Table of Contents
To Patt
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank many friends and colleagues who have encouraged me in the writing of this book. The strongest encouragement came from my agent, Joe Durepos, who saw fragments of this work and said, Do it when I had lost faith in it. Thanks, Joe. Significant encouragement also came from clients who wanted me to lay out the concept of the Four Powers in one volume. I owe a great debt to these men and women, who taught me, through their lives, what it is to be a leader.
To Peter Vegso, president of Health Communications, a great deal of appreciation for believing that this book had merit when he saw it in proposal form. To Matthew Diener, senior book editor; Lisa Drucker, associate editor; Mark Colucci, copy editor/proofreader; and Bob Land, proofreadermy deepest gratitude for the rigor that they demanded from me in the preparation of the book. Lisa, in particular, gave attention to every word and sentence in the manuscript. She taught me that writing is similar to polishing stone. There is a certain pleasure as the stone begins to shine, and it is very tedious. Without her assistance, the book would not be in its present form. Thank you, Lisa.
To my partner, Patt, my deepest appreciation for her support and love. The work we do with executives was born of her vision and insight, and the assessment process she conceived has assisted many leaders.
AUTHORS NOTE
As other authors have before me, I faced the problem of using gender pronounshe or she, him or herin writing The Four Powers of Leadership. Following the argument others have used, I have tried to use gender-neutral language and resort to he or him only for stylistic consistency.
THE FOUR POWERS OF LEADERSHIP
INTRODUCTION
The Practice of Leadership Some Simple Truths About Being a Leader
A part of all of us (even the leaders among us) desires, even longs for, some person to be a focus point, a divining rod or a guide who will help us find meaning and purpose in our life. We want someone to help us define our purpose, whether it is finding some ultimate truth or revelation, accomplishing some great goal, or simply making a lot of money. We want leaders who know how to tap a larger, more exciting purpose to connect to our unique and individual purposes. One of the basic emotional truths about leadership is that we want leaders who discover or create purpose in their own lives and then can articulate this purpose in such a way that we are motivated to follow them in order to find that same purpose for ourselves. Although this truth is an emotional driver for most of us, a persons capability of inspiring and motivating people to follow his articulated purpose seems to be a unique characteristic of leadership.
Leading, then, is not primarily about doing something, but rather about being something. The development of leadership is about becoming conscious of both the power within oneself and the power inherent within the position one holds. In a fundamental sense, the challenge of being a leader is about integrating personal power with ones positional power. This does not mean that leaders are born with no skills to learn. Leaders arent born, and there are a lot of leadership skills that need to be practiced every day. Developing leadership requires understanding and integrating into ones life, day after day, the fundamental powers that leaders must learn to access, cultivate, and balance in their personal and professional lives. Being a leader is not about acting out a role, but rather about accessing the power to maximize ones unique and individual capacities and potentials.
Individuals are not born with a leadership spoon in their mouth or programmed with leadership genes from birth. Nor is leadership a set of skills one learns in a business school or by taking leadership seminars, although both may help.
Leadership is something one develops and grows into, not something one is born or trained to do. No particular personality traitlike being an extrovert or introvertmakes or breaks a leader.
Some individuals may exert their leadership through great personal charm and charisma; others through persuasion and inspiration; and others through keen intellect. In our current postindustrial information age, those with technical or financial genius or acute organizational and management ability tend to receive our acclaim as leaders. The unique conditions of each period of time will call forth the different kinds of leaders we need, whether the conditions are prosperity or economic hardship, war or peace, technology explosion or spiritual development.
In their own way, each of these different types of leaders can galvanize a group of people, overcome or accomplish something thats never been done before, or propose a philosophy that changes peoples lives. In essence, these leaders become magnets that attract people.
Personality, talents or natural gifts can only take one to a certain level of leadership competency. A gap often exists between the inherent power to control and influence because of position and the ability to grow and develop deeper leadership characteristics. These deeper leadership characteristics provide the insight, understanding and wisdom a person must have in order to handle the complexity of followers needs. becoming a leader in name only.
Powerful and successful leadersleaders who maintain their position for a long timego through a developmental, learning and maturing process. They take their original magnetic quality or special expertise and develop it. They learn to reflect on themselves. They learn to see into and beyond what others see around them in the conditions and situations of their environment. They learn to focus less on themselves and more on the people who are attracted to working with them. They gain perspective on and develop humility regarding the depth of their innate capabilities. They also continually attempt to access other parts of themselves, which, in turn, engenders a fuller capacity for leadership. These leaders discover that leading is a practice to be worked on every day.
Some basic principles about leadership practice have been around for a long time. We all know some of these practices instinctively. Knowing them is one thing, but committing to practice them daily is the critical challenge. Each of us has some unique quality that can serve as the cornerstone of increasing our capacity as a leader. Our willingness to practice the principles and truths we already know is the critical choice that can develop our innate leadership capacities. What follows are three principles, and some practices based on them, as a starting point for considering what makes a leader. No doubt you can add to this list from your own experience.
1. Successful leaders make a conscious choice to continuously develop the positive personality traits and talents they have. They also focus their intention to understand their positive and negative characteristics in order to measure their strengths and liabilities. These leaders actively work on both what enhances and what blocks their leadership abilities. In other words, they take themselves on as a continuous development project.
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