Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

The Right Approach: Leadership 101—Leadership is Hard

Good leadership always makes a difference; unfortunately, so does bad leadership. It can be the difference between average (or worse) and exceptional organizational performance. Leadership is not easy to learn; if it was, everyone would be a leader. This Leadership 101 series will provide practical leadership tools and principles that can be applied immediately with your team.

The Biggest Leadership Mistake
I wrote about my personal journey in my October 2016 column citing three pivotal (and painful) lessons I learned early in my career. I have been in leadership positions for most of my 40+ year career, but as I discussed five years ago, it has not always been a smooth and natural relationship. One thing I have learned, working with some of the biggest and brightest companies in just about every custom manufacturing industry, including ours, is that everyone struggles with leadership in some way.

The biggest mistake most companies make is to promote their best employees on the floor into supervisory positions. Making your best drill operator the drill supervisor may sound like a good idea, but without providing leadership training you will most likely just lose your best drill operator. Sometimes your best drill operator should remain your best drill operator.

Leadership is Hard
An effective leader needs to possess a unique skill set to manage people, schedules, equipment problems, and quality issues. The people part is the most difficult because the success of a leader is based on their ability to inspire others to follow them. There is a significant distinction between a “manager” and a “leader.”

While the measure of success of both is based on the ability to accomplish things through others, the differentiator is in how each does this. A manager can direct others to do something based on their managerial title, whether the others want to. A leader gets things done through others because the others have bought into the leader’s vision freely and sincerely want to do what is being asked of them.

Considering this, remember that a leader can be a manager, but a manager cannot be a leader. As my fellow author and friend Warren Bennis once told me, “A manager does things right, a leader does the right thing.”

If It’s Lonely at the Top, You’re Doing Something Wrong
A couple of months before I wrote the October 2016 column, I had just ended 18 months of intensive training to become an independent certified leadership coach, teacher and speaker with the John Maxwell Group. John Maxwell is an internationally recognized leadership expert who has sold more than 13 million books and trained more than two million leaders worldwide. One of the first lessons I learned was regarding the relationship of a leader “being at the top.”

In both your personal and business life you will always run across others who are willing to give advice on things they’ve never experienced. Let’s use an example most of can relate to: using a travel agent. They may sell you an expensive vacation package and say, “I hope you enjoy the trip,” then you never see them again. In contrast, good leaders are like tour guides. They know the lay of the land because they’ve been there before, and they do everything they can to make the trip enjoyable and successful for everybody. A leader’s credibility begins with personal success, and it ends with helping others achieve personal success. To gain credibility, you must consistently demonstrate three things:

1. Initiative: You have to get up to go up.
2. Sacrifice: You have to give up to go up.
3. Maturity: You have to grow up to go up.

 Key takeaway: If you show the way, people will want to follow you. The higher you go, the greater number of people who will be willing to travel with you.

Leadership is Influence: Nothing More, Nothing Less
The core principle of leadership in the John Maxwell leadership philosophy is this statement. After spending six years studying, learning, and now training leadership teams with my clients, I have come to realize that any other definition of leadership is just fluff. Leadership is influence. Period. When writing my October 2016 column, another a-ha moment for me was realizing (unknowingly) that I had come to this same conclusion during my leadership journey, prior to John Maxwell. Early in my career I was an autocratic manager that got things done through the power of my title. This is not leadership. Using brute force and intimidation is not leadership; it is not even being a good manager. Inspiring and helping others achieve greatness is leadership. The brilliance of this is that the fastest path of success for a leader is by helping others become successful.

 The Journey Continues
I ended my 2016 article, “The lessons learned were far too many to cover in even a year’s worth of articles,” which has stuck with me as unfinished business. This Leadership 101 series is my chance to fix this. I hope you join me as the journey continues.

This column originally appeared in the January 2021 issue of PCB007 Magazine.