Leadership is about people.
Leaders use processes and schedules, planners and events, to develop people. Leadership can be fun, painful, boring, or coercive. Leadership can cause great victories and terrible destruction.
But in the end: leadership is about people. The people who lead. The constituents who follow.
The goal of leadership is to develop others and help them become greater people themselves. This may come in the form of leadership training, encouraging and showing others how to become leaders in times or trial or periods of peace. Leadership may include management, instilling others to follow the status quo and remain within the guardrails. Leadership may force others to change, hopefully for the better, but always moving the company forward toward a bigger, better, and brighter future.
Some people may not want to become leaders. Some people may not want to lead at all. Some people relish the idea of improvement; others cannot stand the thought of change. (After all, aren’t we already good at what we do? Why change?). All of these situations are OK, but you still must lead with others in mind.
Some people may not want to become leaders.
But make no mistake, good leaders put their focus on others when it comes to leadership. Good leaders think about what may help people grow. What motivates them to become better? What motivates them to become positive and more productive? What motivates them to become something greater than they ever thought they could be?
Future-minded leaders are always trying to work themselves out of a job. Developing others may take time with varied results. But one staple of a good leader is to build others up, helping them and doing what is best for them, growing them into greater employees and better people. When the time comes to promote a follower into a leader, it is time for the leader to move on to develop others. The transition may not always work out the way it may be intended, the new leader may not be ready for the mantle of leadership. But in some way, these are the first steps to creating new leaders.
There are many different nuances and challenges, environments, and situational factors that may influence others. But the key to remember is that leadership is about people, not processes. Leaders lead people, they do not lead things.
The LEADership Dare 