Today, we will begin the Leadership journey which is the basis of my book, You’re In Charge…What Now? I hope that you enjoy the journey.
The Seven Essential Steps to Leadership Success
In my book You’re In Charge…What Now? I use a mnemonic to describe the seven essential steps to leadership success. The mnemonic is “L.E.A.D.E.R.S” and each of these letters represents an essential step. While I have simplified the elements of leadership into seven words, the essence of my message is that being an effective, peak-performance leader is simple, but not easy.
The responsibility of being an effective leader is much more important than being an effective “manager”. Every effective manager leads first, and manages second. In my lexicon, there are two things the “person in charge of an organizational unit” does: the first is to lead the people; the second is to administer the processes that make up the work. I call this administrative activity the mechanics of managing…these are the activities of planning, organizing, controlling, report writing, etc., and of course the implementation of the technical work of the unit. These are critical activities and can never be ignored, but in my experience those managers who focus the preponderance of their time on the mechanics, ultimately do not succeed. They may achieve short term results, but they usually fail over time.
That which is done “to and for” the people makes a leader a long-term success, not what he or she does to administer the mechanics. Indeed, a manager with great leadership skills can sometimes be successful without being an effective administrator. I have worked for leaders like that, and they were great achievers.
On the other hand, I have worked for leaders who were great administrators but poor leaders, and they were ultimately failures. Simply put: administration may be a necessary condition, but it is not a sufficient condition, for success; whereas, leadership may be a necessary and sufficient condition for success.
My core premise is that if you are to be a successful leader, your success will be determined not by how great an administrator you are, but how great a leader you are day-in-and-day-out. When the staff you are “in charge of” believes that you are a great leader, and when you are doing the seven essential steps, you will be a peak-performance leader who tastes the joy of success.
The next seven issues of this Posting will be a journey through the mnemonic L.E.A.D.E.R.S.… Each letter represents the essence of a key principle for Peak Performance. We start our leadership principles with L for Love, followed by E for Expectations, A for Assignment, D for Development, E for Evaluation, R for Rewards, and S for Self. The words are important keys to remembering the concepts, but we will explore in much greater detail how those concepts make a Leader effective and capable of being great. We hope that by the time you have been introduced to the seven steps in L.E.A.D.E.R.S., that you will be convinced that leadership is really quite simple, but it will require all of your energy and focus to do well. In short, it’s simple, not easy
