Seeding The Lead Podcast Ep 1 – What is a Leader?
Showing leadership abilities is a formal title that is given to you based on somebody else’s assessment of you. It is important to note, however, that just because you’ve reached that level does not make you a leader. You are just a manager, and managers at their purest tend to focus more on the systems of the organization, the structure of an organization, maintaining the status quo, organizing people, and helping with policies. Because again, what they’re trying to do is not carve a way forward—they’re trying to make the dreams of the people above them come true.
If a CEO comes to a manager and says, “Hey, we need to create this product. This is what we’re looking for,” a manager’s job is to harness the resources to create that product and make it a reality. Managers tend to, in their purest forms, be quite cold and calculated. They look at people more or less as cogs in a machine—a resource to be harnessed, one that’s 100% renewable. This is why you see managers firing people left, right, and center.
They talk a lot about getting people on the bus and off the bus, getting people in their right seats, because again, they view people as a resource—expendable—and as such, they need the right resources in the right place to make the dreams of their superiors come true.
This is not what a leader does. A leader is different. A leader is somebody who uplifts, inspires, and guides individuals toward a common goal. Let me repeat this: a leader is someone who uplifts, inspires, and guides individuals toward a common goal. It’s important to note that as a leader, we are people-oriented first. We are all about people.
Our organization runs with people, and this is why we’re moving with a common goal. We’re not telling people what to do; we’re creating a goal with our people. We are helping to uplift our people, we are helping to inspire them, and we are listening to them to help all of us move forward in a direction we want to move into.
As a manager, we don’t care what the other people want. We don’t care if they want to become a multi-millionaire or not—that’s irrelevant—because as a manager, we are moving toward the goal of an organization, not the goal of an individual. As a leader, we are working with individuals to find out their goals and helping their goals come together with ours so we can move in a similar direction. The reason why leadership tends to be hyper-fixated on people is because leadership is an informal role that is given to an individual by a group of people.
Let me repeat this: leadership is an informal role that is given to an individual by a group of people. Think back to any time you’ve had to do a group project with a group of people. Usually, one person stands up and starts taking charge and leading. What happens is the others of the group relinquish some sort of authority and give it to the de facto leader. This isn’t discussed as a group—it’s usually an unconscious consensus that is not discussed within the moment, to say, “Hey, you seem like you want to take charge. I’m willing to put you in charge.” That’s what leadership is.
I know what you’re thinking: if it’s an informal role, anybody could be a leader. The answer is absolutely. I’ve seen co-workers be leaders, pastors, managers, complete strangers, cooks, janitors, etc. This is what many people fail to recognize, particularly when we talk about change management: you have a lot of informal leaders within your organization. We often call them the Wolves. These are individuals that hold unbelievable amounts of power that oftentimes managers and formal leadership tend to ignore, much to their detriment. But this is a conversation for another day.
To backtrack a little bit, when we look at leaders, their power comes from their social influence, or from their followers. Their followers voluntarily give the leader power based on the leader’s actions. If somebody is stepping up, speaking their mind, giving voice to their followers, then followers will naturally start gravitating toward them because they say, “Hey, I like this person’s actions. As a result, I would like to follow them. I would like to voluntarily give them my power, or give them power over me, because they are looking after me, and they’re speaking up for me, and I can see a brighter future with them.”
This is important because it is voluntarily given. And because it is voluntarily given, as a leader, if you screw up, that power can be taken away just as fast. Unlike with managers, executives, and CEOs, whose power comes from policies and job titles, with leadership, it comes strictly from the people. It is voluntarily given, and because it’s voluntarily given, it can be removed just as quickly as it was given.
Now that you know these basic principles, when you look at your workplace or when you look at your social circles, you’ll start seeing these dynamics. For example, I remember working at a health clinic, and there was a group called “The Mean Girls.” It was unspoken, obviously—it was used in hush tones behind closed doors—but “The Mean Girls” were essentially a clique run by a woman we’ll call Brenda. Brenda was quite vicious, and she would go after people that she considered threats to her organization, or “The Mean Girls,” causing a lot of bullying and harassment in the workplace.
Brenda was a classic example of an informal leader at this organization. Her followers were following her and gave her power over them because Brenda did an amazing job of taking care of her followers. When there was a group meeting or a team meeting, she would always ensure her followers had chairs that they could sit in. If there was a potluck or a lunch and one of her followers couldn’t make it for that potluck, they ensured she got food. That’s what Brenda did. Although she was cruel and nasty and nobody liked her outside of her followers, she was an informal leader that people voluntarily gave their power to.
Unfortunately for Brenda, because she was so mean and nasty, she ended up picking a fight with a bigger fish in the pond. Her followers, realizing that Brenda would not be able to take care of them, jumped ship. Unfortunately, Brenda ultimately lost her job. Just as fast as Brenda rose to power, she had that power taken away.
To help you understand why people leave leaders, we’re going to talk a little bit about the only three things a leader has to do. The first thing is: a leader has to create a goal or a vision forward. You have to know where you’re going. You have to see the bigger picture, because again, you need to inspire people. How are you going to inspire anybody if you can’t even think beyond the next couple of hours of your day? You need to see the bigger picture ahead of you—the grand plan.
The next thing you have to do is be decisive in your decision-making. People hate leaders that cannot make decisions for themselves. People would rather follow a leader that made bad choices than a leader that made no choices. That is an absolute fact, and there’s no faster way to anger your people than sitting around going, “I don’t know what to do.” Do not say that. Your job is to make decisions and make choices moving forward.
The last thing you need to do, and this is the absolute most important thing you have to do if you want to be a leader, is to take care of the individuals within your charge. Let me repeat that: you have to take care of the individuals within your charge. Your job is not to cut them out, not to throw them away, not to make their life miserable—it is to take care of them. Because, to wrap back into it, your power comes from those people you look after. If you stop looking after your people, your people will revoke their power that they have given you, and then you will be left high and dry.
I’ve seen this more times than I care to admit. I remember working with one nurse—we’ll call her Beth. Beth was an amazing floor nurse, and she inspired people and helped lift them up and helped move them forward, and she was promoted into a management role. When she got promoted to a management role, she thought she was better than her followers.
She thought that she could do what she wanted and start treating them like absolute crap. Well, guess what? The people that followed her revoked that power and then gave Beth an unbelievable amount of rope to hang herself—metaphorically speaking. That came in the form of, unfortunately, one day Beth took issue with one of the employees, and the employees went to the manager above Beth and complained that Beth was bullying and harassing her.
What ended up happening is that the people underneath Beth, because they hated her so much, said, “Yeah, Beth bullies and harasses us.” Beth lost her job, and that was because she stopped taking care of her people and she started believing that she was above her people.
If you do not take care of your people, they will revoke their authority and power that they have given you. You need to take care of your people.
If this sounds like something that you want—if you would like to be a leader, to step up and take charge, to help guide your people to a brighter and better future, or maybe just make a brighter and better future for your family, or maybe just yourself—then we have a long road ahead of us. This is only the first step that you’ve taken.
When we look at leaders, they are unbelievably people-focused. This means that we need to increase your social intelligence to an ungodly amount, because we need to be able to pull people together. We need to help understand our people’s goals or their aspirations and help align with them. We’re not working against our people; we’re helping to align with our people. As a leader, because your power is derived from your people, you don’t get to fire them; you don’t get to throw them away. That’s not what happens in leadership. Instead, you have to uplift them.
You have to create the environment to watch them excel and grow. You need to help align with your people. You’re not working against them; you’re not telling them what to do. You’re helping to understand where they’re going and how we can all align together to move toward a common goal.
This requires an unbelievable amount of social intelligence that the average person simply doesn’t have. This is why not everybody can be a leader. Well, I should say anyone can be a leader, but very, very, very few people can be a good leader, or an inspiring leader. They simply lack the social intelligence to get there.
To help you get started in your role, these are the core skills—skills that every leader must develop to be spectacular. The first skill that is absolutely fundamental is your listening skills. Your job is to listen 99% of the time and do 1% of the time. If you’re not listening, you are not doing your job as a leader. It’s as simple as that.
Second, you need to have decision-making skills. You need to have the conviction to decide on a course of action and to move forward with it. There’s no “oh,” “uh,” or “maybe.” No. It is, “This is what we’re doing,” and you must move your people in that direction.
Because you work with a team, this leads into skill number three, which is conflict management. There will be issues that arise within your organization, within your group, or even within your family dynamics, and you have to be able to navigate them. This is a fundamental skill. If you cannot manage conflict, your entire leadership and all your followers will fall apart.
Four, we need to build an empathy perspective. We need to understand how other people think, how they feel, what’s going on in their hearts, to help expand that and come from a people-oriented perspective for any conflict management or any decision-making meeting.
Five, we need to learn how to create trust, because people need to voluntarily give us their power. They’re not going to voluntarily give you power if they don’t trust you. As a result, you need to know how to build rapport and create that trust within your organization. You need to learn how to do small talk.
Six, we need to uplift people in a positive manner. Fundamentally, you as a leader have to be positive, because again, if you’re not positive, your people aren’t going to be positive, and we’re not going to get the best work out of our people if they do not believe that there’s a brighter future.
Seven, we need to work on your communication skills—that is going to be 99% of your job within that 1%. Again, we’re listening the majority of the time, we’re doing in that 1%, but within that 1%, you’d better have the communication skills necessary to connect with your people. A fundamental rule of communication is: it does not matter what you say, if they do not hear it in a way that they understand, it was useless to say. We need to have communication skills.
Eight, we need imagination. We need to be creative and open-minded. We need to be open to other possibilities because, again, we’re creating a vision. We’re creating a dream. We’re creating a goal that everyone’s moving forward to, and in order to do that, we need to let ourselves dream. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had leaders come to me, and it’s clear that they have no imagination because they’ve never been allowed to dream.
Then they wonder why their organization is stagnant. Well, it’s stagnant because you don’t know where you’re going. You can’t even dream of where you’re going because you’ve closed down. We need to spur on your creativity, your imagination, and really create that open mind that we need to view other possibilities.
Number nine, you need resiliency. As a leader, people are going to come and go from your organization or from your own personal life, and you are going to get the stuffing kicked out of you. I’m sorry to tell you this—this is not an easy road to walk down. As a result, you need the skills necessary to be able to pick yourself up and dust yourself off. You must always be willing to say, “Ah, I took the knocks. That sucked, but I’m willing to get back out there and keep going.” That’s what it means to be a leader. We don’t call it quits; we move forward.
Ten, you have to be selfless. In leadership, we take none of the rewards. Our rewards go to our people, because again, our power is derived from them. Our job is to inspire and uplift them. How do we do that? We give the rewards of our people back to them. We don’t keep them or take them. Anything good that’s happening, we give to others because by doing that, it builds trust and gives us more power.
The downside of this is that any failure that may happen is our fault as leaders. Let me say this again: if our team fails, if our people fail, if our family screws up, it doesn’t matter—it is our fault. There’s a very important reason for this: it’s because our job is to protect our people, to make sure that we take care of them. Taking care of them means shielding them from danger when we need to.
This is why we have to take on their failures. That doesn’t mean that we don’t talk to our people about their failures and help them overcome it, but it means that all their failures are ours, and all of their successes are theirs. This is what it means to be a leader.
Lastly, number eleven, you have to become open-minded. You have biases, you have black-and-white thinking, you are thinking the way that you’ve been taught or have been conditioned to think, and as a leader, you must be open to different ways of viewing the world or different ways of thinking.
This will give you cognitive flexibility, or the ability to switch between thinking about two different concepts or to think about multiple concepts simultaneously, which will give you an absolute edge over other leaders. This will help your organization, this will help your people get to the next level. I cannot stress how important it is to be open-minded—to develop your cognitive flexibility to be able to think about things from different perspectives. It is absolutely crucial.
To wrap things up, a leader is someone who uplifts, inspires, and guides individuals toward a common goal. This is an informal title that people give to a leader. These individuals give the leader power or social influence based on the leader’s actions, and just as fast as it can be given, it can be taken away. The goal of a leader is to create a goal or vision forward, to take care of the individuals within their charge, and to make decisions. Absolutely anybody can be a leader anywhere—whether it’s a stranger, a coworker, cooks, pastors, managers, janitors, CEOs, pilots—it doesn’t matter. Anybody can be a leader.
If you have been given the mantle of leadership, or you want to become a leader, then we have a long road ahead of us. The first step is to increase your social intelligence. What we need to do is help develop the skills of listening, decision-making, conflict management, building an empathy perspective, learning to create trust with our people, uplifting our people in a positive manner, increasing our communication skills, allowing for imagination, increasing our resiliency, becoming open, and creating selflessness within ourselves. These are the skills that you need to keep your mantle of leadership.
If you’re interested in expanding your social intelligence to help deal with people—whether it’s for a leadership role or even for yourself—every two weeks we are going to come back here and discuss a different area of leadership. What you’ll notice is, even if you’re not a leader in your own life, many of these skills are applicable across the board, whether it’s setting boundaries, conflict management in your own personal life, or just being able to listen and provide an empathetic ear to a friend. These skills are not just for leaders but for individuals learning how to navigate interpersonal relationships.
For a faster and more tailored approach to your life, to help you get to the next level, feel free to drop in for a free coaching session, and let’s help figure out how we can get you toward your goal.
So with that, we’ll end today’s podcast, and I can’t wait to see you in the next episode. Cheers!
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