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It Starts with You
Leadership always starts with you. Your influence does not begin with the number of people you lead, the size of your budget or salary, the political environment, the stock market, or any other person or circumstance. Your influence begins and ends with who you are and with how you lead. Those other things have their place, but they don’t determine your success. You—not your team or your goals or your mission statement—are the starting point for your leadership and your influence.
I have heard some people say the opposite a few times—that leadership is not about the leader, that it has nothing to do with the leader, that the leader should actually be invisible, replaceable, or even anonymous. On the surface, this might sound noble and altruistic because it makes leadership solely about other people, and what could be wrong with that? Just two things: it isn’t true, and it doesn’t work.
If leadership starts and ends with the people you lead, then you are limited in what you can do if something doesn’t seem to be working well or you aren’t satisfied with current results. Your only option is to berate, complain, and threaten, hoping your negativity will somehow produce positive results. If you are frustrated with where you are, don’t blame everyone else. Study the problem, get counsel, and make needed changes, because leadership starts with you.
Nothing is more counterproductive than blaming the wrong thing when there is a problem. If my car runs out of gas, it’s not the weather’s fault, or terrible L.A. drivers’ fault, or the government’s fault. It’s my fault. The best course of action is to accept that my wife was right about stopping for gas earlier, to call for help, and then to move on with my day. In the same way, if your leadership is not working, the healthiest and most hope-inducing thing you can do is set your ego or insecurities aside, figure out what is wrong, and fix it. Maybe you are the problem, and maybe you’re not. Either way, no one is in a better position than you to identify and fix whatever isn’t working—especially if part of the problem is you.
You—with all your quirks and idiosyncrasies, your strengths and weaknesses, your unique journey to get where you are—are the starting point for your own leadership. In accepting that, you discover hope, humility, and the grace to change.
If leadership starts with you, then your first leadership challenge is to lead yourself. You must learn how to teach yourself, guide yourself, and challenge yourself to be the best person and leader you can be. This isn’t easy. Admitting that your leadership success depends primarily on you can be uncomfortable at first, because it takes vulnerability and courage to look inward and face the fact that you might need to make some changes. But leading yourself is not only necessary, it is freeing. Here are a few reasons why.
1. If You Can Lead Yourself, You Can Lead Anybody
Even if your team includes a difficult person—or a bunch of them—the hardest person you will ever have to lead is yourself. If you can figure out how to lead you, you’ll be able to lead anyone regardless of their age, experience, or qualifications.
What does it mean to lead yourself? First, leading yourself means developing self-control. Self-control is your ability to keep yourself—your emotions, thoughts, goals, and motives—in check and in balance. Are you going to lead from your mind or your emotions? Your will or your whims? Your calling or your comfort? Your spirit or your flesh? When you lead yourself, you become the protagonist rather than the victim of your own story: instead of letting life determine your feelings, thoughts, and reactions, you determine them.
Leading yourself means you lead by example. In other words, you practice what you preach. You are authentic, consistent, and honest. You walk beside people rather than pushing them from behind; you take them with you rather than sending them out alone.
To be clear, I’m not saying you have to be a superhero or the expert at everything. That’s unrealistic and, honestly, dysfunctional—it’s probably not wise for you to try to teach your accountant how to balance the books or tell your graphic designer how to make great art. But when it comes to values, to vision, to integrity, to bravery, to hard work, to humility, and even to following the rules, the best leaders lead by example.
Leading yourself means pursuing personal growth. You have to be strong to lead: mentally strong, morally strong, emotionally strong. It’s difficult to lead with authenticity if you are hiding a guilty conscience. It’s difficult to stay focused on the future if you’re bitter and have a grudge against someone from your past. And it’s difficult to stay focused on achieving a goal if you haven’t learned to say no to the distractions and sideshows that line the way.
No one is born a perfect leader: it’s something you grow into. You have to learn and mature in many areas over time. This kind of growth is normal, and it should be embraced, even celebrated.
Take emotional intelligence, for example, which we’ll look at in a later chapter. Learning how to understand and control your emotions is a lifelong process—even if you’re not a leader. I have four children, and none of them started out life in control of their feelings. They had to develop control over time, and they still have a long way to go. Not that I blame them—I still have a long way to go as well. It’s only to be expected that leaders will need to intentionally focus on developing their emotional intelligence as they grow in influence and authority.
The same is true for every area of personal and leadership growth. Becoming a good leader is a process of gaining knowledge, and learning maturity and skills—and you are the student. Leading yourself is your first and most difficult task, and one that you’ll undertake and be challenged by the rest of your life. Don’t coast on what you already know. Don’t assume weaknesses or deficiencies will take care of themselves as you go along. Take responsibility for who you are, and don’t be afraid to face the things you need to learn, change, or fix.
Learning and changing are positives, not negatives. What you learn about yourself—your motivations, your fears, your needs—will inform your leadership and infuse it with authenticity. It will also help you to cultivate essential character traits such as humility, empathy, and relatability. We lead human beings, after all, so it just makes sense that we lead with, lead from, and lead through our own humanity. We lead and influence people with flaws, and so we need to develop the practice of addressing our own flaws.
Ultimately, it is no one else’s responsibility to lead you—that responsibility is yours alone. Even if you report to a leader, mentor, boss, or other authority figure, the most that leader can do is guide your external actions; you are responsible for the internal you. And the better you lead yourself, the better you will lead others.
2. If You Can Lead Yourself, Your Weaknesses Won’t Stop You
A commitment to self-leadership is a commitment to facing our own limitations—and that can be a hard pill to swallow. Leaders are supposed to have all the answers, right? So, doesn’t it undermine our leadership if we admit we might have a problem—or even be the problem? The short answer: No. Good leaders can take responsibility for their weaknesses without being undermined or overwhelmed by them.
When I say your “weaknesses” won’t stop you, I’m referring to anything that limits your leadership or slows your progress as a team. Most of the time, these are simply the byproducts of being human. Maybe you aren’t good at administration, budgets, schedules, or planning. Maybe you don’t know how to lead an effective meeting. Maybe you hate answering emails. Maybe you tend to freeze up when facing tough decisions. Maybe you speak so boldly and bluntly that you hurt people. Maybe you can’t stand negotiation or conflict. Whatever your limitation is, it’s not insurmountable—unless you refuse to acknowledge it.
Why are we so hesitant to confront our own limitations? Often it boils down to insecurity. We’re afraid the people we lead will find out what we always suspected to be true: that we aren’t enough; that we don’t measure up; that we are a fraud and a failure. We convince ourselves it’s better to avoid the facts and live in fear than to face reality and risk our self-esteem and our image taking a public hit. So we blame others, blame the economy, blame the government, blame bad luck—and in the process become our own lid, our own ceiling. But we will never grow—personally or as leaders—beyond our capacity to be honest with ourselves and transparent with others when it comes to our limitations.
Once you recognize your limitations, you can overcome them or at least work around them. Sometimes this will mean learning and growing in order to strengthen a weakness. Take a class, read a book, ask questions, get feedback—do whatever you can to improve yourself. Other times, rather than fixing a weakness, you will need to staff your weakness. If you can’t keep up with your email inbox, consider giving someone on your administrative team that job. If you can’t negotiate well but you have to broker a deal, take someone along who handles conflict better than you. There is no shame in admitting you’ll never be great in a particular area and delegating the task to someone else. In my experience, my team already knows where I’m weak, and it bothers them a lot less than I would have thought. Far from being condemning or feeling disappointed in my leadership, they are eager to help by filling in my weaknesses with their strengths.
Your authority comes less from your ability and more from your authenticity.
I’m not saying leadership abilities aren’t important—people tend to stop following inept leaders sooner rather than later. But I am saying your willingness to be honest, humble, and courageous in facing your weaknesses is far more important. You can staff or organize your way around a lack of skills, but first you have to acknowledge what you lack.
3. If You Can Lead Yourself, You Will Inspire People to Follow
The story is told that when John Wesley, the famous eighteenth-century preacher, was asked how he attracted such large crowds, he replied, “I set myself on fire and people come to watch me burn.”1 In other words, people are watching you, and they will be attracted by your passion, drive, and commitment.
Leaders who lead themselves are leaders who are internally motivated: they have identified, developed, and refined the “why” behind what they are doing. They are self-motivated, therefore they can motivate others; they are self-inspired, therefore they can inspire others. They are passionate about the vision that drives them, and their passion is a magnet that draws people to their cause.
It’s worth mentioning that not all motives are good motives. Part of leading yourself is making sure you are in control of the hidden drivers behind your actions, decisions, and words. Why? Because sooner or later, the motives of your heart will be revealed, and they will affect your long-term leadership success. If things like fear, greed, power, lust, and anger are lurking behind your leadership, you’ll have a tough time keeping a solid team, because no one wants to follow that kind of leader for long. However, if you are motivated by things like love, faith, compassion, a dream of a better world, the potential of your team, and building others up, you will inspire long-term loyalty and passion in your followers. Your ability to own and lead your own heart will stir the hearts of those who follow you.
Your leadership starts with you, which means you can begin leading right now by deciding to lead yourself. Will you assume responsibility for who you are and the influence you have? Will you be honest with your strengths and weaknesses? Will you keep your motives pure and your passion strong? Will you commit to the process of authenticity, growth, learning, and change? When you accept that you and you alone are the most important factor in your own leadership, you set yourself up for even greater levels of influence and leadership. Your journey begins with you.