6
How Do I Get Started in Leadership?
Some people have a clear vision for leadership. There is an organization they desire to create or a task they want to accomplish. They see something and they try to seize it. They start performing a service or creating a product, and if it’s successful, they soon need help. When they hire their first employee, they start leading.
However, most people move into leadership differently. They find themselves in a situation where someone asks them to lead something—at work, in their community, or at church—and they agree to take on the responsibility. Or they help to give direction to a project or task because no one else is doing it, or because the person in charge is doing it so poorly that they worry it will fail. So they take charge and organize it themselves, hoping to see it succeed.
How you come into a leadership role matters less than how you handle it. And the key question you need to ask yourself is, “Why do I want to lead?” I ask that question of any person who says he wants to get into leadership. If you want to help other people, your team, and your organization, you’re starting on the right foot. If your desire is to fulfill a worthy vision, one that will help people and make the world a better place, you’re headed in the right direction. If you’re doing it to add value to others and not just yourself, you are seeking to be a leader for the right reason. And it is your duty to become the best leader you can possibly be.
1. How Can a Young Leader Establish His Vision and Get Buy-in When He Doesn’t Yet Have a Track Record of Success?
I’ve known a lot of young leaders who are very eager to share their vision and want to know why everyone doesn’t immediately jump in to help them accomplish it. In fact, I was one of those leaders when I started out. I came to my first position with big dreams and zero experience. I wanted people to instantly follow me and fulfill the vision. I often asked myself, “Why aren’t people buying in?” Instead I should have been asking, “How can I build credibility?”
Until you have credibility, don’t even try to get buy-in for your vision. You won’t get it. You need to earn trust before people will buy in, and you must earn it through character and competence.
When you take on a new leadership position, how much temporary trust you receive will depend on many things. The culture of the organization. The credibility of your predecessor. The influence of the people who put you into place. If the environment and the culture are negative, people may assume that you won’t be a good leader and give you very little grace. In a more positive environment, people may be open to you and willing to give you the benefit of the doubt for as long as six months. During that time, what you say will hold more weight than who you are. But everyone will be watching to see if what you say and what you do line up. If you have demonstrated character and competence, your credibility will keep gaining more weight until who you are eventually has greater influence than what you say. As people’s trust grows, so will your influence. And as Stephen M.R. Covey observed, “The beauty of trust is that it erases worry and frees you to get on with other matters. Trust means confidence.” It also means buy-in.
“The beauty of trust is that it erases worry and frees you to get on with other matters. Trust means confidence.”
—Stephen M.R. Covey
To demonstrate competence as you start in leadership, begin with the basics:
- Work hard: There is no substitute for a good work ethic. People respect someone who works hard.
- Think ahead: Because your decisions affect your team, beginning with the end in mind and identifying priorities are doubly important.
- Demonstrate excellence: The better you are at your job, the higher your initial credibility.
- Follow through: Good leaders bring things to completion.
To communicate character to team members in a short time, do the following:
• Care about the people you lead: Any time new leaders arrive on the scene, the people on the team ask three things: Do they care for me? Can they help me? Can I trust them? If you care about people and show it, they will be able to see your good character.
• Make things right: Because new leaders want to impress their people, they sometimes try to hide their mistakes. That is the opposite of what they should do. When decisions don’t turn out the way they were intended to, leaders owe their followers an explanation and an apology. That may feel painful in the moment, but it will develop character credibility. If they can also make amends for the mistake, that will be even better.
• Tell the truth: When there is consistency between the words and actions of leaders, followers know that leaders can be trusted. Honesty adds integrity to the vision and credibility to the vision caster. In the long run, people appreciate truth—even hard truth.
If you put in the slow hard work of developing credibility through character and competence, you will begin to earn trust. The more trust you gain, the more potential influence you’ll have. When the team wins, you gain further credibility. When you make a mistake or the team fails, it costs. Your goal is to earn so much credibility that people buy into your leadership and never lose faith in you, because if they do you’ve lost credibility with the organization.
2. How Do You Determine Your Leadership Potential?
I believe that nearly everyone has the potential to lead. Maybe not everyone can become a great leader, but everyone can become a better leader. Knowing that may be encouraging, but it may not be very helpful in determining how to pursue your leadership potential.
What are the signs that you have leadership potential, that you should try to lead others starting now? You need to examine four areas to get a sense of whether it is time for you to step up and lead:
1. Pay Attention to the Need You See
Leadership begins with a need, not when someone wants to fill an empty leadership position. Sometimes people see a need and it sparks something within them, a passion. That was true for me when I began to realize that organizations floundered when they didn’t have good leaders. It helped me to understand that everything rises and falls on leadership. And it made me want to do something about it.
There are many needs in this world. Are there some that strike a chord in you? If you see a need that you feel a strong desire to address, and it moves you to action, that is a sign that you have the potential to lead in that area.
2. Use Your Natural Abilities to Help Others
When the desire to address a need intersects with an ability to do something about it, sparks begin to fly. When the ability of the leader perfectly fits the need of the moment, the results can be extraordinary. Henry Ford’s ability to build cars at a moment in history when they could be mass-produced changed the United States and then the world. He saw the need, he had the ability, and he took action.
You have gifts, talents, and skills that you can use to help people. It is your responsibility to learn what those abilities are and develop them. If you’re not sure what they are, ask others who know you well. In addition, look at the areas where you are naturally intuitive, productive, satisfied, and influential. We tend to lead naturally in areas where we are gifted. We also add the most value when we work in those areas. Once you’ve discovered and developed your abilities, put them to use to help your team.
3. Make the Most of Your Passion
When you begin helping others in an area that you believe is important, you may find the passion rising in you. That’s a positive sign. Passion in a leader is compelling to others. People want to follow passionate leaders. It makes them want to jump on board and join them.
General Douglas MacArthur said, “Youth is not entirely a time of life; it is a state of mind. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals.… You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.”
If you are new to leadership, tap into your passion and fuel it. If you’re not new to leadership, make sure you don’t lose your passion. A cold leader never inspired anyone to a cause. A red-hot leader inspires nearly everyone.
4. Develop Your Influence
The bottom line on leadership is that it’s influence. If you want to lead, you must persuade people to work with you. People who think they’re leading but have no one following them are only taking a walk.
Author and professor Harry Allen Overstreet remarked, “The person who can capture and hold attention is the person who can effectively influence human behavior. Who is a failure in life? Obviously, it is the person without influence; one to whom no one attends: the inventor who can persuade no one of the value of his device; the merchant who cannot attract enough customers into his store; the teacher whose pupils whistle or stamp or play tricks while he tries to capture their attention; the poet who writes reams of verse which no one will accept.” If you want to make an impact in the world, you must be able to influence people.
If you focus your attention on a need that speaks to your heart, make the most of your abilities, tap into your passion, and develop influence, you can become a leader. And you will be able to make a difference in the world.
3. How Can I Discover My Unique Purpose as a Leader?
Martin Luther King Jr. asserted, “If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” I think all people desire to find the thing for which they would die, because that points them to their purpose. And I think everyone has the potential to discover it. That’s especially important for leaders, because their purpose affects the lives of not only themselves, but also other people.
“If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”
—Martin Luther King Jr.
But discovering your purpose takes time. First you need to know yourself. Your unique purpose must be built on your strengths. Discover your strengths and you have the opportunity to discover your purpose. Don’t learn what they are, and you have very little chance of living out your purpose.
How do you get to know yourself? You can learn a lot from self-evaluation tools, such as StrengthsFinder, but some things you will learn only through trial and error. The pattern in my life has been move forward, crash, reflect, evaluate, change, move forward. As I said, this can take some time, so you must be patient. Every success and every failure can bring you another step closer to knowledge of yourself.
Once you discover your strengths, you must intentionally increase your time using them. That’s when you will likely begin seeing themes emerge in your life. Life coach SuEllen Williams suggests writing out your life story in five-year increments, noting life-altering events and influential people to discover themes in your life. “If you look at what’s been important to you in the past,” she says, “you may start to see a theme for your life and where you’ve gotten off track. Once you get back on, things will start falling into place.”
Your goals are to sharpen your skills and to increasingly target your work toward your strengths until you home in on the thing that makes you say, “I was born to do this.” That’s what Martin Luther King Jr. was talking about when he said, “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’ ”
It takes time to learn about yourself, but it also takes effort to remain true to yourself. People will ask you to depart from the path that’s right for you. But the better you know yourself and the truer you are to yourself, the greater your success will be as a leader. Benjamin Disraeli, one of Britain’s great prime ministers, wrote, “I have brought myself, by long meditation, to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.”
As I write this, I am sixty-seven years old, and the fulfillment of my purpose is still unfolding before me. My dreams are getting clearer to me, but I haven’t achieved all of them yet. I hope that in the coming years, I will continue to have a sense of anticipation and joy as I seek to fulfill my purpose. The key for me is the same as it is for you: be yourself. No one is better qualified to be you than you. God only made one of you, so be yourself and do what he created you for.
4. It Is Said That to Be a Good Leader You Must First Be a Good Follower. Does This Maxim Hold True at All Times? If So, at What Point Does a Follower Become a Leader?
This question reveals a common misconception about leading and following. It assumes that it’s either-or. It’s not. It’s both all the time. Nobody does only one or the other. It’s an interplay that leaders must navigate from moment to moment. In many situations I take the lead. I cast vision and set direction for my organizations. But often I become the follower when deferring to the expertise of people in my organization.
Watch the interplay of people during a meeting. In a healthy environment, different people take the lead based on the situation and the skills needed in the moment. Only egotistical leaders believe they must lead in any and every situation.
The best leaders know what it’s like to follow and have learned how to do it. And they are willing to learn how to follow well before trying to lead. Aristotle asserted, “Who would learn to lead must… first of all learn to obey.” That’s why leadership-intensive institutions like the United States Military Academy at West Point teach followership first.
Good followers add value to an organization. They focus well and do their best to make their team and organization better. They strive for excellence in their work. They spot problems and volunteer to fix them. And they champion new ideas.
You might expect followership to be valued in a military setting, but it has value in leadership in every setting. For example, when asked what advice he would give to talented young conductors, octogenarian Lorin Maazel, conductor of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, advised, “If they want to learn to become very good, they should learn how to become good followers. Sit in the orchestra and learn how depressing it is to find yourself trying to follow someone you cannot respect either professionally or personally.”25
Successful followership is a learned skill, just as leadership is. If you want to be a good leader, understand following, and never forget what it’s like to sit in the follower’s chair.
5. I’m a Bit Introverted, and I Believe That Being More Outgoing Could Help Me to Be a Leader. How Can I Accept My Personality, Yet Blossom in Connecting with Others?
Because so much of leadership is about working with people, it can be more difficult for some introverts to get started leading. But that doesn’t mean that introverts can’t lead. They have led well in every industry and area of life. Author Susan Cain points out that billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates is an introvert. So is investor Warren Buffett, a friend of his. The United States’ greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, was an introvert. So was statesman Mahatma Gandhi.
You don’t need to be an extrovert to lead others. However, you may at times have to be more outgoing than you would naturally like to be. John Lilly, former CEO of Mozilla, who is an introvert, forced himself to walk the halls and make eye contact with people after he realized that his not greeting others offended them.26
You should not try to change your personality to become a better leader. That will only make you come across as phony. You just need to become your best self by focusing on your gifts and maximizing the best qualities of your temperament. For example, let’s look at the two classic introverted temperaments: phlegmatic and melancholic. Phlegmatics are known for their steadiness and their ability as peacemakers. If you’re phlegmatic, tap into those qualities to give your team security and stability, and then get people to work together. Melancholics are known for their thinking ability, their creativity, and their attention to detail. If you’re melancholic, make the most of those qualities by planning and strategizing.
In addition to using your strengths, you do need to make a deliberate and continuous effort to connect with people. To do that…
1. Understand the Value of Connecting with Others
Few things are more important to the leader-follower relationship than connection. I learned in elementary school how much of an impact this makes from one of my all-time favorite teachers: Mrs. Tacy. She made me feel like the most important and most loved child in the world. She went out of her way to let me know how much she cared. Whenever I missed her class, she would write me a note and encourage me. When I returned to class, she made sure I knew that she was aware I had returned and that she was glad to see me. And it wasn’t because she singled me out. She made every kid in her class feel that way.
If you want to connect with people, never forget how important it is and work at it every day. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. It may sound corny but it is true.
2. Connect with Others Using Your Strengths
As a young leader, I began to work at connecting with people. To do that, I imitated other connectors whom I admired. While it was a good idea to learn from them, it was a mistake to try to be like them. It was a real breakthrough for me when I realized I had strengths that I could use to build rapport and relationships with people. Today I rely on these five qualities every day when working with people, whether one on one, in a meeting, or onstage:
- Humor: I enjoy a good laugh and I don’t mind being the butt of the joke.
- Authenticity: I am myself in all situations, and I don’t teach anything I don’t live or believe.
- Confidence: I feel good about myself and I believe strongly in people.
- Hope: I naturally lift up and encourage people, and I love to do it.
- Simplicity: I’m pragmatic, not intellectual. I don’t try to impress people with big words or complex sentences. I want to connect with people, so I keep it simple.
I don’t know what your strengths are, but you have some. What are your top five? Are you using them? Have you found a way to make who you are work for you?
3. Ask Good Leaders to Give You Feedback
If you want to learn how to make the most of your strengths and leverage the best traits of your personality type, seek out feedback from other leaders. I did that a lot. Not only did I study good leaders and connectors, I sought their advice about leadership, and whenever possible I asked them to give me specific feedback on my communication. People who are not good at leadership and communication may be able to tell when you aren’t connecting, but only good connectors can tell you why.
As Stephen Covey said, “It takes humility to seek feedback. It takes wisdom to understand it, analyze it and appropriately act on it.” But it is definitely worth it. Only by being yourself and building on your strengths can you become a better leader.
“It takes humility to seek feedback. It takes wisdom to understand it, analyze it and appropriately act on it.”
—Stephen Covey
6. What Advice Would You Give to an Aspiring Leader Trying to Take the First Steps into Leadership?
My best piece of advice would be to try to take the long view of leadership. Here’s why I say this: when I started off in my career, people didn’t think much of me. I was very eager, and I had lots of ideas, and I worked hard, but when you’re young, people don’t think you’re very good. And they don’t give you much credit. When I was in that situation, I wanted to stand up and say, “Excuse me. I know I’m not real good but I’m better than you think.” But you can’t do that. You have to prove yourself and earn credibility.
If you work hard, learn how to connect with people, develop credibility, and prove yourself every day, after a while people will begin to believe in you. You will have influence, and you will be able to get things done. And here’s what’s really ironic. Lead well long enough, and people will shift from giving you no credit, to giving you proper credit, to giving you too much credit. Today people think I’m better than I actually am.
So try not to worry too much about what people think about you. Do your best. Work hard. Keep growing. And eventually you’ll be able to make a positive impact as a leader.
7. What’s the First Thing a Leader Should Do When Brought in from the Outside to Be Responsible for a Group or Department?
Whenever you take on the responsibility to lead a new team, it’s a challenge, whether you are an experienced leader or a novice. But I believe there are five things you can do to get off on the right foot and set up the team for success:
1. Strengthen Relationships
I’ve already discussed the importance of connecting with people in this chapter. You do that so you can strengthen relationships and start building the team. You do that by putting people first. FedEx founder Fred W. Smith understood this. He said, “Federal Express, from its inception, has put its people first, both because it is right to do so and because it is good business as well. Our corporate philosophy is succinctly stated: People-Service-Profit.”
The quickest way to build relationships is to try to get to know and understand each person on your team. To understand the mind of an individual, look at what that person has already achieved. To understand the heart of a person, look at what he or she aspires to do. If you have a handle on people’s history and aspirations, you’ve gone a long way to getting to know them.
2. Earn People’s Trust
You cannot lead a team if you do not have the team members’ trust. Michael Winston, former managing director and chief leadership officer for Countrywide Financial Corporation, asserts, “Effective leaders ensure that people feel strong and capable. In every major survey on practices of effective leaders, trust in the leader is essential if other people are going to follow that person over time. People must experience the leader as believable, credible, and trustworthy.”
3. Position Team Members Properly
It is the leader’s responsibility to position team members where they add the most value and have the greatest chance for success. Doing that serves them individually as well as helping the team to perform at its best.
In my book The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork, I describe the Law of the Niche, which says all players have a place where they add the most value. How do you figure out where each team member fits? By getting to know his or her strengths and weaknesses. If a leader doesn’t know what his players’ strengths and weaknesses are, he cannot hand off responsibilities to them. And for that matter, if a leader doesn’t know his own strengths and weaknesses, he will not hand off responsibilities to his team.
When you take over a team, if you did nothing other than put each player in his or her strength zone, you would greatly increase the productivity and success of the team. It can make a huge difference in a very short time.
4. Create Clear Expectations
Another fairly quick way to positively affect a team is to give the entire team as well as each individual player clear expectations when it comes to performance and goals. Author Denis Waitley asserts, “Motivation is always in direct proportion to the level of expectation.” In contrast, not knowing what’s expected of us is confusing and demotivating. We all want to have the “win” defined for us.
“Motivation is always in direct proportion to the level of expectation.”
—Denis Waitley
It’s always been my experience that if I expect great things from my people, they’ll go to great lengths to keep from disappointing me. Good people always rise to your level of expectation.
5. Determine People’s Capacity
As every coach knows, most people do not push themselves to their capacity. In fact, if you look at the research that Gallup has done, you find that an overwhelming number of people are downright disengaged at work. It is the leader’s job to try to change that. Gallup identifies people’s not working in their strengths as the primary reason for disengagement at work, so if you have put people in their strength zones you’ve already put them on a good path to better performance. If you’ve communicated what is expected, you’ve helped them even more. What’s left? To motivate and inspire them to achieve, and give them a safe place to fail.
If you encourage people to strive to go farther than they ever have, and you give them the freedom to fail, they will take risks, and you will help them to determine what their true capacity is. That’s no small thing. Daniel H. Pink says, “One source of frustration in the workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people must do and what people can do. When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what they must do falls short of their capabilities, the result is boredom. But when the match is just right, the results can be glorious.”
8. How Do You Find Balance Between Leading Others and Producing?
When I started in my career, I wasn’t trying to lead anyone. In fact I didn’t think about leadership at all. I simply tried to get things done. I focused on reaching people and trying to grow my church. In other words, I was a producer, and if you had asked me, I would have said that leadership was producing.
I look back now and recognize that I was a Level 3 leader, based on the 5 Levels of Leadership. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Level 3 is where you develop credibility.
Leadership is often the result of a person’s being productive. That’s often why people are willing to follow you. If you’re good at what you do, motivated people want to know why. They want to watch you and learn from you. They’re willing to take your direction, because they hope you can make them better. That’s where leadership often starts.
Let’s say you’re a highly productive person and others begin to recognize that you’re good at what you do, and they start asking for your help, even though you have no official leadership responsibilities yet. What do you do? Helping others will take your time. It may reduce your productivity. Will you help them, even though it becomes more difficult for you to take care of your own responsibilities and get your work done? Many people don’t want to be bothered. But let’s say you love what you do and you desire to help people. So you give them some of your time and pick up the slack by working either longer or smarter. During this season you’re probably going to be spending 90 percent of your time producing and only 10 percent leading.
If you work in an organization that recognizes and rewards producers who help the team, you will probably be given some leadership responsibilities. However, you may receive those on top of your responsibilities. (And this will almost certainly be true if you are an entrepreneur or self-employed.) This is where you need to begin learning how to manage producing and leading. Maybe the balance shifts from ninety-ten to eighty-twenty. At this point two things become critical: priorities and delegation. At some point you will run out of hours in your day and days in your week. You will have to stop doing some things and start delegating others. To start figuring out what tasks you can shift, ask yourself these questions:
• What am I required to do personally? Some tasks cannot be delegated. If you own a business, you know that you have a responsibility to the organization to help it succeed. The buck stops with you. If you work for someone else, there are things your boss requires you to do personally. Ask what must be done that only you can do and that cannot be delegated. These responsibilities must remain high on your priority list. As I prepared to accept the last leadership position in which I worked for someone else, I asked what tasks only I could do. These I did, and I delegated nearly everything else.
• What gives the organization the greatest return? Some of the things you do return great value to the organization because they use your greatest strengths. These are the things in your production zone, and you should never delegate them to someone else. For example, I never ask someone else to speak for me. This is my sweet spot. It adds value to people, generates revenue, and increases opportunities for my organizations. I will continue speaking as long as these things are true.
• What rewards me personally? There are certain tasks that we simply enjoy doing. If they bring a high return, great. If not, we need to let them go. For example, early in my career, I loved spending time looking at metrics and analyzing stats. I could do it all day because it was like a drug to me. But did it give a high return? No. Was it required of me? No. Could someone else do it? Yes. So I had to stop doing it. Truth be told, this is where people get tripped up. They keep doing things they enjoy that they shouldn’t be. If you want to be productive, you should try to learn to get joy from what gives the greatest return and discipline yourself to do those things.
If you want to be productive, you should try to learn to get joy from what gives the greatest return and discipline yourself to do those things.
• What reproduces productivity and leadership in others? When most people think of delegation, they focus on the benefit to themselves. They understand that it frees up their time to take on additional responsibilities, like leading. And that’s good. But there is another benefit of delegating: it allows others to grow in their ability to produce or lead. In the beginning this can actually take up more of your time. But in the long run, it pays off not only for you but also for the organization and the people you develop.
As your leadership ability and responsibilities increase, the balance between the time you spend leading and the time you spend producing will evolve. If you are a great equipper and developer of people—a Level 4 leader—you may get to where you are spending 90 percent of your time leading and reproducing leaders and only 10 percent of your time actually producing. However, if at any point you begin to lose credibility with your team or the person you work for, you will need to shift more time and attention back to producing. Productivity is the engine that drives your credibility and leadership.
9. I’m Always Worried About Hurting People’s Feelings or Worried About What They Will Think of Me. What Can I Do to Overcome This and Become a Strong Leader?
As long as you’re overly concerned about what other people think of you, you won’t be able to become a strong leader. I say that because I used to be a people pleaser and I cared too much about what others thought of me. When I started in my career, I often knew what to do, but I didn’t do it. I had clarity, but not confidence.
The key to my change was deciding to do what was best, not what was best for me. I had to believe in the cause more than in my comfort. I had to live for a purpose bigger than myself. I had to be willing to take the heat so that I could move people forward. Here’s how this works:
- Believing in the cause creates your conviction.
- Believing in your vision fuels your inspiration.
- Believing in your people builds your motivation.
Once you possess enough conviction to keep you from worrying about what others think, you will be willing and able to set the standards necessary for you to lead effectively. When I arrived at Skyline in San Diego as its leader, the organization had been on a plateau for many years. How was I able to get it growing again? I raised the standards for leadership: I expected better results from each leader; I insisted that everyone train new leaders; I also let go of some staff members and hired better leaders. Did all these things make me popular with the staff? No. But they helped the organization grow. In the time I was there, it more than tripled in size.
It is the job of the leader to determine the standards for the people he leads. As leader, I can never forget that. I must…
Teach the standards,
Live the standards,
Lead others to stretch to the standards.
If I don’t, both I and the organization will drift into mediocrity—and then go down from there.
To be an effective leader, you must listen to others, and consider their thoughts and ideas, but do what’s right for the organization and the people according to your personal values and the highest standards.
10. How Does an Emerging Leader Establish Leadership Confidence Without Affirmation?
Confidence is important for a leader, as I indicated in my answer to the previous question. If you’ve read The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, you’re familiar with the Law of the Big Mo, which says that momentum is a leader’s best friend. What turns the key to momentum and gets it started? Often it’s the leader’s confidence!
Confidence makes it possible for leaders to take risks and speak up. It empowers them to go first when they need to. It helps them tackle big problems and overcome failure. Let’s face it: leadership is often messy and difficult. Confidence makes it possible for leaders to keep moving forward in spite of this.
Confidence also sets individuals apart. Confident people stand out from the crowd. Confident leaders provide certainty to uncertain people and security to insecure people. People migrate to confident leaders. People want to follow others who know where they’re going. Their confidence gives the people who follow them confidence. Together they are more likely to overcome adversity.
Unfortunately, many young leaders have to function in environments where they receive limited guidance and even less affirmation. So many leaders must learn to develop confidence on their own. That can be difficult, but it’s not impossible. If you desire to improve your leadership confidence, do the following:
1. Spend Time with People Who Give You Confidence
Many times we lack confidence because the people we spend the most time with would rather take us down a notch than lift us up. They’re like Charlie Brown’s friend Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip by Charles M. Schulz. In one strip she tells him, “You, Charlie Brown, are a foul ball in the line drive of life! You’re in the shadow of your own goal posts! You are a miscue! You are three putts on the eighteenth green! You are a seven-ten split in the tenth frame! You are the dropped rod and reel in the lake of life! You are a missed free throw, a shanked nine iron and a called third strike! Do you understand? Have I made myself clear?” With friends like that, who needs enemies?
If people in your life make you feel discouraged and tentative, you need to spend less time with them and more time with people who want to see you win and express that to you. I had to do that early in my career. I broadened my circles. And when I found someone who encouraged me, I went out of my way to spend time with him. You should too.
2. Find a Way to Get a Few Wins Under Your Belt
Few things give us confidence like a win. My dad understood this. When I was a kid, I used to wrestle my brother Larry, who is almost two years older than I am. When we were growing up, Larry was bigger and stronger than I, and when we wrestled, Larry always won. Dad could see that this was starting to become discouraging to me, so one day as we pushed back the couch to set up our wrestling area, Dad announced, “I’m going to wrestle John tonight.”
I got down on the floor with my dad, and we started to battle each other. Much to my amazement, I was doing well against him. No matter what Dad tried, I was able to work my way out of it and he wasn’t able to pin me.
Dad and I wrestled every night. And every night I was able to fight Dad off. Not once was he able to pin me.
Larry watched this go on for a week, and he could barely stand it. He was dying to jump back into the “ring” with me. And Dad finally let him. But guess what? Larry seldom beat me again. The wins Dad put under my belt were enough to give me confidence, and confidence had been all I lacked.
If your confidence isn’t what it needs to be, find ways to rack up a few wins. Start with easy ones if you need to. For that matter, you can also make a list of past victories to help you develop (or regain) confidence. Even the best of leaders sometimes feel low and need to remember past victories to give them a boost so they can move forward.
3. Quit Comparing Yourself to Others
One of the things most detrimental to people’s confidence is comparing themselves to others. If you are not a naturally confident person or you have a glass-is-half-empty type of personality, you will most likely compare your worst to others’ best and find yourself lacking. Don’t do it! Others are often not as good as we give them credit for, and we are all too aware of our weaknesses. As a result, the comparison is distorted. Besides, each of us is a unique individual with something to contribute to this world. Instead of comparing yourself to others, focus on being your best you.
4. Specialize Until You’re Special
That leads to the final thing I would suggest you do to gain confidence. Become really great at something. If you specialize in doing something based on one of your top strengths, you not only add value to your team, you also find it easier to believe in yourself.
I learned this lesson on the basketball court when I was a kid. Basketball was my first love. I still vividly remember being in fourth grade and watching the high school basketball team being announced at the first game I attended. From that moment I was hooked. After that I spent every spare moment shooting hoops.
What I discovered was that my best skill on the court wasn’t handling the basketball, grabbing rebounds, or playing defense. It was shooting. So that became my focus. In particular, I practiced thousands of foul shots. By the time I played in high school, I was the most consistent free throw shooter on the team. And when we were in pressure situations in a game, I was confident in my shooting.
If you want to gain confidence, become an expert in something. Develop a valuable skill. Become an expert on your product. Learn everything there is to know about your customers. It can be nearly anything—if it helps the team to succeed and it gives you confidence, it’s a win for everybody.
There is no one clear path to leadership. There is no simple checklist for becoming a leader. Each person’s journey is different. In my case, I needed to learn how to lead in order to be successful in my career, but I wasn’t aware of that need when I got started. In fact, in the late sixties and early seventies, leadership wasn’t a concept that was on many people’s radar. Instead people studied management.
It wasn’t until I presided over my first board meeting that I got a sense of who was leading the meeting—and it wasn’t me. I came in with an agenda and several changes I wanted to make in the organization. Before I could really launch into any of it, a farmer named Claude started to talk, and everyone else started to listen. He took us through the items he thought were important, everyone followed his lead, and before I knew it, the meeting was over. Claude didn’t do anything bossy or unpleasant. He simply wanted to get things done and acted as he probably always had during such meetings.
After a couple of meetings like this, I realized that if I wanted the people in the board meeting to address the issues that were important to me, I needed those issues to come from the leader—Claude. So about a week before the next meeting, I went to visit Claude out on the farm. We chatted, I helped with chores, and I just happened to mention a couple of the issues that were important to me. When Claude heard them, he said, “We should probably bring those up at our next board meeting.” I told Claude I thought that was a good idea. For the next three years, if there was something I thought was important, I brought it up with Claude, and he made it happen. Why? Because he was the person with influence at the church, and I was just a kid with a job title.
I learned many great lessons in my first leadership position, the most important of which was that leadership has to be earned. Leaders have to grow into their roles, and if the role becomes more demanding, the leader has to keep growing. Leadership is never a right. It’s a privilege and a responsibility. But it’s one that is open to anyone who’s willing to work hard enough to get it.
I learned many great lessons in my first leadership position, the most important of which was that leadership has to be earned.