The 5 Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential (23 page)
Read The 5 Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential Online
Authors: John C. Maxwell
Helping Individual Leaders Grow Extends Your Influence and Impact
E
ffective leaders understand that what got them to their current level of leadership won’t be enough to get them to the next one. They understand that if they want to keep getting better as leaders, they have to be willing to keep growing and changing, and that each move up the 5 Levels of Leadership requires a paradigm shift and a change in the way a person leads.
On Level 3, the emphasis is on personal and corporate productivity. The ability to create a high-productivity team, department, or organization indicates a higher level of leadership ability than most others display. But to reach the upper levels of leadership that create elite organizations, leaders must transition from producers to developers. Why? Because people are any organization’s most appreciable asset.
To reach the upper levels of leadership that create elite organizations, leaders must transition from producers to developers.
Good leaders on Level 4 invest their time, energy, money, and thinking into growing others as leaders. They look at every person and try to gauge his or her potential to grow and lead—regardless of the individual’s title, position, age, or experience. Every person is a potential candidate for development. This practice of identifying and developing people compounds the positives of their organization, because bringing out the best in a person is often a catalyst for bringing out the best in the team. Developing one person for leadership and success lays the foundation for developing others for success.
Bringing out the best in a person is often a catalyst for bringing out the best in the team.
Peter Drucker observed,
Making the right people decisions is the ultimate means of controlling an organization well. Such decisions reveal how competent management is, what its values are, and whether it takes its job seriously. No matter how hard managers try to keep their decisions a secret—and some still try hard—people decisions cannot be hidden. They are eminently visible. Executives who do not make the effort to get their people decisions right do more than risk poor performance. They risk losing their organization’s respect.
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How does this emphasis on people and people decisions translate into action? Leaders on the People Development level of leadership shift their focus from the production achieved by others to the development of their potential. And they put only 20 percent of their focus on their personal productivity while putting 80 percent of it on developing and leading others. This can be a difficult shift for highly productive people who are used to getting their hands dirty, but it’s a change that can revolutionize an organization and give it a much brighter future.
The Potential of the Organization Just Got Greater
W
hen you become capable of leading people on Level 4, the upside of leadership becomes even stronger and the potential of the organization increases dramatically. Here are the primary positive benefits of leading on the People Development level:
Most leaders are looking for ways to grow their organizations. Where do they usually focus their attention? On Level 3. They work to increase production. That’s the wrong focus. How do you grow a company? By growing the people in it. And if you
really
want to expand the organization and its potential, focus on growing the leaders.
Author and friend Denis Waitley once shared with me a wonderful insight about personal development. He said that people need to have the conviction that there is value in their dreams, and he said that it required “the belief that you are worth the effort, time, and energy to develop yourself.” That can also be said when it comes to developing others. We must believe in their value. We must value their dreams. We must believe that they are worth the time, effort, energy, and
resources that developing them requires. Unfortunately, many leaders do not have that belief.
One of the leaders I admire is Jim Blanchard, for many years the leader of Synovus. In 1999,
Fortune
named the company the best place in America to work. I believe one of the main reasons Synovus was so successful and such a great place to work was because of their dedication to developing people. That started with Blanchard, who said he loved reading books and any kind of opportunity to receive leadership training. Blanchard explained,
We made a decision twenty-five years ago that… putting people in jobs that they are not prepared for because we have not invested in their training is one mistake we are not going to make…. Training and preparing leaders, teaching them the basics, and trying to enthuse them to seek their own highest level of leadership was a good approach and a good investment in a corporate environment. It has certainly paid off. One thing we learned is that developing leaders is probably the most appreciated benefit in the company. When current or would-be leaders realize that you are investing in their growth, it’s more important to them than money. It’s more important, in my opinion, than a supervisor taking personal interest in their person and encouraging them along the way in their career, although that is probably second.
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That is a good description of the jump from Levels 2 and 3, where a leader builds relationships with people and helps them to be productive in their career, to Level 4, where the leader helps them develop their potential and become the leaders they are capable of being.
The mark of someone with potential to grow is openness to the process.
Blanchard says that the mark of someone
with potential to grow is openness to the process. “When you look at people who are eager to learn more,” Blanchard remarked, “you can bet they are on the right track. And when you talk to people who just don’t want any more instruction, then they have pretty much hit the wall. They are done.”
If you want the best for your organization, you need to invest in its people. That’s where the greatest potential is. And in a competitive business world, the ability to develop people is often the difference maker between two organizations competing to succeed using similar resources. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich pointed out, “If employers fail to upgrade their workers, then they’re trying to be competitive only with their capital. Anybody can replicate physical capital. But the one resource nobody can replicate is the dedication, the teamwork, the skills of a company’s employees.” Develop them, and you become a one-in-a-thousand leader.
Achieving success isn’t easy. Thousands of new businesses are launched every year only to fail a short time later. Those that make it discover that sustaining success isn’t easy, either. Many companies said to have been “built to last” don’t. Even some of the giants who seem invincible don’t remain successful forever. What gives an organization the best chance for sustaining growth and success? Developing and training people. Only by helping your people reach their potential will your organization reach its potential.
In the early years of leadership, I didn’t understand this. Equipping and developing others wasn’t a high priority for me. Once I discovered the Production level of leadership, that was where I poured my seemingly endless store of energy. I was able to work long hours, and I loved the affirmation that others gave me for my work ethic and productivity.
Words such as “How can you accomplish so much?” were music to my ears. Only after I left an organization did the music stop. I realized that as soon as my personal touch was no longer on a particular task or effort, it wasn’t sustained. As a result, many of the things I built ceased to thrive or in some cases even to exist after my exit. I had flunked the leadership test!
This really threw me for a loop. Author and friend Ken Blanchard says, “The test of your leadership is not what happens when you are there, but what happens when you’re not there.” I wondered what the secret was. Why did some organizations continue to succeed after their leaders left while others fell apart?
I began to gain leadership insight in an unlikely place. One night Margaret and I went to a circus, and in the center ring was a man who began to spin a plate on the end of a stick. (If you’re from my generation, you may have seen this done on a variety show.) After he got that first plate spinning, he started to spin another plate on a second stick. Then another and another and another until he had six plates spinning. For the next few minutes he hurried from stick to stick, keeping the plates spinning so that none of them would lose momentum and fall. The more plates spinning, the faster he ran to keep them from falling.
All of a sudden I realized: that was me! I was doing everything myself, and as long as I ran quickly, I could hold everything together. But the moment I stopped, everything would crash around me. By not training anyone else to spin the plates of leadership, I was wearing myself out and limiting the potential of my organization. What a mistake. That was when I made developing others to lead a priority in my organization. It has revolutionized my leadership and made an incredible impact on every organization I’ve led.
I think many of us come from the paradigm where the leader is connected to everything of importance in an organization. Authors
James A. Belasco and Ralph C. Stayer liken this mind-set to that of a buffalo herd, where everyone waits around to see what the head buffalo thinks and wants to do. Instead, they argue, effective organizations need to be less like herds of buffalo and more like flocks of geese, flying in V formation and sharing the load. Their book
Flight of the Buffalo
states,
Rather than the old head-buffalo leadership paradigm, I developed a new lead-goose leadership paradigm. Crafted in the crucible of real-time leadership experience, that paradigm is built around the following leadership principles:
• Leaders transfer ownership for work to those who execute the work.
• Leaders create the environment for ownership where each person wants to be responsible.
• Leaders coach the development of personal capabilities.
• Leaders learn fast themselves and encourage others also to learn quickly.
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When leaders take this kind of approach, then everyone has the potential to lead—at least in some area and capacity.
If you haven’t made developing leaders a priority in the past, allow me to encourage you to do so now. It will take time and commitment, but you can do it. If you have been successful leading on Levels 1, 2, and 3, you have the potential to move up to Level 4. It will require you to shift from doing to developing. It will require you to believe in people. And it will require you to share the load. But if you desire to make the shift in emphasis and put in the work, you can do it. Never forget that leadership is the art of helping people change from who they’re thought to be to who they ought to be.