The 5 Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential (25 page)

Maturity is the ability to think beyond yourself, see things from the perspective of others, and place their needs above your own. Selfishness prevents people from reaching that level of maturity.

My friend Gerald Brooks says, “When you become a leader you give up the right to think about yourself.” Becoming a Level 4 leader requires us to recognize that we now have the authority to serve people in a special way and we need to exercise that ability. You can’t do that if you have a self-serving attitude.

If you want to lead on Level 4, you need to focus 80 percent of your attention on others and helping them to grow, learn, and achieve. If your focus is always on yourself and what you want, then people become an obstacle to your goals.
Their
needs are seen as interfering with
your
goals. And you spend most of your time disappointed with others because they aren’t on your selfish agenda and are forever letting you down.

Leadership expert and author Max Depree says, “The leader is the servant who removes the obstacles that prevent people from doing their jobs.” What a great description. That kind of Level 4 mind-set requires maturity. It means coming to work every day placing other people first in our thoughts and actions. It means asking, “Who can I add value to today?” and “What can I do for others?” That is not the mind-set of an immature leader. It is the mind-set of a People Developer.

So if you want to move up to Level 4 leadership, get over your selfishness, get outside of yourself, and adopt the attitude of speaker and master
salesman Zig Ziglar, who said, “If you will help others get what they want, they will help you get what you want.”

My friend Wayne Schmidt, vice president of Wesley Seminary at Indiana Wesleyan University, once told me, “No amount of personal competency can compensate for personal insecurity.” He is so right. Insecure leaders continually sabotage themselves and others. And because they worry about their position and standing, they have a hard time investing in other people. Why? Because they fear that someone will take their place. For that reason, leaders who don’t deal with their insecurities and overcome them rarely reach Level 4 as leaders.

If you suspect that your insecurities may prevent you from moving up to the People Development level of leadership, then be prepared to do some work in the following three areas:

Leaders who are honest with themselves know that they don’t have all the answers. They recognize that success always comes from the combined contributions of everyone on a team. Success comes when people work together, each person playing his or her part. And because of this, they don’t try to answer every question themselves. They don’t try to make every decision. They see winning as a collaborative effort. And their goal isn’t to make others think more highly of them. It’s to get their people to think more highly of themselves.

How can you tell if your ego might be getting in the way of your
ability to move up to Level 4? Consider what happens when you meet with your team.

• Do your team members share their thoughts and ideas freely?
  
• Are the best ideas rarely your ideas?
  
• If you often contribute ideas, does the discussion quickly move from your idea to the best idea—and you’re happy about it?
  

How about when your team performs?

• When your team succeeds, do the other team members get the majority of the credit?
  
• Is there a shared sense of pride in the work that’s being done?
  
• When things go wrong, do you personally accept the greatest share of the blame?
  

If you can honestly answer yes to these questions, ego may not be a problem. If you answered no to many of those questions, beware. You may need to deal with your ego. Positive working environments led by secure leaders allow team members to get the credit. Level 4 leaders experience genuine joy in the success of others. When others shine, so do they.

Author Tom Peters observed, “There is nothing more useless than the person who says at the end of the day, ‘Well, I made it through the day without screwing up.’ ” Why would anyone have that kind of goal? Because they’re afraid of making mistakes. Many insecure workers try to avoid making mistakes by doing as little as possible or by trying to keep a low profile. Insecure leaders often deal with the issue differently. They rely on control. They think if they micromanage their people, they can keep them from making mistakes.

Unfortunately, controlling leaders don’t understand that progress comes only from taking risks and making mistakes. They would be better off taking the advice of someone like Chuck Braun, of Idea Connections Systems, who developed the concept of the “Mistake Quota.” When he trains people, he tells students that he expects them to make thirty mistakes per training session. Braun says he can almost hear the sighs of relief in the room as people relax and begin participating.

Good leaders forge ahead, break ground, and make mistakes. And they expect the same from their people. Authors James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner say it this way: “Leaders are pioneers—people who are willing to step out into the unknown. They are people who are willing to take risks, to innovate and experiment in order to find new and better ways of doing things.” To succeed as a leader on Level 4, you must embrace that attitude and give up controlling others.

Since you can’t prevent mistakes, why not adopt an attitude in which you and your team learn from them? That’s the only way anyone can really profit from mistakes anyway. So don’t try to put people in a box. Try to help them make the most of their fumbles, flops, and failures. As Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, said, “A leader’s role is not to control people or stay on top of things, but rather to guide, energize, and excite.” That’s what Level 4 leaders do.

Different leaders see trust in different ways. Secure leaders see it as the glue that keeps relationships together and makes business work. Stephen M. R. Covey, author of
The Speed of Trust,
says that trust produces speed because it feeds collaboration, loyalty, and, ultimately, results. Contrast that with the words of Al Neuharth, former CEO of
the U.S. newspaper chain Gannett and author of
Confessions of an S.O.B.
He wrote, “Now that I was on top, I knew others would want to topple me… I believe in practicing the S.O.B.’s Golden Rule:
Expect others to do unto you what you would do to them.
” I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live with that kind of attitude.

Insecure leaders don’t place their trust in others, nor do they engender trust from others. As a result, they don’t invest in others. And they don’t become Level 4 leaders. As a leader, you should never take trust for granted. Only when you lose it do you really understand the value of it. My daughter Elizabeth learned this in high school when she was a cheerleader. Because Elizabeth was tiny, she was a flyer. That means she was always either at the top of their pyramid or being tossed high into the air. With daredevil abandonment she would soar. How was she able to take such risks? Trust. She had practiced with her teammates for hours, having been thrown and safely caught hundreds of times. Then during her senior year, an inattentive teammate missed and let her fall on a throw. She wasn’t the same after that. From then on, she experienced moments of hesitation whenever she was thrown.

If you want to become a People Development leader, you must give others your trust and earn their trust in return. There is no other way to succeed on Level 4.

How many times have you considered giving someone something to do and instead thought,
It’s easier to just do it myself
? I bet you’ve done it often. Why? Because it
is
easier. Doing work yourself is always faster and easier than developing other people to do it. But that’s short-term thinking! To become a developer of people, you have to
be willing to adopt a long-term mind-set. If you pay the price on the front end, the return is great on the back end. On Level 4, the question isn’t “What can you do?” The question is “Who can you develop?” Investing in people takes a lot of time and energy.

Shortsightedness, like selfishness and insecurity, is another sign of immaturity in a leader. People Development requires big-picture thinking. It takes patience. Helping another person to become a competent leader almost always takes longer than you think and is more difficult than you expect. You must do it anyway. Otherwise you limit the potential for yourself, your people, and your organization.

Nearly anyone can lead others positionally. Many people can lead others relationally. Few people can be productive and put a team together to achieve goals. But very few people are both able and willing to develop others to become leaders. That is why most leaders only ever lead followers. Anyone who can relate well with people, produce personally, and communicate a vision is capable of attracting a following. However, attracting, developing, and leading other leaders is much more difficult. And most leaders are not willing to put forth the tremendous effort it takes and to make the sacrifices necessary to do it.

In the organizations I have led, developing people has been a high priority. I tell the leaders who work for me, “Your job is to work yourself out of your job.” By that I mean that I want leaders to figure out how to do the job with the highest level of excellence, recruit a team, develop them, model leadership, find a potential successor, train and develop that person, and empower him or her to lead in their place. When people do that, they’ve worked themselves out of a job, and they’re ready to move up to the next job.

That’s a high bar of expectation for leaders. In some organizations,
leaders can’t even get the job done on their own, much less develop someone else to do it. But that’s what Level 4 leadership takes. In my world of leadership, People Development is the target for every leader I employ. And if they are not willing or able to work themselves out of their job, I might have to take the job away from them and give it to someone else who can. So the goal for my leaders is never to keep their jobs. The question to them is, “Will you lose it by developing others or will you lose it because you didn’t develop others?” It’s always the leader’s choice.

My nonprofit organization EQUIP exists to help leaders in countries around the world develop people to lead on Level 4. Every six months EQUIP sends two associate trainers to a site to train leaders. For two days they take indigenous leaders through training material in a conference setting, equipping them for leadership. At the end of the conference, these leaders are given training materials in their own language that they can take back and use to train potential leaders in their sphere of influence. They are also given additional books to help them continue growing during those six months between sessions with EQUIP’s associate trainers. As long as these local leaders are committed to training their own people and becoming Level 4 leaders themselves, they are welcome to engage in EQUIP’s training process. In this way, EQUIP has been able to train millions of leaders internationally during the past decade.

In many countries where EQUIP works, this concept at first seems odd to people. Many leaders, especially in developing nations, are very positional and territorial. Their goal is to obtain a position of power, attract as many followers as they can, and do whatever is necessary to hold on to their power. The idea of giving themselves away by developing and empowering others to lead is very counterintuitive. But many get it. They do it. And they see the incredible impact People Development can make. It transforms organizations and even impacts cultures. But it takes a high level of security and skill to do. And it requires a high degree of commitment.

O
nly leaders can develop other people to become leaders. A well-intentioned person with no leadership knowledge and experience cannot train another person to lead. Theorists who study leadership without practicing it cannot equip someone to lead, no more than a cookbook reader who has no experience in the kitchen would be able to teach someone how to cook. Nobody really understands leadership until he or she does it. Put another way…

In light of that truth, my goal in this section on People Development is to give you a clear path to follow as you seek to develop other people to lead. My assumption going into this is that you are already leading people somewhere in some fashion. If you are (or have in the past), the following seven steps will make sense. If not, you will need to gain experience leading on Levels 1, 2, and 3 before you will be capable of implementing these Level 4 best behaviors.