The Brutal Truth About Leadership No One Wants to Admit..."

What if everything you believed about leadership was a misconception? Here’s what no one tells you…

This is something I've struggled to explain for a while now and yet it is something I believe in my heart to be 100% true so I'm going to share my thoughts on leadership with you.

Leadership or at least the word is a little bit like the word literally, simply because people couldn't use it correctly it's been redefined, once, not that long ago literally meant written down, now it can mean figuratively or actually, which means we no longer have a word that means written down, which seems to be the opposite of progress.

Leadership used to be the process or act of leading, if 8 people are running the 1500 metres only the person in front is leading, the person at the back, no matter how much of a nice person they are, no matter how much they care about how everybody else is performing or developing is not leading and therefore is not a leader. The word leader used to be a singular noun, now it's used to define everything including collaboration, negotiation, inspiration, and developing others as well as being a good person, the word leadership has become like the word marketing it's so big and so inclusive, it covers such a wide range of concepts and areas that it no longer means anything to me.

Whenever I ask people to define leadership what they end up doing is telling me all the traits of a good person, they care about people, they have others best interests at heart, they help others develop and become leaders.

Well, there have been plenty of highly successful leaders in history who were not good people

To me it's become a subjective term, and it’s very hard to measure the subjective, and it's hard to improve something you can't measure. As far as I can work out the only objective measure of a leader is how many people you lead.

This is why it's a great thing for gurus to talk about and of course to charge you for, because you can't measure the impact of their advice, you may attribute other things to that advice, but you've got no way of measuring it objectively.

This is where every piece of advice on leadership I can find anywhere on the Internet falls short, it tells you leadership is about being a good person and I would argue being a good person is about being a good person, leadership is neither good nor bad. ?It is the process of leading.

I am not saying for one minute but it's not important to be a good person, it is definitely a good idea to care about other people, to have their best interests at heart, and to help to develop others to become leaders, at the same time I'm pointing out that those are the traits of a good human being not necessarily those of a successful leader.

Good leader equals a leader who is a good person bad leader equals a leader who is a bad person neither of those things define how successful they were as a leader.

Over the last 30 years I have honed my skills in problem solving, to identify the problem behind the challenges or if you like the thing that really needs fixing or changing, whether it's an individual, a team, a culture a process, or a mindset.

Over that same period I have seen a move towards the good person version of leadership, a move away from management almost to the point it has become a dirty word, I've seen a huge amount of businesses focus on creating values talking about culture And I've seen a lot of people get rich selling you those concepts.

So, what's the problem? I mean there are a 1000 books on leadership a 1000 on sales and there are a 1000 coaches for engineering or marketing or property and for any other industry you can think of and yet less than 4% of businesses succeed you may know that 96% of all businesses fail in their first ten years what you might not know is that 96% of businesses fail in every 10 year period.

Over that same 30 year period where leadership has become the be all and end all of everything that number has not improved, if anything it's gone backwards, so objectively it is not the solution to business success, if it was the numbers would change.

So, what are 96% of businesses missing?

Above I told you that my skill was in identifying the real problem and getting that fixed, in all the time that I've been working with businesses and with all the businesses that I've worked with The problem has never been leadership, I'm not saying they couldn't have been better leaders I'm just saying that was not a problem that we needed to fix.

So, what were the problems that needed fixing and how did we do that?

Before I get to that let's talk about what I don't do, I don't tell people how to be a better property investor, how to make a better widget or how to run a better engineering company because they are for the most part, already pretty good at that or they wouldn't still be in business, they would have already gone bust if they were poor at what they did.

I don't tell people how to build a better culture or be a better leader either because as far as I'm concerned those are an outcome of doing some other things right in the first place.

I believe what is missing is what nearly every person in my field is coming at it from the wrong direction, they reason that successful people have certain traits therefore if you have these traits you will become successful, that's a reasonable assumption to make, that successful people share traits therefore if you have these traits then you will become successful, what this is missing is that those traits are there because of the things that those successful people have had to learn and have had to do, the actions they've taken, the traits are an outcome of that journey.

Now I am specifically talking about business leadership here as that's the field I work in, and in business you need to get good at planning that's a skill you need to learn and then you need to practise it you need to get good at management that's the managing of systems and processes as well as managing people, which seems to be a something that has disappeared from nearly every business in the last 25 years, you need to get good at finding the right customers and you need to get good at delivering more value to them than anyone else in your industry does. ?If you master those things, you will become a leader in your industry.

And that's the value I bring, that is what I do, I help those with the ambition to become a leader focus on effective planning, on good and effective management, I help them identify what a good customer looks like and then help them deliver more value to that customer than anybody else in their industry does, I develop leaders because I focus on the things that makes leaders.

Waltergroup.co.uk