How to embark on the journey to become a Leader

On the battlefields and in the boardroom, in classrooms and in courtrooms, leaders play a crucial role: they bring people and organizations together, guiding them along a particular path and giving them courage to carry on. But what exactly makes a leader? And how can you become one?

Well, leadership comes in many different forms and leaders operate with varying degrees of sophistication. This hierarchy can be thought of as a leadership ladder, and advancing up it is a long process that requires learning self-discipline, how to prioritize tasks and how to infuse every action with integrity and vision. In short, a leader knows that her personal growth is central to the growth of her organization.

If you can commit to this process, you’ll become a better leader in no time, embodying the word in everything you do.

Leadership is always about influencing others, but it can take several distinct forms.

Everybody – from football coaches to business executives to full-time mothers – knows that leadership is an essential quality of powerful people. But what exactly is it?

In a simple sense, leadership is just influence; it’s the ability to inspire others to follow you. In other words, all moral considerations aside, anybody who can attract a group of followers qualifies as an effective leader. That includes the likes of John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill and even Adolf Hitler. All these people were leaders simply because people followed them.

That being said, it should also be noted that there’s a hierarchy of leadership. To be exact, there are five different levels: position, permission, production, people development and personhood.

The first, position, is the lowest level of leadership. It’s about having the right to be a leader. To put it differently, leaders of position are solely leaders because of their titles.

The second level, permission, is about relationships. If you’ve attained this level of leadership, people follow you because you’re tuned into their needs and wishes; you listen to and value the opinions of others. As a result, leadership of this type won’t last long if you neglect the needs of others. They’ll soon lose interest and stop following you.

The third level of leadership, production, is attained when relationships such as those from the second level start to produce results. At this level, your leadership is the result of your and your team’s success. People admire those results and are therefore happy to follow you.

If you manage to attain the fourth level, people development, people will follow you because they value your mentorship. At this level, a leader takes care to grow the skills of others, who respond with absolute loyalty. In cases like this, people follow you because they’re thankful.

The final tier of leadership is personhood. While it’s certainly attainable, it’s only reached by leaders who spend their entire lives influencing others. At this level, you’re a person who commands respect, which is what inspires others to follow you.

Leadership is about setting priorities at multiple levels.

So you want to develop your leadership abilities. Well, then you better know about priorities. Having solid priorities will enable you to determine what’s most important and who you should focus on. It sounds simple enough, but good leaders prioritize on more than one level.

For one, you have to be able to prioritize different projects and tasks. Some of these will be important, others urgent and some will be both. This last category is the one to prioritize.

For instance, writing a report on sales figures may be important, but not that urgent. Such tasks should be a part of the everyday work of your team, but they should be worked toward deliberately, not rushed.

Then there are projects and tasks that aren’t important, but that are urgent. Checking your email is a prime example here. It should be done quickly so you can move on to the work that matters.

And, finally, there’s work that’s neither important nor urgent, like filing documents, which can be done in brief chunks of time, maybe just once a week.

Being able to break things down like this is key, because if you fail to set the right priorities, you’re bound to lead your organization in the wrong direction. But tasks and projects are just one level; you also need to be able to prioritize the energy, money, time and staff devoted to any given project or task. To do so, apply the 20/80 principle.

That is, spend 80 percent of your resources – like money and energy – on the top 20 percent of your organizational priorities. Similarly, you should plan to dedicate 80 percent of your time to the top 20 percent of your most productive staff, who account for 80 percent of your organization’s success. Every priority below this, the remaining 80 percent, should be delegated and outsourced. And, naturally, new personnel should be trained by the top 20 percent of your people.

To put it simply, prioritize the best people, tasks and projects. Investing in them will result in the most success.

A leader acts on her convictions and backs up her words with actions.

Now that you know how to set priorities, it’s time to talk about another core leadership concept: integrity. To have integrity is to adhere to a set of values without fail; these values are your compass, guiding everything you do. To put it differently, people with integrity act based on who they are.

But that’s not all it means. Integrity is also about being consistent and doing what you say you’ll do. Being able to follow through like this will inspire people to trust and follow you.

For example, research from Stanford University that indicates that the vast majority of learning – 89 percent of it! – is visual. In other words, if the people you lead hear you say that your job is to focus on the customer and then see you paying special attention to customers on a regular basis, they’ll eventually start doing the same.

Being able to maintain such consistency will reinforce your credibility as a leader because people will know who you are and what they can expect from you. This in turn will produce trust, which is crucial to your success.

After all, would you follow the advice of someone you didn’t trust?

Or imagine being in the army. Would you follow your commanding officer into a dangerous situation if you thought he was a phony or worried that he might reverse his decisions at the last minute?

Clearly, trust is essential to leadership, and integrity can help you build it. Integrity will also be the foundation of your long-lasting reputation. As an example, think about what it’s like to meet for the first time someone you idolize.

Many people are disappointed during such meetings because the idolized individual doesn’t turn out to be the person he seemed to be from afar. Maybe he appeared to be making clear decisions, but in reality is just blowing in the wind.

On the other hand, people with integrity secure a reputation that endures. That’s because, if you have integrity, there’ll be no difference between the person you seem to be from afar and the person you are in meetings and day-to-day interactions.

Leaders must embrace change and support their followers.

You might think you’re a pretty good leader, but how can you be sure?

One way is to assess how beneficial your work has been. In fact, this criterion is so important that creating positive change is the third principle of leadership. Leaders need to be ever ready to change; if they’re not, their inflexibility can negatively affect the entire organization. A leader must be able to adapt.

For instance, when Henry Ford created the Model T, he became so infatuated with the car that he refused to consider changing a single detail; he believed it was perfect as it was. Because of this, he even fired his top production official, William Knudsen, who suggested a new design.

Ford may have been a manufacturing genius, but such a rigid resistance to change was a major misstep. Remember, the world moves at a rapid pace and competition is fierce. To succeed in this environment, your business has to embrace the possibility that major shifts will occur. If you can’t change, your organization won’t be able to, either.

In Ford’s case, changing the Model T was simply necessary. Despite what Ford thought about the car, it was old-fashioned and General Motors had already started developing more modern vehicles that the Model T would have to compete with. While Ford remained reluctant for years, he finally did update the Model T, releasing the Model A and maintaining his strong position in the automobile industry.

But, as a leader, you must do more than simply embrace change. You also need to recognize the psychological challenges that change can impose on your employees.

Change requires employees to step out of their comfort zones and face dramatically new contexts, and this is bound to lead to stress and insecurity. So to help employees ease into this process, you should do everything you can to ensure that they know in advance why the change is happening as well as the objectives it seeks to realize. By keeping your employees informed, you give them the chance to take ownership of the change, which will reduce its negative impacts.