Leadership is either "Build or Crush"

Leadership is a rich subject. Google and you’ll get countless sites opening to leadership of all sorts from concepts and techniques to the way leaders are and the way they have shaped themselves. All of it available at our fingertips.

We all tend to have fundamental ideas about leadership we learned from what we read and from others who are leaders in our lives. We often unwittingly generalize leadership fundamentals from our experiences and behavior we learned from other leaders. From these ideas we build our unique mental model of leadership.

Eventually, all leaders find situations where their mental model of leadership fails. I submit such times should invoke in us careful inspection of our leadership model. But who has time for that, and how does one do that anyway? 

Unfortunately, doing so isn’t naturally intuitive so we may have to think a little deeper and be a little more persistent in the process.

You the Person

The first leadership fundamentals are about you, the person. We all can argue to any length, but, all other leadership fundamentals hinge on how well leaders master this category.

There are three of you to be concerned with:

1. The you that is within you – whom you feel you ought to be.

2. The other you is who you actually are and you are aware of. These two of you aren’t always the same.

3. The third you, which is who others see and whom you might not be aware of. The third you can differ significantly from the first two because the third you is what others interpret from your behavior and words

Getting the first two of you in sync with each other is probably your most important and ongoing objective, and it starts with being honest with yourself. This is contrary to one tendency in our nature, which is to rationalize away criticism from the most important critic, you. When we rationalize we tend to blame others and/or the situation to cast off accountability and responsibility for change.

When we look at leaders from successful businesses as well as successful societies, those who demonstrate the best leadership skills are those who bring the best out of others. They get people to realize their potential. They make others think they are great. They build the most precious resource of all: the people they lead.

Here are 3 ways of building people. 

1. Building People by Sowing Good Habits

The Greek philosopher Aristotle said that excellence wasn't something you arrived at after a long period of preparation but a habit. Excellence is the result of doing things in an outstanding way repeatedly. In poorly-led organizations, excellence is rare because there is nobody to set the habit example and encourage regular acts of outstanding performance. In well-led organizations, leaders coach people through regular, unremitting, and positive attention to good habits.

2. Building People by Your Expectations of Them

A team does as well as you and the team think they will. In an experiment at a British school, teachers were given assorted ratings about a new set of intakes, ranging from "excellent prospect" to "unlikely to do well". These ratings were arbitrary and bore no relation to the pupils' true abilities. In tests at the end of the year, there was an astonishing degree of correlation between how pupils performed and the random ratings given to the teachers.

3. Building People to Create the Vision

One popular image of the successful leader is the person who, by force of willpower and personality takes over an ailing enterprise and magically turns it around, transforming failure into success, loss into profit and disaster into triumph. The reality is that there are very few examples of such leadership. And yet there are many examples of leaders who come into an enterprise, set themselves and their teams a vision of what is possible and then bit by bit, through hard times and good, build towards the vision.

The one thing that distinguishes leaders from managers is that leaders know that people cannot be measured like a raw material on the balance sheet. Great leaders know that, when called upon, people will respond to the needs of the enterprise. And they do that by building people. 

Let me close this narrating a small tale to emphasize the fact that Leaders will either “crush” or “build” people around them.  It all depends on how they are nurtured and grown to be what they become.

 A Bird In The Hand

Many years ago, in ancient China, the disciples of a wise master decided to play a trick on him. They selected one of their number to pose an unanswerable question.

The youth approached the master. “Wise master, in my hand I have a bird. Can you tell me if it is alive or dead?”

The master thought for a moment. If he replied “alive”, the youth would crush the bird and prove him wrong. If he said â€œdead”, then he would release the bird and let it fly away.

Clearly, the apprentices couldn’t lose and the master couldn’t win.

“Certainly,” the master replied after barely a moment’s thought. “The life of the bird is in your hands.”

Moral: When you manage others, you can always do one of two things: "grind them to death or inspire them to life."