Are You A Positional Leader?

Do you know anyone in your organization that flaunts their title as their only means to get things done? 

People who rely on their title, position, or power to influence others do not lead well, and they neglect many of the human aspects when it comes to their people in their organization. While this approach can influence others, it does not foster effective long-term working relationships. Instead, it often disenfranchises people and prevents them from expressing their ideas and opinions.

Your Title Doesn’t Make You A Leader

People who operate from a traditional concept of position & title believe that a large amount of power is granted to them based on their title alone. Leaders who operate from a positional standpoint alone are often unable to look beyond the roles and responsibilities of the title to see how their performance, attitude, and general behavior affects others. Their lower emotional intelligence may perceive others as lesser, using manipulation to acquire influence while further reducing the integrity and the trust others place in them. 

Fear

Many positional leaders love to instill fear in their organization; every word or phrase is based on fear in an attempt to hold onto control. They love to use phase like “your job is on the line” ‘you can be fired if the project fails to deliver the required results”; I even heard a manager tell their staff “many of you have a Mortgagees, car payments and rent, and if you are fired from this company you can lose your home, car and be out on the street. Many people fall for this kind of nonsense because of their mental conditioning and their lack of confidence to point where they even adopt these kinds of ridiculous strategies in their own managerial space to get their staff to perform.

Fear, manipulation, control and your title should never be used as any means to influence your people to work; if this is your tactics, you need to evaluate yourself because you will never build anything of value with this foolishness. I am diabolically opposed to companies that tolerate this behavior. Position is a poor substitute for influence, and according to John Maxwell 5 level of leadership, these people may be bosses, but they are never leaders. They have subordinates, not team members. They rely on rules, regulations, policies, and organization charts to control everything in their company.

People will only follow them within the stated boundaries of their authority. And their people will usually do only what is required of them. The very nature of leadership speaks to inspiration, motivation, vision, purpose, trust, values, communication, and many more that seek to help people become the very best version of themselves; it has nothing to do with manipulation and fear. We need to usher in a new paradigm in many organizations to get people to love their work and their environment.

The beauty of leadership lies in the fact that a person does not need a formal title to prove that they are a leader. People follow leaders because of their values, their vision, their passion, their purpose, their inspiration, and many more. It's not about rank, power, or your place on the org chart; it's all about inspiring people to believe in themselves, believe in their gifts, believe in their potential, and to believe in something much greater than their own self-preservation. When you have that type of influence, and people choose to follow you voluntarily, you are the road to becoming a great leader.

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About Gifford Thomas

I am the founder of Leadership First and the author of The Inspirational Leader, Inspire Your Team To Believe In The Impossible. At Leadership First, we are committed to publishing the very best inspirational leadership quotes and articles to inspire our 160,000+ community of leaders to believe in the impossible, while creating an environment free from toxic, fearful and intimidating leadership. We believe everyone can and should enjoy their work, but it must start with the leadership leading by example. Follow our community of leaders HERE, visit our website HERE and let's change the leadership status quo to help inspire and motivate our leaders to make a difference and create an organization their people will love.

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