Developing the Leader Within You

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.

Which level describes your current leadership status? Regardless of where you’re at, in the blinks that follow, you’ll learn how to climb the ladder and excel as a leader!