John Maxwell said, “Everything rises and falls on leadership.”
Leadership is a key ingredient in an organization’s success. But for the organization to grow, the leader/s must grow. For a leader to grow, he must grow himself. Hence, before a person can lead other people, he must be able to lead himself first.
In the path of leadership, I paint two phases of leadership. It starts with the personal leadership (where the leader brings out the best in him/herself) and proceeds to the people leadership (where the leader brings out the best in others). It begins with personal effectiveness before it goes to the organizational effectiveness.
Under personal leadership, it is important that the leader leads his performance; hence, the concept on performance leadership (or what I call performance management with a heart). To do so, he needs to put into account what I call the power blocks of a performance launchpad. The power blocks are the following: attitude, ambition, community, communication, core, time, tools, sweet spot, and story. (We will talk about each in upcoming articles.) But what we need to note at this point is that we are to raise our personal effectiveness with them and through them. In other words, we are to launch our performance from and with that launchpad.
A powerful tool to consider in this section is Stephen Covey’s teaching on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He described the keys to move you from dependence to independence to the wonderful phase of interdependence. To have private victory, he shared with us the first three habits: be proactive, begin with the end in mind, and put first things first. To gain public victory, add the next three habits: think win-win, seek first to understand then to be understood, and synergize. Finally, as you do all these, you’ve got to sharpen the saw (7th habit).
In his 8th Habit book, he taught us to find our voice and help others to find theirs. This will help us further our private and public victory, our move from personal to organizational effectiveness.
As we move to the people leadership phase, we will begin to take on projects with people and thus the need to know about project leadership (or what I call project management with a heart).
To lead in projects, it is important that we consider the basics of management where we need to plan and organize (guided by strategic and systematic thinking), execute the plans and programs, and monitor so we can measure and manage the performance required and so with the different stakeholders in the project.
Throughout these phases, particularly in the execution and monitoring, there has to be a good feedback mechanism or the giving of constructive evaluation to the people concerned. In this section, the mentoring and coaching skills of a leader has to be invoked.
In all the phases, the leader has to be able to engage, motivate and inspire his people as well. To be able to do this, he must build on the core blocks to command his credibility which are his character, competence, and influence.
The path of leadership is a challenging yet beautiful path. It is multi-faceted. It can be learned.
Join me in this path of leadership, a journey to delve into the different phases and points of being an effective leader. I just shared with a glimpse of the path of leadership model I am working on. In the next articles, we will be discussing each section one by one. Through this, I hope we will grow as leaders one day at a time.
As John Maxwell taught us, “Leaders develop daily not in a day.” ‘Til the next article.
(Chris Dao-anis, CPA, ACG, ALB speaks and trains on personal leadership. His latest book ‘Living Large in the Little Things’ is available at Mt. Cloud Bookshop, Casa Vallejo, Upper Session Road, Baguio City. For talks and trainings, email him at chrisdaoanis@gmail.com or visit his website at www.chrispoweracademy.com.)
