Leadership: Introduction
Success January 5th, 2009This is the start of a new series on leadership. I’ll briefly introduce each section below to give you an idea what you can expect in this series of articles.
NOTE: Each of the titles links into the series.
Understanding What It Is
Leadership is something that can easily be explained, but it is very difficult to put into practice. It’s important to understand what it is and the various things that make up leadership.
Know Yourself and Your Capabilities
In order to put the areas of leadership into practice once you do have an understanding of it, you need to look at yourself and your own capabilities so that you know what areas to develop, use and avoid in your leadership style. The characteristics of your own personality will also great impact your leadership and you should know how.
Skill Development
Any leader is going to realize that they cannot be everything they want to be without a lot of development of their skills. No matter where you are in your leadership abilities, there are always skills to learn, new ones to develop and refining to do on the ones you have.
Remember, It’s About People
Human nature is important to know, understand and handle as a leader. Every step you take as a leader will need to be done with one important fact in mind, it’s all about people.
Willingness to Take Risks
Leaders drive change and they inspire others to follow them by challenging new things and persisting through it to a point of success. That willingness to take risks is a critical aspect of leadership to explore.
Accepting Mistakes
Leaders are not better at things than others, they are not smarter, they are not lucky and they are not born that way either. They are however able to learn and accept their mistakes without mistakes holding them back from continued leadership.
Give Direction
Leaders can only lead if they give some direction or example for others to follow, otherwise it’s not leading.
Humility
Finally, my final area to cover of leadership is doing all this while staying humble. Great leaders are humble in their work, lives and leadership and it enables them to be lasting leaders well beyond their time and direct role of influence.
Each of the articles titles above link into the series.
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January 5th, 2009 at 7:33 AM
Sounds good! And looks like you’re going to be doing a lot of writing. I’ve subscribed to your RSS feed and I’m wondering if you have considered using twitter also?
January 5th, 2009 at 8:07 AM
Dhanamjaya, well I finished writing the whole series now and yes, it was a HUGE amount of work and writing. I’m going to enjoy discussing and following up on it now as I publish all these articles. It’s great to see how comments and discussions often lead into the next articles. It gives me a chance to tweak things along the way as well.
Thanks for stopping by and subscribing! Looking forward to reading more from you!
January 5th, 2009 at 9:41 AM
Wow wow, I’m going to follow them closely, Mike. It sounds great and I have a feeling that it will be great. 🙂
January 5th, 2009 at 11:00 AM
I’m looking forward to this, Mike! Leadership, true leadership – can be elusive.
January 5th, 2009 at 12:30 PM
I apologize for being off topic, but I wanted to let you know that you have an award waiting for you. You can get the information on my site.
Congratulations and have a great day!
(Perhaps receiving an award can be viewed as leadership in blogging?)
January 5th, 2009 at 1:03 PM
Thank you for the wonderful introduction. Your posts about the leadership will depict what it means to be the human and therefore knock on the heart of each of us no matter our social status.
January 5th, 2009 at 1:13 PM
This looks like a great series and one I look forward to reading!
-HIB
January 5th, 2009 at 3:37 PM
Thanks everyone for the great comments. Lance you have hit the reason why I’ve waiting so long to do this series. It was much more difficult than I thought so I only hope I have presented leadership in a sense that is not the typical, empire building leadership (which is what I would call that elusive leadership).
I find leadership to be much deeper than that, not easy to learn and something that is completely life changing in so many ways. It feels just writing that that I’m in over my head but I do hope my series can put a perspective on leadership that isn’t the typical superficial set of character traits.
January 5th, 2009 at 4:32 PM
Leadership is a direct approach to nurturing and guiding an office,team or company.
I have to say I compare it to parenthood.I used more of a tough love approach.
I agree totally about taking the responsibly when that “F word” (Failure) comes along.
Awesome article 🙂
Cheers
January 5th, 2009 at 10:14 PM
Hi Mike
Great topic – looking forward to it.
Your piece on leadership and own personality looks very interesting and unique. Looks like I could really use that.
Cheers
Juliet
January 7th, 2009 at 8:38 PM
Yeah Mike, leadership is one of my favorite topics.
I like your point on it’s about people and humility. That’s why leader is so different from manager.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:04 AM
I entirely share your ideas about the direction in which the leader and his people go,that must be progress .
January 15th, 2009 at 11:32 AM
What’s up Mike? I’m looking forward to this series. How do decide on a topic of focus for your blog?
January 26th, 2009 at 1:57 AM
Looks like people are already anticipating this series. I am also looking forward to read it.
February 6th, 2009 at 3:47 AM
I’d say what a coincidence!! 2 days before you started writing about Leadership I decided to buy some books on this matter and I bought those:
1)Introducing LEADERSHIP, by David Pardey.
2)The Connected Leader, by Emmanuel Gobillot.
3)Managing People, by Barry Silverstein.
your article will be a good start for me.
Keep doing the great job.
BR
Husain
February 18th, 2009 at 7:38 AM
Hi Husain
Glad you bought the connected leader I now just have to hope you like it!
Mike this is a great post you must have worked pretty hard at the research thanks for putting together such an impressive mine of information
Emmanuel
February 19th, 2009 at 12:54 AM
Hi Emmanuel,
What a coincidence!!
It’s been an honor to have your comment here.
Actually, what let me add this book to my list is the word “CONNECTED”. Since increasing my connections as well as having leadership skills are one of my goals.
Thanks a lot
BR
Husain
February 21st, 2009 at 7:18 AM
Thanks everyone for the feedback on this series and intro!
@Emmanuel and @Husain – I appreciate your thoughts and “connected”ness here as well. Also, thanks for those books you mentioned, I’ve not read any of them yet. I’ll have some leadership books listed that I’ve reviewed in my February resources list. Thanks for your comments!
February 21st, 2009 at 6:10 PM
At its simplest I define leadership as the ability to make people feel stronger, more capable. It is that form of socialized power rather than the traditional personalized positional power we so often associate with leaders that can be genuinly transformational.
In the connected leader I make the case that only when they connect to the social networks that make up the real organization as opposed to the formal one are leaders able to build resilient and agile organizations. To do so requires trust, meaning and dialogue – three things are are often left behind in our search for effectiveness.
I look forward to reading more of your thoughts.
@husain pleasure is all mine as nice to know someone out there cares!
Best
E
March 22nd, 2013 at 9:37 AM
Im so hapy,im dng mha. i had to take a presentn on leadership, I was searching for introduction .was realy helpful