Don’t we step into a leadership role any time we work as part of a team? I have involved with so many projects, and each of them required coordination among team members.
You represent your organization in front of a customer, and you need leadership.
When you explain your prospects how your products help them, you are in a leadership role.
You explain your superiors at work how a certain change is required, you use put your personal leadership to use.
Do you participate in a meeting, or a group discussion about any goal? Then, you are a leader as you bring your ability to think and your experience and stories for benefit of all.
You are a leader as part of your family at home.
Leadership requires relationships, people skills, passion, vision, team work, emotional intelligence, managing risk, finding new opportunities and markets, managing expectations …etc so many different skills. And yet some people make it look so easy. I am always on look out for ideas and things to do that would make me an effective team player.
I got a few very useful nuggets from Phil Dourado’s book that I read last week – The 60 Second Leader: Everything You Need to Know About Leadership, in 60 Second Bites.
Here are a few ideas from Phil’s book along with my personal experiences and thoughts.
- The primary purpose of leadership is to create more leaders, not followers. Put people in a position to make decisions and drive their course of action. That is because the leadership is required at all the levels and not just top.
- Become a leader to achieve something, and not be someone. As Rudy Juliani said, “Be absolutely clear about what you stand for.”
- Make sure your crew is cutting trees in the right jungle. Overall direction and vision are extremely important for leadership.
Keys to success
- Connect with people. Reach out. Take genuine interest in them.
- Galvanize your mission with a compelling story about yourself, your organization. Make people part of it. John F Kennedy once visited NASA head quarters, and asked a janitor, “And what do you do here?” He replied, “I am helping to put a man on the moon sir.”
- Ask questions, don’t give instructions.
How do you become a good leader?
- Do what you are supposed to do well, no matter who you are, where you are. Never wait for a position, or status to start something. Your mission makes you leader, and not other way round.
- Just do it. Dive in. Leadership is like swimming – you can’t learn it by reading about it.
- Think of failure as an event, and not a person. Learn from failures. But, even if you don’t learn from your failures, get up and go on after every set back.
What do you to be effective as part of the team? I would love to learn from your journey as well.