Follow the Leader:: A Life Lesson…
In Leadership, people follow the leader far more than they follow a vision statement, strategy, or bottom line.
When it comes to leading our organizations, are vision statements, flow charts, spreadsheets and strategies important? Yes, but at the end of the day, what too few executives fail to remember is that…
Which challenges every one of us who are in a leadership position with 3 questions:
Let’s be honest for a second…
Can your team trust you? Does your team really believe that you have their best interest and the best interest of the organization in mind when you’re making leadership decisions? Or do they know that we’re secretly in it for our own gain?
People follow people they can trust. After all, if they take a paycheck from you, then on some level they’re trusting the well-being of their family to you. Leadership is a trust. And people follow people they can trust.
In our day and age, it’s not enough for people to just follow a vision statement or a set of company core values, people want to know the leader they’re willingly following. And here in lies the risk.
As leaders, we must risk opening up and letting people in. The people we lead want to know us. How we think, what we’re feeling, how we process information and how we make decisions. The more our people can know us, the more likely they will be to follow our leadership.
At the end of the day, people want to follow someone that they want to be like. Of course every person wants to be unique in their personality, their style, etc. But…
And let’s be honest, none of us will follow long-term, someone that we don’t want to be like on the inside.
When we get to know someone more deeply and don’t like what we see, over time, we’ll begin to pull away from that person. So the challenge for us as leaders is this: Am I living my life and leading in such a way that people will want to emulate what they see? At the end of the day, people follow leaders they can emulate.
As leaders, we don’t have to know everything, but we must know ourselves, because people will follow us far more than they follow our vision statement, strategy, or bottom line.
Application Question: How am I doing at leading myself well?
Great Post! I agree! As they say, can't separate the messenger from the message. I heard Josh McDowell say that we have learned to “separate belief from behavior”. He further said that kids are quick to pick up on the hypocrisies of the parents (and we all have 'em). I believe that's true even in leadership. People are looking for leaders who are for about more than just lip-service, but are about life-service!
I would say your title has another message hidden in it, too. As you well know, we must be led if we intend to lead. If we cannot model biblical submission/ teachability for those who are following our lead, we certainly cannot expect anything but the same in return. As the Roman Centurion humbly submitted to Jesus, “For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me.”