The Novelty of Effective Leadership From the Front Porch

Chapter One – Wisdom and Effective Leadership Wisdom is a main ingredient of effective leadership. There are books that will tell you that leadership is fundamentally one thing: The ability to influence others. This is true to a degree, but there are layers of wisdom, a combination of knowledge and experience, and a few other ingredients that go into building an effective leader. The word leadership is similar to, in its function, the word reinforcement; there are positive and negative choices to both. Just like you can use positive stimuli to encourage behavior to be repeated, you can also use negative stimuli to encourage behavior to be repeated. In fact, though the theories are sound on using positive reinforcement rather than negative, people still tend to beat a dead horse. Leadership is the same way. You can choose to become a leader that influences others to be self serving to a person, sex, institution, organization, country, race, religion etc., or you can choose to be a leader that influences others to do good and excellent works for other people despite the fact that an individual or a group is not a part of your “group.” Therefore, the question is not whether you can become a leader, because you can fundamentally learn the skills required to influence others. The question is more about what type of leader you will choose to be. I hope you want to be a world class leader. I hope that you choose positive, effective leadership rather than negative leadership, but the choice, of course, is your own. In any case, I want to share with you something about being a manager, which is not exactly, in and of itself, synonymous with effective leadership while you think about which type of leader you want to be. A manager is a person who has organizational authority to tell others what to do. This person usually has a badge with a title. It has been my experience that good managers understand the projects that need to be managed. They can often be “task oriented,” rather than “people oriented.” They can be, but generally are not, creative and have little or no visionary abilities. They usually ensure projects get done and tasks are on time. Leaders love them, because they will pay attention to little details and encourage forward movement in the right direction. They are by and large smart and effective. Many are also very “political,” (which can, at times, be synonymous with organizational bully {OB}). They seem to say yes no matter the job. We can tell you from the front porch that “yes” people are a dime a dozen. It takes great skills to stand up to your boss or organization when you are passionate about something when everyone else remains complicit. Ineffective manager’s behaviors are similar to good managers except an ineffective manager is lost when they do not understand the task or the moving parts to a project. A good manager can quickly become an ineffective manager given the circumstances. Since they are not generally people persons and lack leadership skills, they tend to use coercion to get tasks accomplished through others or end up doing the tasks themselves when their direct reports (staff) drop off fed up. Many managers, good or ineffective, have very little to no ability to influence others without pulling rank. Most good managers learn how to encourage or motivate others, while many ineffective managers leave that to the leaders in a given organization or institution. This then, becomes the distinction between ineffective managers, effective managers, good leaders and great leaders. An ineffective manager does not meet deadlines and may or may not deliver favorable results on a consistent basis. Sometimes this happens due to mistakes, bad choices and or lack of training. An effective manager meets both deadlines and consistently provides positive project outcomes. Some managers accomplish project management by means of leadership (good managers) and some do so by bullying (ineffective managers). Good, effective leaders on the other hand: 1. Have the ability to influence others; they give trust and work to gain the trust of others by being self-aware, a student of their and others’ behaviors, listen; give feedback and recommendations in a respectful and dignified manner. 2. Study leadership, history, current events and relationship building/ people and encourage others to grow both personally and professionally. 3. Are risk takers, yet display wisdom and understanding. 4. Are visionary and are big picture thinkers. 5. Are creative. 6. Open to diverse lines of thinking, displaying consistently evolving emotional intelligence (this distinguishes them from bad leaders). 7. Hold themselves, as well as others accountable (this distinguishes them from bad leaders). They display a high degree of integrity. They disciple, rather than punish. 8. Take responsibility for ill results, but share credit or give credit fully to others for positive results (this distinguishes them from bad leaders) 9. People would willingly follow them whether the leader had any authority or not as they tend to engender trust. 10. They choose the right people who are already passionate and motivated to do the excellent thing. They also help the wrong people for a job decide to find the right job for them. Great leaders are good leaders and are necessarily good project managers. First we have to be good, effective leader.