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This is a guest post by John Langhorne is with Langhorne Associates. He can be reached at www.langhorneassociates.com. His new book, Beyond Luck: Practical Steps to Navigate the Path from Manager to Leader, is available at www.beyondluck.net.
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With apologies to Justice Potter Stewart. Leadership is like pornography, easy to
English: Official portrait of Justice Potter Stewart. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
recognize but difficult to define. Reviews of leadership show dozens of theories of leadership. Most of them can be described as “walks on water.” This doesn’t help much when you are trying to work on leadership development.
To those of us who have spent decades reading this stuff, the recent and more useful work on leadership shows two major findings. First, there is not a set of characteristics common to leaders. Rather the common characteristic is there is no common characteristic. Second is that leadership is personal and process driven. Perhaps the shortest description is “Identify your basic strengths and deploy those competencies to produce high personal performance. For a more in-depth look on this topic, go to this article.
This means that leadership development is personal development and the most critical element in such development is the ability to see yourself as others percieve you. This capacity has various labels, among them are introspection, insight, self-awareness, self-examination etc.
To develop your leadership skills you must begin by working on yourself, this means changing how you frame your development. Consider this story as an introduction to becoming and being a leader.
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