Effective Leadership Management

People follow leaders they know -- leaders who care. People follow and trust leaders with character. People follow and respect leaders who are competent. People follow and approach leaders who are consistent and people follow and admire leaders with commitment.

When he was installed as president of Harvard University in October 2001, Lawrence Summers delivered a speech in which he declared that “in this new century, nothing will matter more than the education of future leaders and the development of new ideas.” (Summers, 2001). In this single sentence the new head of Harvard made at least two important assumptions: that people can be educated in ways that relate to being leaders, and in ways that relate to being good leaders.

This kind of positive thinking explains why leadership education has become a big business. The “leadership industry” is dedicated to the proposition that leadership is a subject that should be studied and a skill that should be taught. To meet the increasing demand for leadership education and training, many experts have emerged. These leadership scholars, teachers, consultants, trainers, and coaches work on the optimistic assumption that to develop leaders is to develop a valuable human resource.

The academic work that supports the leadership generally shares this positive bias. The titles of many of the best and most popular leadership books of the past twenty years send messages that make the point. Targeted primarily at those in the corporate sector, they include Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman’s In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies; (Peters & Waterman, 1982). Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s The Change Masters: Innovation & Entrepreneurship in the American Corporation; (Kanter, 1983). Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus’s Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge; (Bennis & Nanus, 1985). John Kotter’s A Force for Change: How Leadership Differs from Management; (Kotter, 1990). Noel Tichy’s (Tichy & Cohen, 1997). And Jay Conger and Beth Benjamin’s Building The Leadership Engine: How Winning Companies Build Leaders at Every Level; Leaders: How Successful Companies Develop the Next Generation. (Conger & Benjamin, 1999). Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People; (Covey, 1990). Peter F. Drucker’s Management Challenges for the 21^st Century, (Drucker,1999), On the Profession of Management, (Drucker, 1998), and Managing in the Next Society, (Drucker, 2002). Each of these books assumes that people can learn to be leaders and that to be a leader is to be a person of competence and character.

On Monday you’re doing what comes naturally, enjoying your job, running a project, talking and laughing with colleagues about life and work, and gossiping about how better management can be. Then on Tuesday, you are made a manager. You’re a boss and a leader.

Suddenly, everything feels different. Leadership requires distinct behaviors and attitudes, and for many people, they debut with the job. Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.

Without question, there are lots of ways to be a leader. You need to look only as far as the freewheeling, straight-talking Herb Kelleher, who ran Southwest Airlines for thirty years, Microsoft’s quiet innovator, Bill Gates, and Trump Organization, Donald Trump,  to know that leaders come in all varieties.

Leadership is not about getting the money or the fame or the accolades or the status. It is about one person making decisions and giving orders from a lofty perch, pulpit, or vacuum. It is not possible without a leader who genuinely cares about the cause and those behind it. It is not a dictatorship, but a fellowship.

Leadership is about serving, compassion, hard work, dedication, and tireless enthusiasm for what you’re doing and for the people you’re doing it with. Leader challenges, mediates, motivates, communicates and inspires. Sometimes with a shout, sometimes with a whisper, but always by example.

Over the past ten years, during my talks with managers, principals, superintendents, church leaders, university presidents, business owners, hospital administrators, physicians, and chief executive officers of various organizations, leadership issues such as integrity, personality, skills, concepts and character were discussed. In other words, how does a leader improve effectiveness and efficiency?.

Some new managers, for instance said that  “I was just promoted and I’ve never run anything before. How can I be a good leader?” Micromanagement often comes up as an area of concern, as in, “My boss feels as if he has to control everything - is that leadership or babysitting?” Similarly charisma gets a lot of queries; people ask, can you be introverted, quiet, or just plain shy and still get results out of your people?” Are you a weak leader because you are quiet, does not talk very often, and tends to control your emotion? If you have subordinates who are smarter than you how can you possibly appraise them?

These kinds of questions have pushed me to make sense of my own leadership experiences over ten years. Across the decade, circumstances varied widely. I led associations with ten, twenty and over fifty families. I led a health care facility with over two hundred beds as an assistant administrator. Worked as a licensee and administrator of a licensed assisted living facility for over ten years. I managed businesses that were dying and ones that were bursting with growth. There were acquisitions, divestitures, organizational crises, moments of unexpected luck, good economies and bad. And yet, some ways of leading always seemed to work. They became my principles or habits.

Leadership skills and positive mind-se