Your Path to Leadership

Leadership is difficult. If leadership were easy, everyone would be a leader. Taking on the mantle of leadership requires that you help others by leading them on the path to achieving the team’s goals and missions. Leaders often need rally points. A rally point is a guidepost that helps the leader to reassemble and reorganize if the leader or the team becomes lost or dispersed. 

A leadership rally point focuses the leader’s principles, character, competencies, and commitment to achieve a purpose. These rally points are guiding principles that define your leadership. Leaders make the difference between honor or shame, success or failure, and victory or defeat. The best leaders can produce a synergy that transforms teams to be more than the sum of their parts. Without synergy, selfish leaders can destroy teamwork and drive organizations to fail.

Leadership is often demanding, but the challenge offers great rewards. Overcoming setbacks to build and guide a winning team can be an electrifying experience that can inspire others to do much more than they ever thought possible. Winning leaders can improve the well-being of their teammates and increase productivity. 

Raise your leadership awareness through study and seeking opportunities to gain leadership experience. Ultimately, understanding leadership is fundamentally a journey about understanding one’s self. Self-awareness is essential. Service to others, rather than self, improves self-esteem and confidence. There is no greater reward than to unlock your ability to influence, motivate, inspire, and lead people to succeed. In today’s competitive, ever-changing and fast-paced world of business, the companies and teams that survive and prosper over the long term are those which are led by people with character, competence, and commitment who invest in and develop their people. If people are your team’s greatest asset, this approach is logical and smart. 

As I was writing the final chapter of my book, our planet was experiencing the horrible COVID-19 pandemic, a catastrophe where many people questioned how this can happen with all the medical advances humans have made over the centuries. This virus has killed hundreds of thousands, infected millions more, and changed the lives of everyone. Stunned by COVID-19, people are looking for leaders to guide them through these unprecedented and stressful times. 

Fear is the worst virus. Leadership is the cure. Be a leader. Leaders can generate the action, faith, hope and courage to conquer fear. In times of crisis and challenge, leadership is the vital ingredient. 

We will walk through 7 rally points to consider and will provide you with additional tools that can assist you in raising your leadership awareness and sharpening your leadership ability. 

1. Rise.  Leaders are made by learning and experience. Learning how to lead is a journey. You can influence your journey by aggressively seeking knowledge and experience. Volunteer and choose to lead whenever you can to gain experience. Read to lead to gain awareness. Embrace a thirst for knowledge with focus and passion. Write to sharpen your thoughts. Reflect on your actions at the end of each day. 

You will rise to the level of your leadership. Leadership is an art. Leadership matters and teamwork wins. 

• Courage. Fear is a reaction; courage is a decision. Leaders decide on courage. Leadership is action under fear; fear of failure, fear of harm, fear of death. Leaders cycle through the fear faster than others, overcome it, choose courage, and act. Aristotle called courage the first virtue because it makes all of the other virtues possible. Courage is a fundamental prerequisite for effective leadership. Courage is not necessarily heroism. Courage is acted on every day, in small things and large. 

• Character is destiny. Character is a habit, reinforced consistently by small acts that grow into a powerful, personal force of will and example. It is based on principles and values. Principles are the fundamental truths or propositions that serve as the foundation for your system of beliefs, behaviors, and reasoning. When you consistently live by your personal, core values, and when they are congruent with your actions, you move closer to fulfillment. Leaders build trust by matching their words with their deeds. Managers do things right. Leaders do things right and also do the right things. 

• Competence is a decisive rally point on your leadership path. Can you do the work? Are you competent at what you expect others to do? If you lack the knowledge required for the task, find someone to teach you. If you don’t know how, learn how. Study your craft to learn what you are lacking and understand enough to know the difference. 

A competent leader can be effective with a mediocre team, while an ineffective leader can demoralize the best-trained organization. Effective leaders, therefore, understand the importance of working every day to be competent. They learn, practice, and discipline themselves to maximize their time to increase competence in the skills that count.

• Commitment. Overcomes obstacle. Fully commit to your goal and cause. Adapt, improve and overcome. Attitude is the engine of commitment, and this combination trumps everything. Your heart and brain must be in the game. Learn from these leaders and incorporate their lessons into your own life. Just as others have done in the past, you can imbue those you lead with the determination to succeed. Do not make excuses; find a way or make one. By moving forward, you generate options. 

• Example. The leader is the role model for everyone on the team. Wise leaders strive to make every action a good example for their team members to emulate. Actions, attitudes, thoughts, and words must be in alignment. 

Words are impactful, thus leaders who communicate the proper words, at the appropriate time, and most importantly, follow up with action, are pathfinders that people will follow despite difficulty, hardship, and sacrifice. 

All leaders build their own leadership framework, one that is either selfless or selfish. Selfish leaders abound. Selfless leaders are rare. Be a selfless leader who serves the team and raises them to succeed.

• Know yourself and be yourself. A leader strives to be self-aware. Identity your strengths and weaknesses, sharpen your strengths, and compensate for your weaknesses. 

You can be a leader, a pathfinder, and make your own world better. Leadership is the art of influence.

“The one quality that can be developed by studious reflection and practice is leadership.”

– General Dwight D. Eisenhower

The leader influences everyone on the team, for better or for worse. Leaders who take their job seriously, but not themselves, who do not yearn to shine, but strive to reflect, can influence others. A leader who understands that leadership is an art can inspire people to act together as a team to win. Be this kind of leader. 

If you raise your awareness of leadership, you can raise your leadership, and you can raise your life. Ultimately, the choice is yours: shall you be a pathfinder or a path-follower? 

Leaders change the potential energy of a group into the kinetic energy of a team. You can opt to play it safe and follow the group, or take a risk, summon up the courage, and lead your team to explore new frontiers. 

Expectational leaders are pathfinders, Pathfinders learn the path, walk the path, and guide others to the destination. If you take this awareness to heart, your leadership is rising. 

Good luck on this leadership Journey!