By Jeff Bell.
Being the head of a business is a great achievement.
Just to be sitting where you are.
You will have learned, you will have worked, you will have earned respect and admiration through a formal qualification, winning the job initially, maybe moving horizontally to other businesses or even other industry sectors as well as vertically through the ranks.
More difficult still, you may have started your own business and grown with it.
Either way, you may have advanced through other formal qualifications and industry recognition and maybe some awards.
You were probably the highest performer at each level, picking up management roles as you went. If you were lucky, you will have received management training and possibly some mentoring too.
Or you may have advanced just by holding tight for long enough, while others have moved around and moved away.
Your journey will have undoubtedly encompassed the fallacy of managing people. Because, as we all [should] know, people cannot be managed. Only resources can be managed.
This is the What? of a career—tangible, measurable things that take you to a destination—the certificate, the qualification, the years of service.
You could take a breath there and say “I’m done, I’ve arrived, this is enough for me.” Achievement will have been its own reward.
Even though you are still in your 40s? So, is that it? Is achievement the be-all and end-all?
Essentially, this is all management thinking.
But when achievement isn’t enough, the time is ripe for success.
Success is about satisfaction, a state of being. As Simon Sinek says, it’s the pursuit of the Why? of your life journey. Much of what you are concerned with now is the intangible.
Success needs leadership.
Leadership is concerned with a cause, a purpose.
While a manager receives their authority based on their role, a leader’s authority is gained through personal interaction and influence.
To make things happen, a leader is more strategically focused—looking 5 years out and even over the horizon about the business and the futures of the people working there. The leader will have a tight relationship with a band of lieutenants—the executive team—who will themselves lead operational teams to bring the vision to reality. Rather than by directing employees through series of tasks, these leaders will inspire and motivate people to drive themselves.
Leaders have highly developed emotional Intelligence, applying it in ways that will excite people to be part of the cause of the business, giving more of themselves and rising beyond their own expectation.
As important as they are in management, processes are less well-defined and more elusive in leadership. The leader needs to read the situation and quickly make decisions on how to respond. There is no handbook for this—there are too many nuances, what-ifs and personal ebbs and flows.
It requires personal experience and the ever-present risk that you may mishandle and forever lose the chances you get.
Looking externally, the leader needs to read all the competitors and the twists and turns in the business’ market, as well as the macroeconomic and political environments.
Having read, the time comes for decisions, actions and adjustments to those already made necessary due to further shifts and changes while the actions were being put into play.
Taking people with you, leading people with confidence means unrelenting pressure. Your point of view—your way of thinking about this pressure will determine whether leaderships for you is a burden or an exciting challenge.
Beyond achievement is success.
That means making a difference to people’s lives. It means getting things done through other people, willingly—this is the essence of leadership. People cannot be managed. They can only be led.
So, how to reach beyond achievement?
How can we develop a success mindset, let alone the appropriate behaviours?
A combination of external coaching and peer insights with teamwork, in a confidential setting—such as the Band of Leaders—can have outstanding results. For as long as you are a decision maker.
If you strive for success, you will be among the 5% of people Jeff Olson talks about in his book The Slight Edge.
That’s what we focus on in BoLA.