Building Leadership: Choose the Long View

Are you in the business of building and multiplying leaders?

Are you a parent?  A teacher?  A business owner?  Do you have clients or employees or consumers?  Maybe you are a student or a captain on the football team?

Then you are in the business of building leaders.

Intentional or not...

Ready or not...

I'm sure that you pull those around up to the table to teach them complicated leadership skills and train and read and test and train some more?!  Maybe show videos or tell them what to do?

Perhaps, provide them with a required reading list, study guide and then test their knowledge?

Maybe, you say.  Or maybe, you are working like a crazy person shoving people through the rat race?  

You want to build leaders until the work needs done and it gets messy and is chaotic and a struggle...then you rescue the fledgling leaders and cussing out their irresponsibility?  We cannot let them fail...because we would look bad.

Do you find yourself lamenting, "what has happened to leadership in our culture?"  Or do you fear the day when the students who know how to form a line and say o.k. and nod their heads, enter the real world?

My view is, we operate within a sphere of influence.  Some people in our lives look to us to lead while others hope we will follow.

  I believe that what we do comes from who we are and how we think.  

If we believe the people in our lives have the capability and responsibility to make it what they want to make it...we have taken the first step in true leadership development.   If we think it's our job to rescue and take responsibility and fix, we are handicapping those around us.

The key to leadership development?  Choose the long view.

As a very young new Mom, I built on what I was most familiar and experienced with... animals.  

I knew if I was riding the calving pasture after school to check the cows expecting babies; my first role was to stay out of the way!  

Disrupting the natural process, in the name of helping, can cause pain and sometimes death.  

While the struggle of calving and of a new baby calf to get up and begin to eat was hard to watch...it was a necessary exercise.  (Of course, sometimes I had to step in and help but that was a last resort.)  Struggle helped the babies build the bond to their Mom and helped them be strong.  Stepping in too soon left them vulnerable to predators and disease.

While my instinct as a new Mom was to hover, protect, control and nurture this dependent baby, was necessary for a short time, it could not last forever. 

I knew they had to build their strength to push up, sit up, crawl or walk would take struggle and almost continuous bumps and fails.

It was soon apparent my job was to take the long view of life.  My job was to walk beside my children, believe in the people they were becoming and allowing them to fail.  (Which I sooo fail at sometimes.)

It meant having to embrace letting go, so they had to take responsibility for who they were and are becoming.  To move from parenting to coaching so they had the capacity to run their own lives.

Tony Stoltzfus states in his book, Leadership Coaching,  "in order to grow as a leader, a person must gradually increase in ability to take initiative and bear responsibility.  

Our capacity for leadership is directly tied to our capacity for responsibility." 

 www.Coach22.com