Creating leaders not followers is a concept that great leaders adopt when they are helping to successfully support and manage their teams. According to John W. Gardner, “Effective leaders deal not only with the explicit decisions of the day — to approve a budget, announce a policy, discipline a subordinate — but also with that partly conscious, partly buried world of needs and hopes, ideals and symbols.” If you want to become like Gardner’s effective leader who creates other leaders, then you need to ensure that you are leading by example.
3 Defining Factors Of Leaders Who Create Leaders
Leadership styles can change amongst leaders, however the following three beliefs will always be present amongst individuals whom are great leaders.
- Great Leaders Create Leaders Not Followers.
Whether you are a business owner, manager, or community leader, you have a number of daily responsibilities. However, your first responsibility as a leader is to help your team achieve great things. If you want to inspire greatness, then you need to recognize, nurture, and support the best qualities of your team members. As a leader it is your job to help your team members harness their own internal greatness, so that they can go on to inspire other team members to reach new heights of success.
- Leaders Aren’t Born, They Are Developed
A person isn’t born a leader. Individuals turn into leaders by leveraging their own experiences to provide the lessons learned and support needed to motivate a team. As part of this process, great leaders will take responsibility for their actions, tackle challenges head-on, and inspire others to improve their skills in an effort to achieve new goals.
- Leaders Lead By Example.
Someone becomes a follower when they stop believing that there is anything left to learn, when they are unmotivated to push themselves past pre-established limits, and when they lose the will needed to strive for greatness. In order to ensure that you are not creating followers, you must remember that a great leader will lead by example. Your team members must recognize that you are continually learning and striving to improve. By overcoming a challenge and sharing this story with your team you can continue to motivate your team to face their own challenges and most importantly to continue down the road towards becoming the next set of leaders.
Apple And Steve Jobs: The Modern Embodiment Of Good Leadership Qualities
Every leader has a specific style, however all great executive leaders possess the following three attributes that are best embodied by the late Steve Jobs: vision, passion, and the ability to inspire trust. Steve Jobs’ leadership character was something that excited his employees and inspired them to strive for greatness as they created new, innovative Apple products that would one day change the world. It was his ability to inspire greatness, accompanied with his passion for developing new products, and his employees’ trust in his capabilities that helped Jobs become an effective leader who created other leaders. In conclusion, in the words of John W. Gardner, if you want to create leaders not followers, then you must become an effective leader who serves as a model; symbolizes the group’s unity and identity; and retells the stories that carry shared meanings.
