The Leadership Path

Introduction

In mid-2022, I was asked to give a keynote speech at a local high school for their graduation. It was a different type of speech to the ones I’d done in the past.

I don’t consider myself to be an expert public speaker. In fact, as you’ll see in the chapter titled ‘TED Talks and Other Difficult Conversations’, it’s not something I’ve previously enjoyed. But over time I’ve learned about how good presentations work and practised a lot, and I’ve become quite comfortable with delivering things like keynote presentations at corporate retreats and conferences.

For this high school graduation, I spent some time thinking about what I could say that would be interesting and relevant for young people who were leaving school. I went hunting for some nugget of inspiration or advice that might be relevant to them.

Leadership has long been a topic that’s interested me – and it’s the topic I’ve written about most extensively. But I wasn’t initially sure how I could make my thoughts about leadership relevant to a group of teenagers who were about to embark on their adult life.

Eventually, I started to think about the relevance of leadership to my everyday life, and that got me thinking about whether any of my life lessons had shaped my perspectives on leadership. I see leadership as something that applies in every aspect of life. It’s not restricted to the workplace – it spills over into my family life, my personal relationships, and my sense of self.

I believe there’s a direct correlation between how people manage their personal lives and how they manage their work lives. People who are good managers of their personal lives will often be good managers in the workplace.

I also believe that leadership is something we’re constantly learning. It’s like a permanent apprenticeship, with increasing mastery but with no end point. We learn both from structured learning like school and university, and from the various situations we find ourselves in. How we react to the situations we encounter shapes both our personal worldviews and our leadership focus.

With that in mind, I attempted to take my years of life experience and condense them down into a presentation for the high school graduation. And it was while I was talking to the students that I had a little lightbulb moment: maybe these ideas were worth sharing more widely! That’s how this book came into being.

In this book, I’ve assembled the things that matter to me when I think about leadership. It’s broken down into two sections, each with a distinct focus:

Leading self

Leading teams and organisations.

My hope is that these ideas will help you – no matter where you are on your leadership journey.

This book is about developing a leadership mindset, which is relevant for all types of leadership. It doesn’t matter whether your goal is to lead an organisation, a community group, or your personal relationships. This book provides an approach to leadership that will help you to think about what’s important for you and what you still need to learn.

My hope is that my experiences and thoughts about leadership will help you to reflect on and cultivate your own leadership skills and practice. I don’t set out to develop a comprehensive list of everything that’s important for a leader. Instead, I want to share some of my thoughts and experiences to help you reflect on your own. I hope these ideas will help to make your leadership journey a little easier than it otherwise would be. I’ve included the things I wish I’d known earlier.

Success doesn’t come easy. Often, we learn more from failures than we do from successes. But even knowing that, failures still hurt, and they can still knock your confidence. More often than not, life is a complex combination of little successes and little failures or challenges. These are all learning opportunities, helping you to develop your skills and contributing to your depth of experience.

This book doesn’t describe a path for guaranteed success or great riches. I don’t pretend to have all the answers. All I have is my own thoughts, reflections, and experiences – based on many years of working in both the military and corporate life and based on my studies.

I hope you find something in this book that speaks to you and helps you along your path of developing as a leader. If you finish this book and feel you’ve developed your leadership skills or adapted your thinking – even in the smallest way – then I’ll have accomplished my goal.

SECTION ONE

Leading Self

For us to be able to lead others, we must first be able to lead ourselves. Leading the self is the foundation of all leadership. This doesn’t mean that leaders must live perfect lives – quite the opposite!

Throughout our lives, we are all faced with situations and decisions that challenge us. We won’t always make the right decisions, but we will always have to live with the consequences of these decisions – whether good or bad. Regardless of the outcome, we learn. And through learning, we continuously shore up the foundation of our leadership abilities and make them stronger.

If leading the self is the foundation of all leadership, then the ability to learn and reflect is the mechanism that strengthens the foundation. That is why this section of the book is the largest by far.

The principles listed in this section are by no means a complete list of the attributes that matter when it comes to self leadership. Instead, they’re a compilation of the more prominent things that seem particularly important to me. I’m sure that as I continue my leadership journey, I’ll continue to grow and develop my understanding of these attributes. And I hope you’re able to do the same.

What Is Leadership?

Leadership is one of those things that we recognise but find difficult to clearly define. There is no universally agreed definition of leadership – though common themes emerge from the various definitions I’ve read. In this section, I discuss some of those common themes and explain why I think they’re important.

Leadership is earned: You’re only a leader if you’ve got people who follow you and believe in you. This means that leadership is something that’s granted by the team, not given through a job title or the corner office. If you have a leadership title, but there’s no one following you, you’re not actually a leader.

Leaders inspire others: They motivate people to do things.

Leaders lead by example: They inspire people through their actions. What they do is strongly connected with what they say.

Leaders provide vision.

Leaders rally people around a shared purpose.

Leaders provide guidance and direction.

Leaders help people to remove roadblocks.

Leaders help their team to develop themselves.

Leaders are values led: Great leaders understand that people need to see strong values such as trust, credibility, and integrity.

Leaders demonstrate empathy.

Leaders are resilient: They keep working during difficult times and bounce back quickly after a failure.

Leaders demonstrate passion: Zig Ziglar once said that passion is what people have when they realise their potential.¹

Leaders listen more than they talk: They listen to multiple aspects of conversations, not just the most obvious content.

Leaders are flexible and understanding: They understand that sometimes the team will need to deviate from its path, even if the end objective hasn’t changed. Good leaders have enough flexibility to respond to emerging issues, but not so much flexibility that they lose sight of the objective.

Leaders are fair and impartial: They don’t show favourites within the team; they understand the difference between personal and professional relationships.

Leaders are consistent: A good leader is the same person every day and their team can be confident about how the leader will approach an issue or react to a problem. They’re not moody or unpredictable. Even when things are difficult, good leaders will be consistent in their decision-making and general conduct.

Leaders give praise and accept responsibility: Great leaders are happy to give praise to members of the team. They’re selfless enough to recognise that success isn’t just about them as an individual. But when things go wrong, great leaders accept responsibility. They recognise that no team is perfect, and they accept that they’re the person who is ultimately responsible.

Leaders have coaching qualities: Great leaders recognise strengths in other people and work to develop those strengths. Great leaders don’t feel challenged by having smart and capable people on their team. They actively work to develop the next generation of leaders. They’re not frightened of becoming redundant.

Leaders are human: They make mistakes, just like the rest of us. Great leaders understand this and accept themselves as flawed but committed. The best leaders recognise their mistakes, learn from them, and move on.

Leaders work for their team ahead of the organisation: A great leader recognises that their main responsibility is to the people who are on their team. A true leader doesn’t work for an organisation – they work for the people employed by that organisation. They’re accountable to everyone and feel responsible to everyone. In job interviews for CEO positions, I often ask candidates how many people they worked for in their last organisation. The most promising candidates say they worked for everyone in the organisation. The least promising candidates identify the board.

Endnotes

1. Zig Ziglar (1926–2012) was an American author and motivational speaker, famous for books such as See You at the Top and Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale.

Be Aware of Leadership Myths

There are several myths surrounding leadership – that is, unfounded beliefs people have about certain things that will or won’t happen when they become a leader or accept a leadership role in an organisation. I’d like to expose these beliefs for what they are: unfounded myths that might hamper your leadership potential.

MYTH: Leadership is based on your job title or position in the organisation

It’s easy to think that leadership is a job title or position – that you apply for a leadership position, are successfully appointed to it, and simply become a leader when you weren’t one before. Leadership is not like that. True leadership isn’t a job title or a particular position within an organisation. Instead, leadership is based on how you interact with people – how you behave and how you treat others. Leadership is a quality that develops over time. It’s something that others recognise in you. And while leaders typically hold senior positions in an organisation, that’s not necessarily the case.

Sometimes there’s a disconnect between the leadership skills required by a role and the leadership skills demonstrated by the individual in that role. Senior roles can be filled by people with no idea about leadership. And sometimes, true leaders are found working in junior roles.

MYTH: You can’t lead from a junior position

It’s easy to assume that people in junior positions are always followers. Perhaps they don’t have the skill or ambition to become leaders and are happy to stay in a junior role. Or perhaps they’re inexperienced, and their leadership potential is still developing – leadership is in their future. But this belief is based on a myth: it’s a myth that it’s impossible to lead from a junior position. Anyone, in any position, can demonstrate leadership.

Of course, in some organisations, people in junior positions who have leadership potential may be too scared to display their leadership skills. They may believe they won’t be trusted or listened to. They may believe they don’t have a right to speak out. But leadership skills and attributes can be demonstrated by anyone, and having people in junior positions who display leadership skills can be a great asset to an organisation. A useful book about this topic is The 360 Degree Leader, by John Maxwell.² Maxwell explores the idea of leading from any position within an organisation. Leadership isn’t just about leading down through the hierarchy. There’s also a valid place for leading up and for leading to the side.

MYTH: When you’re in a senior position, everyone will do what you say

If you’re working in a senior or leadership position in an organisation, you may reasonably expect that everyone will do what you ask them to do. And of course, it’s mostly true. If a senior manager asks for something to be done, it typically gets done.

But it’s important to keep in mind that