LAME Leadership Revisited
My post yesterday about LAME (Look At Me, Everyone) leadership inspired a record-breaking number of retweets (only 4, I know but hey, that’s my record right now), so I thought I would expand on my thoughts a little.
The quote was inspired by a Peruvian student of mine who attended a class I taught at a University in Guatemala. Listening to his comments, I realized I had not convinced him that leadership can be learned.
Data wasn’t going to convince this guy. He stubbornly clung to his argument. One can learn to be a manager, he said (as if a manager was somehow half a leader), but not a leader. In one of those blinding revelations for which I cannot take credit, I realized that his notion of leadership was charismatic leadership (which also proved to me what I had already suspected—he had not been listening to my oh-so-intriguing lecture).
And he was right. You cannot learn to be charismatic.
But
- Charisma is not sufficient. Do you know any charismatic people who are not leaders? Might there be something else necessary?
- Charisma is not necessary. Some leaders are charismatic. That’s not new information, I hope. But most great leaders are, in fact, humble (Jim Collins’ Level 5 Leadership is a good place to start here if you want more information).
You may not have the right stuff to become a world-class, biography-worthy leader. But you can get a lot better than you are now. Unlike common sense, leadership is a series of behaviors, and behaviors are learnable.
Though my student’s efforts to pay attention in class were consistent with the efforts he made to become a better leader, I finally convinced him that leadership is a series of learnable skills. He just never learned many of them.
Learning to lead is humbling work. Most simply don’t make the effort.
junkie, and jet-lag wimp (here is
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