🔒Leadership

We talk of leadership and imagine scenes of huge roaring crowds. Rippling banners and uplifted trumpets. Adulation. No rejection. No resistance. No nasty sniping.

Real leadership doesn't look like that, which is why we see so little of it.

If you're actually going to lead, be ready. Leadership, real leadership, is mostly grubby, grinding, endlessly demanding of time, patience and effort. Then, in the midst of long stretches of unnoticed, unrewarded labor, unexpectedly there arises the moment at which great success is achieved . . . or great disgrace is earned.

Basically, your extraordinary personal investment will be taken for granted.

You can't be sufficiently disciplined and adequately tolerant to invest all that time in supporting, guiding, educating and persuading people into a strong constituency of productive followers unless you are a leader.

You can't — at the same time — be sufficiently gifted and smart, properly alert, sensitive and politically attuned to know when your moment has come … unless you're a leader.

Motivation plays a key role in whether you are meant for leadership. If you love authority, you're out. Your followers will hate you. If you enjoy the limelight, you will be regarded as a performer, a lightweight. Your employees may love to watch you, but they won't follow you. If you declare yourself a leader, you're a joke — you cannot put the mantle on yourself.

If you expect appreciation, you're really missing the point. When, and if, appreciation comes, it's a surprise because it never was part of your motivation.

So if you understand the challenges and are willing to make the investment, how do you become a leader?

You lead by exceeding expectations, beginning in the most mundane ways. Wherever your project, your organization, your people are, that's where you are. You attend an awful lot of meetings. You tell people, early on and all along, what they need to know. You have and you demonstrate respect. You ask real questions, and you listen intently when people speak. You reward significant input, and you ignore distraction and misdirection.

This all takes time. Most of that time is low-octane investment of your presence and attention. It is draining. You don't need to have all the answers, but you need to be a steadying, reinforcing backbone of the process. Leaders are alert, committed and always on message.

You need to do your homework so you can answer questions and dissolve objections. You must offer ideas and solutions while empowering people to think and act in ways to consciously engage their own initiatives.

And this job requires what Peter Drucker called "the 'C' word — courage." No meaningful decision, he said, is easy. When it truly matters, there is going to be pain and a price to be paid, no matter which way you go. People are going to be hurt and they're going to be angry. At you.

Probably no one will blame you if you dodge the firestorm. But, if you do, they will never think of you as a leader.

Be honest with yourself. Do you really want to be a leader, or would you find satisfaction in a solid worker-bee slot in your professional life? There's nothing wrong with that; in fact, that's where most of us will provide good value throughout our working careers.

But if you yearn for the personal rewards of successful leadership, on the other hand, you have some decisions to make. Identify what is important to you, publicize it then go after it, stubbornly.

Understand that it will take discipline and effort. The skill sets to create a successful leader are both internal to your daily behavior and observed in your moment-to-moment interactions with all the people you encounter.

You must study yourself and others to identify the specific needs, then you have to practice and perfect the behaviors and meet the needs. If someone comes up with a good idea, you, as the leader, recognize the initiative and encourage the originator to flesh out the idea. You ask meaningful, constructive questions and involve others as appropriate.

If the proposal is sound, you convince the group to adopt and implement it. You pay attention to its progress to keep the process moving, but you don't take over. You see it as a growth opportunity for everyone involved, and you act that way — as a leader.