How to develop yourself as a leader

Much of my professional life has been spent in trying to persuade organisations of all sizes to grow their own leaders. In that work, as I once heard a US bishop say, I have had enough success to prevent me from despair and enough failure to keep me humble. But from experience and observation I have to tell you that most good leaders emerge and grow in spite of their organisations rather than because of them.
Moreover, you will most probably work for five or six organisations in your career, so none of them will be quite as committed to your long-term development as you are. How then do you develop yourself as a leader?

There is no infallible system or set of systems, I am afraid. You are a unique person, with a unique path of leadership in front of you. Nobody can teach you the way: you have to find it for yourself. If it was an easy path, a lot more people in leadership roles or positions would be showing the skills of leadership as outlined in these pages than is actually the case.

All I can do is share with you some practical suggestions and reflections that you may find useful. I hope that you will find them encouraging in nature, because on a journey we all need inspiration (even to write books!). As the eighteenth-century poet John Collier truly said, ‘Not geniuses, but average men and women require profound stimulation, incentive towards creative effort and the nurture of great hopes.’

Be prepared

The door into leadership has ‘Confidence’ written upon it. You have to want to be a leader. It begins with a willingness to take charge. If you hate the idea of taking responsibility for the three circles, then leadership is not for you. Remain an individual contributor. ‘You cannot put into yourself what God has not put there,’ as a Hungarian proverb says.

Given you fulfil that basic requirement of a willingness to accept responsibility, never write yourself off as a potential leader. It is a question of getting yourself into the right field and then waiting for the right situation. But remember Louis Pasteur’s famous remark that ‘Fortune favours the prepared mind.’ The more prepared you are, the more confident you become. Remember as a leader or leader-to-be always to look confident, even when you may not be feeling it inside. People will tend to take you at face value.

Be proactive

Organisations do have a vested interest in your development as a leader, because they need leaders. Share with them your hopes, intentions and ambitions. You should be seeking above all opportunities to lead, be it leadership of a team or a project group. Experience is a compost heap of successes and failures. Make compost! Without it you can hardly grow as a leader.

Apart from promotion to a leadership role, organisations may well offer you – perhaps in response to a request from yourself – some leadership training. It may be either an internal or an external course. Seize these opportunities with both hands. You will be able to practise your skills and receive useful feedback.

You should, of course, remain constructively critical, for not everything you hear on leadership courses or read in books is both true and practicable. But it is a key opportunity for stimulation and learning. Take any such offers.

Be reflective

Most leaders are action-centred and fairly well immersed in their work, not least because they tend to love it. You do need, of course, to be able to withdraw from time to time and take a ‘helicopter view’ of what is going on. These times of reflection should include your own role performance as a leader. List the things that are going well and identify some specific areas for self-improvement. This process is a natural one in any aspect of our lives – as husbands, wives or partners, for example – but you should upgrade it into a self-learning method. It will yield you a mental list of action points aimed at improving your skills and knowledge as a leader.

Using informal or unstructured feedback is an especially important self-development tool. People are rather like mirrors or ‘social reflectors’: they beam back to us how we are coming across.

In this respect, however, others are imperfect receptors or mirrors, for they do not merely observe you: they also interpret what they see before giving you their feedback – solicited or unsolicited. So you do have to be cautious in using feedback. You may have to unpack the observation from the interpretation. Remember that you are only receiving others’ impressions, not true psychological statements about the inner you.

Always look for a pattern. As the proverb says:  “If one person says that you are a horse,

Smile at them. If two people say that you are a horse, Give it some thought.

If three people say that you are a horse, Go out and buy a saddle.”

Feedback is a bit like the guidance mechanism in a rocket. If you receive it with an open mind, looking for the truth in it, it can guide you on your path to excellence in leadership.

Never be afraid of failure. The path forward will be strewn with the results of your failures as a leader. For the only way you can move from being a good leader – where you are now – to becoming a very good leader, even an excellent or a great one, is by aiming higher. And that is bound to generate shortfalls. But persevere. In the end they may say of you that you are a born leader!

Developing your basic confidence using the well-tested frameworks set out in this article, enlisting the help of your organization as a partner in your leadership development, and making discriminating use of the feedback coming your way from all sources – superiors, colleagues, team members, friends and family – are but three practical ways in which you can improve your leadership. You can doubtless think of others. It does take time, for there is no such thing as instant leadership. Therefore be patient with yourself. Aim to take a step forward each day.

Do something differently tomorrow as a result of reading this article. However small a step it is, you will be on your way. Read this article again at regular intervals: it will help you to keep moving forward. For, as a true leader, like Wordsworth’s ‘Happy Warrior’, you should be one who Looks forward, persevering to the last, From well to better, daily self-surpassed.