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Andy Grove (Intel) goes into the classroom several times a year to teach Intel managers how to lead in an industry in which the product (microprocessors) doubles in capacity every eighteen months. If you show up on the right day every couple of weeks at GE's Crotonville Leadership Development Institute, you would find Jack Welch teaching.
He spends 30% of his time on leadership development, spends an enormous amount of time giving speeches to employees and taking the hot seat in question-answer sessions. As an executive director in Zenith Bank, you would find Nigeria's Tina Vukor-Quarshie at the Skills Development Centre every weekend training different categories of employees from security officers to top management. As an executive director in Platinum Bank, she was very involved in training marketing officers and utility personnel from Tuesday through Saturday from 7am - 10am on a wide range of subjects.
Some companies don't do a good job developing leaders because they don't try very hard. some have good intentions, but they don't just commit the time and resources needed to do it. Others like to talk about it but actively discourage it by punishing people who dare to think independently. And still others have committed full amount of time and resources to elaborate well-enforced human resources development processes but they have been largely taught by consultants and academicians who aren't leaders themselves. So what they have tended to produce are very articulate managers who are masters of the latest "business-speak" and the fads and fashions of management gurus. But they end up acting like bureaucrats and civil servants, not leaders.
As an effective leader, you must have a teachable point of view. The standard definitions of "leadership" generally state that leaders are people who motivate one or more other people to do a specific thing. This involves teaching those other people to see the desirability of reaching that specific goal and usually showing them how to get there. For me, playing a role in helping people awaken their potential is a deeply fulfilling thing to do. My teaching is usually the result of deep reflection about what has allowed me to be successful. I am an electrical engineer and an accountant in the making but I have always had an urge to teach, to share with others what I have figured out from myself. This article and many others is the result of the gravitational pull of that same urge. Simply put, if you aren't teaching you aren't leading!
What I know today about leaders and leadership has come from a combination of reading, observation, advice of expert practitioners and the personal experience of doing it. As diverse as leaders I know about are in terms of their background, age, occupation and accomplishment, they are in accord on three basic points. First, they all agreed that leaders are made, not born, and made more by themselves than by an external means. They are self-selected and self-made. They have been able to figure out for themselves how to dream dreams, enthuse others with their dreams and then make them happen.
Second, they all agreed that leaders have the ability to fully and freely express themselves. They have no interest in proving themselves by an abiding interest in expressing themselves. This difference is critical because it is the difference betwwen being driven as too many are today, and leading, as too few do. Third, they all agreed that leaders refuse to be deployed by others and choose to deploy themselves fully. Leaders have been described as "monomaniacs on a mission". They seize the initiative. Waiting for permission to begin is not characteristic of leaders; acting with a sense of urgency is.
Leadership is undoubtedly the most vital variable in the business equation for success because it is the variable that harmonises every other variable. I am talking about intellectual visionary, inspiratioal and transformational leadership. Your success as a leader can be judged by how the people you lead are doing. When confused as to how you're doing as a leader, find out how the people you are leading are doing. You'll know the answer? My favourite quote during any of my training sessions on leadership is "If you think you are a leader, look behind you. If there is no one following, then you are just taking a walk".
Teaching, I'm convinced, is at the heart of leading and it is through teaching that leaders lead others. Leading is not dictating specific behaviour. It is not issuing orders and demanding compliance. Leadership is the capacity to get things done through others by changing people's mindset and energising them into action. Successful leadership must accomplish this through ideas and values and teaching is how ideas and values get transmitted.
To be an effective teacher, one needs to be a world-class learner and then pass on the learning and energise others also to be teachers. Learning, teaching and leading are inextricably intertwined. Leaders engender leadership traits in others and teach others to be leaders. Great leaders make teaching truly part of their company's genetic code of leadership and one of the primary tools that they use is to lead. Great leaders are great teachers not only because they know what they think but also because they take the time to organise their thoughts in ways so that they can communicate them clearly. Some of the seasoned leaders I know of that have teaching hard-wired into their everyday activity are Jack Welch (formerly of General Electric), Andy Grove (Intel), Larry Bossidy (formerly of Allied Signal but now Honeywell), and Fola Adeola (formerly of Guaranty Trust Bank). We all have our own styles but the common denominator is very simple: We all personally invest time and emotional energy in teaching and expect all other leaders to do the same thing. Teaching is a way of life for us.
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THE LEADERS AND THE GUTTERS Tochi Ejiofor | Nov 30th, 2003
The truth is that the real leaders are born and not made. They could still be lying low in the gutters, where they came from. I want the world to know that they are watching us everyday.
I believe that the world is educated enough to make a choice of its future, for ourselves, our children and our children's children. Now, the choice is a simple one; to give these true leaders a chance to come out or not. Don't ask me who these leaders are if you have ever seen the CHILDREN.
Tochi Ejiofor (tochiejiofor@yahoo.com) 2348034525295
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