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Overview
Twenty-five years ago, John Maxwell published the book that forever transformed how people think about leadership. Developing the Leader Within You showed that leaders are made, not born, and helped more than two million people in the process. Maxwell now returns to this classic text to include the insights and practices he has learned in the decades since that work first appeared.
In this completely revised and expanded workbook, based on the book of the same title, you will receive everything you need to take a significant step in your leadership journey, along with in-depth activities designed to help develop the leader within you. If you complete all the readings and exercises and answer all the questions, you will be amazed at how your influence, effectiveness, and impact will increase in such a short time. And if you’re going through this process with a group, you’ll enjoy the challenging discussion questions at the end of each lesson so you can explore the ideas in even greater depth.
With insights gleaned from his forty-plus years of leadership success, Maxwell will especially help readers explore the value of:
- Achieving success using the Five Levels of Leadership
- Developing people—a leader’s most appreciable assets
- Identifying and solving problems and preventing their recurrence
- Defining and articulating a vision for your organization
- Building on the leadership skills you already possess
No matter the arena in which you find yourself called to serve—family, business, or nonprofit—the principles Maxwell shares in this workbook will help you develop the vision, value, influence, and motivation required of successful leaders.
Designed for use with Developing the Leader Within You 2.0 (9780718073992), sold separately.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780310094074 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperChristian Resources |
| Publication date: | 10/02/2018 |
| Edition description: | 25th Anniversary Edition |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Sales rank: | 116,674 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
LESSON ONE
THE DEFINITION OF LEADERSHIP: INFLUENCE
Why has leadership become so important? Because people are recognizing that becoming a better leader changes lives. Everything rises and falls on leadership. The world becomes a better place when people become better leaders. Developing yourself to become the leader you have the potential to be will change everything for you. It will add to your effectiveness, subtract from your weaknesses, divide your workload, and multiply your impact.
Why Many People Don't Develop as Leaders
More and more people recognize the value of good leadership, yet not very many work to become better leaders. Why is that? Despite the widespread prevalence of leadership books and classes, many people think leadership isn't for them. Maybe it's because they make one of these assumptions:
I'm Not a "Born Leader," So I Can't Lead
Leaders are not born. Well, okay, they're born. I've never met an unborn leader. (And I wouldn't want to.) What I really mean is that your ability to lead is not set at birth. While it's true that some people are born with more natural gifts that will help them lead at a higher level, everyone has the potential to become a leader. And leadership can be developed and improved by anyone willing to put in the effort.
A Title and Seniority Will Automatically Make Me a Leader
I believe this kind of thinking was more common in my generation and that of my parents, but it can still be seen today. People think they need to be appointed to a position of leadership, when the reality is that becoming a good leader requires desire and some basic tools. You can have a title and seniority and be incapable of leading. And you can have no title or seniority and be a good leader.
Work Experience Will Automatically Make Me a Leader
Leadership is like maturity. It doesn't automatically come with age. Sometimes age comes alone. Tenure does not create leadership ability. In fact, it's more likely to engender entitlement than leadership ability.
I'm Waiting Until I Get a Position to Start Developing as a Leader
This last assumption has been the most frustrating to me as a teacher of leadership.
When I first started hosting leadership conferences, people would say, "If I ever become a leader" — meaning if they were ever appointed to a leadership position —" then maybe I'll come to one of your seminars." What's the problem? As legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said, "When opportunity comes, it's too late to prepare." If you start learning about leadership now, not only will you increase your opportunities, but you'll also make the most of them when they arrive.
How Will You Develop the Leader Within You?
The bottom line is that if you've never done anything to develop yourself as a leader, you can start today. And if you have already begun your leadership journey, you can become a better leader than you already are by intentionally developing the leader within you.
What will that take? That's the subject of this workbook. These ten lessons contain what I consider to be the ten essentials for developing yourself as a leader.
Let's start with the most important concept of the ten: influence. After more than five decades of observing leaders around the world and many years of developing my own leadership potential, I have come to this conclusion: Leadership is influence. That's it — nothing more, nothing less. That's why my favorite leadership proverb is "He who thinketh he leadeth and hath no one following him is only taking a walk." For you to be a leader, someone has to be following you. I love what James C. Georges, founder and chairman of the PAR Group, said in an interview I read years ago: "What is leadership? Remove for a moment the moral issues behind it, and there is only one definition: Leadership is the ability to obtain followers."
Anyone — for good or ill — who gets others to follow is a leader. That means Hitler was a leader. (Did you know that TIME named Hitler their Man of the Year in 1938 because he had greater influence on the world than anyone else?) Osama bin Laden was a leader. Jesus of Nazareth was a leader. So was Joan of Arc. Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy were leaders. While the value systems, abilities, and goals of all these people were vastly different, each of them attracted followers. They all had influence.
Influence is the beginning of true leadership. If you mistakenly define leadership as the ability to achieve a position instead of the ability to attract followers, then you will go after position, rank, or title to try to become a leader. But this type of thinking results in two common problems. First, what do you do if you attain the status of a leadership position but experience the frustration of having no one follow you? Second, what if you never achieve the "proper" title? Will you keep waiting to try to make a positive impact on the world?
My goal with this workbook is to help you understand how influence works, and use it as the starting point for learning how to lead more effectively. Each lesson is designed to help you acquire skills and abilities that further develop you as a leader. With the addition of each skill set, you will become a better leader.
Insights About Influence
Before we get into the particulars of how influence with others works and how to develop it, let's nail down a few important insights about influence:
1. Everyone Influences Someone
My friend Tim Elmore, the founder of Growing Leaders, once told me that sociologists estimate that even the most introverted individual will influence ten thousand other people during his or her lifetime. Isn't that amazing? Every day you influence others. And you are influenced by others. That means no one is excluded from being both a leader and a follower.
If you are observant, you can discover the prominent leader of any group. Titles and positions don't matter. Just watch the people as they gather. As they work to resolve an issue or make a decision, whose opinion seems most valuable? Who is the person others watch the most when the issue is being discussed? Who is the one with whom people quickly agree? Whom do others defer to and follow? Answers to these questions point you to who the real leader is in a particular group.
You have influence in this world, but realizing your potential as a leader is your responsibility. If you put effort into developing yourself as a leader, you have the potential to influence more people and to do so in more significant ways.
2. We Don't Always Know Who or How Much We Influence
One of the most effective ways to understand the power of influence is to think about the times you have been touched in your life by a person or an event. Think about the people who influenced you in a powerful way, or the little things that meant a lot to you. I can point to the influence of a camp I attended as a youth and how it helped determine my career choice. My seventh-grade teacher, Glen Leatherwood, began to stir a sense of calling in my life that I continue to live out today in my seventies. When my mother bought bubble lights for our family Christmas tree, there was no way for her to know that they would evoke the feeling of Christmas in me every year. The affirming note I received from a professor in college kept me going at a time when I was doubting myself. My list is endless. So is yours.
We are influenced every day by so many people. Sometimes small things make big impressions. We have been molded into the people we are by those influences. And we mold others, often when we least expect it. Author and educator J. R. Miller said it well: "There have been meetings of only a moment which have left impressions for life, for eternity. No one of us can understand that mysterious thing we call influence ... yet out of every one of us continually virtue goes, either to heal, to bless, to leave marks of beauty; or to wound, to hurt, to poison, to stain other lives."
3. The Best Investment in Tomorrow Is to Develop Your Influence Today
What's your greatest investment possibility for the future? The stock market? Real estate holdings? More education? All of these things have value. But I would argue that one of the best investments you can make in yourself is to develop your influence. Why? Because if you have the desire to accomplish something, you will be in a better place to do it if others are willing to help.
In the book Leaders, Warren G. Bennis and Burt Nanus say, "The truth is that leadership opportunities are plentiful and within reach of most people." That's true in businesses, volunteer organizations, and social groups. If you're an entrepreneur, those opportunities are multiplied exponentially. The question is, will you be ready for them when they come? To make the most of them, you must prepare for leadership today and learn how to cultivate influence and use it positively to make a difference.
The Five Levels of Leadership
When I began studying influence, I also drew upon my own leadership experience and what I observed in leaders I respected and admired. What I discovered is that influence can be developed in five stages. I turned those stages into a tool that I call the 5 Levels of Leadership. It provides a model of influence that can help you better understand the dynamics of leadership, and it also creates a road map you can follow to develop influence with others. I've been teaching this model of leadership for more than thirty years, and I can't count the number of people it's helped. I hope it helps you in the same way it has others.
Take a look at the graphic of the 5 Levels. As you work to develop influence with others, your goal is to earn each level and add it to the dynamics of your relationship with others. Most of the time that occurs in order from Level 1 up through the levels. However, that's not always true. You can develop more than one level simultaneously.
Let's examine each of the levels. You'll quickly get a handle on how they work.
Level 1: Position
The most basic entry level of leadership is the Position level. Why is this the lowest level? Because Position represents leadership before a leader has developed any real influence with the people being led. In generations past, people would follow leaders simply because they possessed a title or position of authority. But that is not very common today in American culture. People will follow a positional leader only as far as they have to.
When I took my first job as a leader in 1969, people were respectful of me. They were kind. But I had no real influence. I was twenty-two. They could see how little I knew, even if I couldn't. I found out how little influence I had when I led my first board meeting. I started the meeting with my agenda in hand. But then Claude started to talk. He was just an old farmer, but everyone in the room looked to him for leadership. Whatever he said held the most weight. Claude wasn't pushy or disrespectful. He didn't do a power play. He didn't have to. He already had all the power. He just wanted to get things done.
It's very clear to me now that in that first job, I was a leader living on Level 1. All I had going for me at first was my position — along with a good work ethic and a desire to make a difference. I learned more on Level 1 than at any other time in my early years of leading. I figured out pretty quickly that a title and position won't get a person very far in leadership.
People who have been appointed to a position may have authority, but that authority doesn't exceed their job description. Positional leaders have certain rights. They have the right to enforce the rules. They have the right to tell people to do their jobs. They have the right to use whatever power they have been granted. But real leadership is more than having granted authority Position is a good place to start in leadership, but it's a terrible place to stay.
Anyone who never leads beyond Position depends on territorial rights, protocol, tradition, and organizational charts. These things are not inherently negative — unless they become the basis for authority. They are poor substitutes for leadership skills.
If you've been in a leadership position for any length of time, how do you know whether you are relying too much on your position to lead? Here are three common characteristics of positional leaders:
Positional Leaders Look for Security Based on Title More Than Talent
There's a story about a private during World War I who saw a light in his trench on the battlefield and shouted, "Put out that match!" Much to his chagrin, he discovered that the offender was General "Black Jack" Pershing. Fearing severe punishment, the private tried to stammer out an apology, but General Pershing patted him on the back and said, "That's all right, son. Just be glad I'm not a second lieutenant."
The higher people's level of ability and the resulting influence, the more secure and confident they become. A new second lieutenant might be tempted to rely on his rank and use it as a weapon. A general doesn't need to.
Positional Leaders Rely on Their Leader's Influence Instead of Their Own
Baseball Hall of Famer Leo Durocher, who managed the Giants from 1948 to 1955, was once coaching at first base in an exhibition game played at the United States Military Academy at West Point. During the game, a noisy cadet kept shouting at Durocher, trying to get under his skin.
"Hey, Durocher," he hollered. "How did a little squirt like you get into the major leagues?"
Durocher shouted back, "My congressman appointed me!"
Just because people may be appointed to a position of authority doesn't automatically mean they can develop influence. Because some positional leaders can't, and possess no influence or authority of their own, they rely on the authority of their boss or the person who appointed them. Anytime they fear that their team members won't follow them, they're quick to say, "We need to do this because the boss says so." That kind of borrowed authority can wear thin after a while.
Positional Leaders Can't Get People to Follow Them Beyond Their Defined Authority
A common reaction of followers to positional leaders is to do only what's required and nothing more. If you've observed leaders asking people to do something extra, stay late, or go out of their way, only to have the people refuse or say, "That's not my job," then you might be seeing the results of positional leadership. People who define their leadership by position will find themselves in a place where people will do only what's required based on the rights granted by that position. People do not become committed to vision or causes led by positional leaders.
If any of these three characteristics describe you, then you may be relying too much on your position, which means you need to work harder at cultivating influence. Until you do, the team you lead will have low energy and you will feel as if every task is a major ordeal. To change that, you'll need to start focusing on the next level of leadership.
Level 2: Permission
My friend and mentor Fred Smith says, "Leadership is getting people to work for you when they are not obligated." That is the essence of the second level of leadership, Permission.
Leaders who remain on the Position level and never develop their influence often lead by intimidation. They are like the chickens that Norwegian psychologist Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe studied in developing the "pecking order" principle that is commonly used to describe all kinds of groups. Schjelderup-Ebbe found that in any flock, one hen usually dominates all the others. This dominant hen can peck any other without being pecked in return. The second in the order can peck all the others except the top hen. The rest are arranged in a descending hierarchy, finally ending with one hapless hen who can be pecked by all but who can peck no one else.
In contrast, Permission is characterized by good relationships. The motto on this level could be written as, "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." True influence begins with the heart, not the head. It flourishes through personal connections, not rules and regulations. The agenda on this level is not pecking order; it's people connection. Leaders who succeed on this level focus their time and energy on the needs and desires of the individuals on their team. And they connect with them.
The classic illustration of someone who didn't do this is Henry Ford in the early days of the Ford Motor Company. He wanted his laborers to work like machines, and he attempted to control their interactions outside of work with rules and regulations. And his focus was totally on his product, the Model T, which he believed was the perfect car, and which he never wanted to change. When people started asking for it in colors other than black, he famously responded, "You can have any color you want as long as it's black."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Developing the Leader within You 2.0 Workbook"
by .
Copyright © 2018 John Maxwell.
Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface to the 2.0 Edition, 5,
Acknowledgments, 7,
Lesson 1: The Definition of Leadership: Influence, 9,
Lesson 2: The Key to Leadership: Priorities, 37,
Lesson 3: The Foundation of Leadership: Character, 61,
Lesson 4: The Ultimate Test of Leadership: Creating Positive Change, 81,
Lesson 5: The Quickest Way to Gain Leadership: Problem Solving, 99,
Lesson 6: The Extra Plus in Leadership: Attitude, 123,
Lesson 7: The Heart of Leadership: Serving People, 145,
Lesson 8: The Indispensable Quality of Leadership: Vision, 161,
Lesson 9: The Price Tag of Leadership: Self-Discipline, 179,
Lesson 10: The Expansion of Leadership: Personal Growth, 199,
What's Next?, 217,
Notes, 221,
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