Great question, isn’t it? Especially if you are someone who really wants to move into a leadership role. But it is also a great question for anyone who has found himself or herself in a leadership role and suddenly realized that personality will only take you so far.
One place where that happens a lot is not at a business, it is not on a sports team, it is at home. Traditionally, at least in America, the leader in the family home is the father. But what if you are a father and don’t know how to lead your family? What if the father is now missing? How do you learn to be the leader? More to the point, how do you even know how to lead? AI is not the answer.
It could be that you are someone who has done a great job at work, and now you are being promoted to a managerial position, which is basically a leadership role. What do you do now?
The answer in both of those cases is almost always twofold: You remember how someone else led you, and you learn “on the job.” Perhaps it is no longer a thing, but back in the day there were actually jobs where the training to do it only happened after you were in the job. That was intentional, because the thinking was that those jobs could not be taught, they could only be learned through OJT — On the Job Training.
Imagine this: Just before they put you on a gurney and wheel you to the OR to have your broken arm (a compound fracture!) repaired, the doctor comes by to ask if you have any questions. You have one, which is, “How many of these have you done?” And the doctor says, “I fixed a broken collarbone once, but this is my first arm job and my first compound fracture. I’m learning through OJT because it’s a lot cheaper than medical school.”
And your next question for the doctor is….?
Most leaders can relate
The reality is that only a very small percentage of people who find themselves in leadership roles, whether in the family or at work or even on a committee or in a club, have any formal training in leadership. We often quote Coach K (the famous basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski), who said leadership is “the least taught occupation” in the world, and yet it transcends all other occupations.
In addition to observing others lead and learning on the fly, people who want to learn how to lead often read books about leadership. I did that myself, and still do. I haven’t counted them in a while, but I probably have more than 40 books in my library that are about leadership. Most of them are well written and have good information about leadership, but they are often the literary equivalent of watching someone else lead and learning from their experiences. Useful? Of course. But they don’t teach you how to lead where you are.
Two of those books — and only two of them — contain any real teaching about how to lead, and one of those is a college textbook.
A solution!
The very good news is that you can both learn to lead and (this is the question in the title) learn to be a leader. Those don’t always go together, of course, but ideally they do.
Anyway, there is one very good, very affordable solution: attend a Do Good U Leadership Conference.
One of those will be happening in Cowley County, Kansas on Friday, August 14, about a month from now. It is only one day, and while we can’t teach you everything there is to know about leadership in one day, we can help a lot. For instance, we won’t just tell you about different styles of leadership, we’ll tell you how to figure out which one is your default style. Then we’ll tell you when to switch styles, why you should do that, and how to do it!
That is all part of learning to lead effectively, and we’ll share tools and techniques that can be used immediately by people who are leading others.
Which is why we say, “Join us on Friday, lead better on Monday.”
The other question
Here is the other question: How do you learn to be a leader? By leading. This is not OJT, and it is not copying someone else’s style. This is you walking to the front of the line, turning around and facing the rest of the people and saying, with or without words, “Follow me.”
When they do, you will be leading. You will not be bossing, you will not be exercising authority, you will not be pulling some elaborate con-game — you will be leading. Along the path, you will falter and even fail. If you have learned to be a leader, you will keep going and others will still follow you.
Learn to lead, then learn to be a leader. We can and do help leaders in companies, in sports teams, and in nonprofits with leadership skills, and we help leaders learn to be leaders.
If you want a taste of that, join us August 14 in Arkansas City, Kansas for the Cowley County leadership conference. If you want to go in depth on leadership, contact us and we’ll chat with you about leadership training for those in your company or school who are and who want to be leaders.
By the way, if you can’t make it to Kansas for the Leadership Conference but know someone in Kansas, please pass this along to them. It’s going to be a powerful and transformative event!
Lead on, and Do Good. It’s in you!