You’re a rising leader. Respected in your company, especially by those around you. You think about where you’re headed, how far you can go. Can you make it to the top? All the way? CEO?
So, you pick up the leading edge books on management and leadership. You watch YouTube clips of the most charismatic CEO’s, those who have made an historical impact on their companies and have changed the course of business thinking. You learn about their path. About their management style. Their 5 point plans to lead a winning organization. Their way of managing people, running their companies, dealing with adversity. You can do that too. If only you can follow their example, take the same steps, be like them.
Stop. You’re not Jack Welch and you’re not Steve Jobs. You’re not Bill or Warren or Martha. You’re you. And that is a great thing.
Why? Because although each great leader has influences who help him construct his own style, he is not those people. He is himself. Good and bad, with strengths and flaws, confidence and doubt, personal challenges and professional triumphs. He became the leader by navigating through life and career making choices and corrections. Following a general course and adapting to changes.
So stop. Stop trying to be the CEO. Stop trying to be Jack or Steve or your favorite leader. You have problems today. Right now. You need to figure out how your team can make its sales quota for the quarter. How to guide someone through a difficult customer issue. How to make sure you have the right people working on the right stuff.
Get all the positive influences you want from whatever sources help you, but make sure you are solving today’s problems, not just dreaming about what it would be like to be Jack or Steve. They don’t have to do your job.
It is probably obvious to you, but your CEO doesn’t understand your job and your daily challenges. Nor should she. If you are sitting 2 or more levels away from the CEO in your organization, it isn’t reasonable to expect her to know how you get things done. Your CEO counts on her direct reports to understand that.
Her job is to set the course for the company, establish a set of priorities based on the company’s process of developing and aligning around those, and manage the performance of the senior leaders to execute against those priorities. She is the primary link between the company and the Board of Directors and shareholders. Her overwhelming priority is to deliver favorably against the expectations of those two groups. She isn’t thinking about you and your challenges.
So how do you survive and advance in your company? You need to understand what successful people who are at your level are doing to solve problems. How are they managing time? How are they conducting meetings? How are they building teams and holding people accountable? How are they influencing others in their organization based on their perspective in the marketplace?
You might be able to gain some perspective from the book about a legendary CEO, but unless that person had to solve problems just like yours at some point in her career, you probably won’t get exactly what you need there. Even if she did face similar problems, the world is changing so quickly that an historical account of what she did may not be terribly helpful to you today.
You need to access insights from people like you. In real time. That means you have to engage with other people at your level, in your industry, in the virtual and physical communities where you live. You need to do this aggressively and intentionally.
Trade associations, conferences, and industry shows are great settings to connect and share with others like you who are facing similar challenges. They are usually venues where you share a common language due to the fact that you are in the same business as other attendees. Seek out your peers in your business and develop your learning network so you have people to call on to develop your ideas about your leadership approach.
LinkedIn Groups is another great vehicle to gain insights about how to solve day to day problems as a rising leader. If you connect to the groups that are a good fit to you, you’ll quickly accumulate a broad perspective on modern leadership and cutting edge thinking about how to solve today’s business problems. You can take in what aligns with your values and discard the rest in order to build and refine your own foundation of leadership principles.
Find a mentor and be a mentor. Develop these relationships, intimate connections that cut through the noise of daily work where real learning and development happens. You should have a mentor and be a mentor at every growth stage of your life and career. These can change over time, so it is easy to find yourself with a mentor gap as you progress through the stages.
There are many other sources of practical knowledge you can access. Explore those. But remember, the overwhelming majority of content will be written about Jack and Steve and others like them. They made it to the top and have public notoriety, so that is to be expected. Be intentional about your learning. Remember, you are trying to solve today’s problems. The way you do that, and the accumulation of your successes, will become your own success story. Not Jack’s or Steve’s.
One last thing. You need to give as well as take. You already have great ideas, perspective about how you overcame a challenge, successes that happened because you made the right choice or guided your team through a difficult situation with grace and courage. There is another rising leader like you who can benefit from that. Be generous.
There may never be a book written about you. Then again, there may be. It will be the story of a person who fully engaged, who learned from others around him and who shared what he learned. A person who rose as a modern compassionate leader. A respected example to others.
It will be the story of you. Not the story of Jack or Steve.
Lead well.
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