Читать книгу Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People - Joseph O’Connor - Страница 22

Knowledge is the second pillar of leadership. You can be a leader by virtue of what you know. When my car breaks down, I take it in to the garage for repair. When my computer breaks down, I do what I can to fix it, but usually I call the support line. If I want to know about the latest fashion or music, I ask my teenage daughter. Mechanics, doctors, engineers, lawyers and teachers can all be leaders by what they know. And knowledge alone is insufficient.

Think of your best teachers or coaches, those who really made a difference for you and what you could do. Who comes to mind? A teacher from school? A college teacher, or a sports coach, or business coach? What sort of qualities did they have?

I remember when I was at college, there was a lecturer who would enter the musty lecture hall with its wooden benches polished by the trousers of a generation of students and deliver his lecturer for an hour in a monotone, looking down at his notes all the time. Then he would pack away his notes and leave. He barely looked at the class. We wondered if he would notice if no one was there for this weekly ritual. A group of us used to draw lots to decide who would attend in any one week and secretly record the lecture so we could all listen to it later. The only thing I remember about this man’s lectures was that he pronounced ‘food’ as ‘fud’, which tells you how captivated I was. This man knew a lot about his subject, without ever inspiring me to find out anything about it above the bare minimum. Other lecturers were superb, stimulating and not only did I remember what they told me, but I also left the lecture hall wanting to find out more in my own time because the subject came alive when they spoke of it.

So knowledge will win over authority – would you rather be in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing or someone who has the formal authority in the situation? – but true leaders have something more. They give of themselves.