Читать книгу Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People - Joseph O’Connor - Страница 24

Different leaders will have different mixtures of knowledge, authority and example. A teacher can be a leader by virtue of what they know and the position they hold. A leader may be someone with formal authority – a manager, an army officer, police officer, or elected official. A leader may have religious knowledge and authority. You cannot set yourself up as a role model, that position, like leadership, is one others have to give you, and it may be unwelcome. We have all taken parents and significant adults as role models when we were children. When we have children we automatically become a role model for them, whether we want it or not.

A coach can be a leader. The British tennis player Greg Rusedski went from fifty-sixth in the world rankings to sixth in a few months under the guidance of his coaches, first Brian Teacher and then Tony Pickard. Rusedski is a talented player and his coaches were able to inspire him to play to his talent. Great athletes lead by example and they usually have great coaches – who are leaders of a different sort. Coaches in business help a colleague solve a problem or improve at a task through discussion and guidance. When coaching deals with personal issues and where the personal qualities of the coach become as important as their business skills, then coaching shades into mentoring. You may not be able to pick your coach, but you always choose your mentor.

A healer can be a leader, usually through the knowledge they have. Doctors and therapists are leaders when they lead people to greater health and well-being. Internal and external consultants can heal organizational rifts.

A steward, someone entrusted to guard what is important, is another kind of leader. In his book Stewardship (Berrett-Koehler, 1996), Peter Block writes of service in the cause of a larger vision, of accountability, and an end to a blame and control culture in the workplace. Much of this I would apply to leadership. I use stewardship in a more limited sense: as a style of leadership.

The steward’s role as a guardian of what is important and worth keeping is important, for example in business, for although businesses must continually renew themselves, too much change is as bad as too little. Without any change a company will freeze and stagnate into an uncompetitive dinosaur, but with too much change the company risks losing the valuable parts of its business. A steward identifies and preserves what is worth keeping, what keeps the company stable. That is successful change – keeping the good things about the present and letting go of the rest. Any leader must be a steward to some degree.

Sometimes a designer is a leader. Designers shape our lives. Look round you and remember that all the man-made objects you see – buildings, furniture, clothes, cars and other machines – first began as ideas. Good designers lead the way in architecture, interior design, fashion and household appliances while others follow. You may never have met the architect who designed your house, but they influence your life every day. Leaders of fashion influence our choice of clothes, furniture, the music we listen to and the books and newspapers we read.

Finally there are those leaders who simply provide a role model. Think of the people who have influenced you the most. They may have been in authority. They may have had more knowledge than you. But there was probably something extra – something personal. They embodied values you admired.

I think a leader is also like a hero. The derivation of the word ‘hero’ is interesting. It means ‘to protect and serve’. Usually the word conjures up ideas of courage, saving lives, maybe winning medals for valour or overcoming impossible odds. But all heroes, even those from Hollywood movies, have another, inner task – they have to overcome a dragon in themselves, they have to go beyond themselves and develop the qualities they need to overcome their task. There is one sure way of telling the hero in a story – the person who has learned the most, the person who is changed the most at the end. Both Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader are heroes in the Star Wars series of films. They were not heroes at the beginning, but they became so by how they responded to the challenges they faced. So becoming a leader means undertaking both an outward and an inward journey – to accomplish something worthwhile in the outside world, to inspire others in a worthwhile task and to discover inner resources that you did not know you had, to become a leader in your own way.