sooooo yeah…since this is a leadership LLC, I figured I’d write my first blog post about what I define as leadership. Not to mention, I couldn’t think of anything else to blog about…haha. I think leadership has many definitions. I think everyone has the potential to become a leader in some way. Some people are born with natural leadership qualities while others may have to work on developing their leadership skills. Because leadership can mean so many different things to different people, I don’t think it’s possible to have a concrete definition for exactly what leadership is. According to Wikipedia (I know it’s not all that credible, but I still love it), leadership is defined as “a process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task“. I think that is a WONDERFUL definition of leadership. It covers a lot of areas of the topic.
IT’S A PROCESS
Leadership is indeed a process!!!!! It takes time to develop one as a leader. As I said previously, some people are born with certain leadership qualities, while others may have to work a little harder to develop themselves as a leader. I think it’s the same way that some people are born with beautiful voices while some people may have just an average voice but have the potential to have a beautiful. (That definitely made a lot more sense in my head but after I wrote it I kinda questioned it. I hope you caught what I meant though haha). Whether you are a “natural-born leader” or you have to work on your leadership skills, it will always lead up to a road of process. It takes time to develop any person into a leader.
LEADERS HAVE INFLUENCE
I think this is KEY to being an effective leader. You MUS T have influence, whether it be good or bad. When most people think of influence, their minds drift off to someone that is really famous or in the public eye, but that isn’t the only influence one can have. Your realm of influence may be just your group of friends or in your family. Influence doesn’t have to be on a grandiose (big words…*takes a bow) scale for one to be considered a leader. If you have the power to make a group of people (large or small) take some form of action, YOU HAVE INFLUENCE AND YOU ARE A LEADER!
LEADERS MAKE THINGS HAPPEN
A leader must be one to make things happen. Within their sphere of influence, a leader must know how to influence their peers to achieve whatever task is before them. This can be on a negative or positive scale. For example, if one is a chief drug dealer (if that’s even possible), they must know how to get the little drug dealers under them to get out there and make that money!!! Making things happen could be done by actually talking to people or just by being an example. When you have that influence, people will follow your example. So if you’re making things happen, they will follow.
FINAL THOUGHTS
One thing that is important to me about leaders is that they MUST know how to follow FIRST!!!!! If you don’t know how to follow someone, there is no way in my mind that you can be an effective leader. That’s all apart of that process I spoke of. Learning to be a leader comes from watching other effective leaders lead. As one of my mentors always say, “You can’t take somebody where you’ve never been.” In other words, if you’ve never done anything or walked through anything, how are you gonna lead me anywhere?
I have class in a few more minutes so I gotta wrap this up. I actually enjoyed writing this and I hope yall enjoy reading it. I also hope I got my point across effectively. alright…………………………….goodbye my fellow leaders! 🙂
September 28th, 2012 at 6:18 pm
So much to respond to! Particularly given our last discussion in class it isn’t surprising that you have specific thoughts on each of these areas. Am looking forward to what other commenters think. A few things that stick out to me:
I actually like that you used drug dealers as your example to demonstrate this definition. It brings up an important question: what’s the role of ethics in your def of leadership? The head drug dealer absolutely fits into the wikipedia definition of leadership. Is a leader’s role limited to the internal workings of their own group? Do they have responsibilities to external stakeholders (like the rest of society that doesn’t benefit from high performing drug dealers as much as the head drug dealer does).
The other comment that struck me was discussing leadership as a process of learning and growing. True that. My take on the wikipedia definition is slightly different though – I think they’re making a comment on leadership being a process between people who have influence on each other (as opposed to it being a position that one person holds and executes independently). What’s your take on that? Can a person hold a leadership position but not be meeting the definition of leadership? Can a person be engaged in a process of social influence to make things happen and not be doing leadership?