You mean there’s a process?
Just like any other trip you have taken, there are milestones along your leadership journey. It is important for the growing leader to understand where they are in their journey and recognize when they have moved on from novice to mastery levels of practice. While not concise and plenary, I believe there are three distinct phases to a typical leadership journey.
The Young Leader
This is the stage of your journey where your desire outpaces your talent. You want to be great, you want to accomplish so much, but the truth is that you just haven’t put in the time to perfect the craft. Many young leaders will get stuck at this stage because they believe that zeal alone is enough to bring results. The idea that it will take time (often years) to get to the point where talent meets desire is unattractive and unappealing. You can easily identify this person on a résumé because they will only stay at one place one or two years. If they aren’t running the company by then, they are ready to move on…
The Arriving Leader
This is the forge where true leaders are born. It requires you to be heated to the point of breaking. You must be moldable, humble, and endlessly resilient. The forge is where mistakes become lessons, and learned lessons become the mold to which you will allow yourself to be remade. Many leaders get stuck here because pride won’t allow them to be broken. They fail to understand that to leave the forge, every part of them must conform to the mold. If they cannot, the process of heating and breaking must start again. The quicker the arriving leader learns that humility wins over pride, the sooner they will leave the forge.
The Practicing Leader
The practicing leader can merge desire and talent into a powerful force of change and influence. But there is still something more that is required of the mature leader: the gift of legacy. No leader is self-made; they are each a product of the leaders who have intentionally poured their influence into them through time and trial. The practicing leader who fails to prepare the next one in line commits possibly the greatest leadership sin of all. So, when you finally DO arrive, the practicing leader understands that it’s immediately time to return to the start and help the next young leader into the forge.
Take five minutes and consider:
Where am I in my leadership journey? What is holding me back? Am I actively investing in the next generation of leadership?
Navigating the phases of leadership is challenging without a guide. Find your guide or be the guide for another. Commit to the process of completing the journey.
