Leadership is not a Solo Sport: How to be a Successful Leader in Business

My experience with leadership has been a lot like an experience I've had lifting weights, and I wanted to start this off using that story as an anology to lead into some of my deeper thoughts on leadership, as I've experienced it, and the form leadership takes as you work your way up in business. 

When I first started to lift, I didn't have any weight on the bar. I was taking a private lesson, and the instructor wanted to make sure I had the form down, before he started to increase the weight. The issue was that there was so little weight on the bar, that I could lift the bar through pure muscle - my form was not improving. 

Finally I just told the guy - "Look man, you gotta trust me here - put more weight on, so I can feel the bar... I can't get this form with the weight so light". He was a little hesitant, but eventually agreed. As the weight increased, my form got better, and finally we got to a point where I was lifting a lot of weight. Enough weight where I couldn't just muscle the bar up. I was forced into having proper technique.  I started to practice proper form, because there simply was no other option. If I had tried reverting back to my old ways, I would have failed to even move the bar. 

For me, leadership has, in many ways, been similar to that experience. There has always been a "Natural Leader" inside of me, but at times it wasn't coming out because it was easy to get away with succeeding without leading properly. It's very difficult to see that you have shitty form if you are constantly succeeding. It isn't until you can't muscle the bar up anymore, sotospeak, that it starts to hit you that something needs to change.

For a while I was able to get away with my ego getting involved. I could get away with imposing my will, demanding authority, and being dictatorial. I'm good with people (so I could mask the "dictator" thing, like spraying fabreeze to cover up a bad fart), I naturally speak//act from a place of an almost uncanny level of confidence, particularly in situations where I may not even know what I'm talking about or doing. Needless to say, I was a big guy just muscling up a weight-less bar. 

Leadership in Business: At a certain point on your way up, you hit a stage where your success is no longer in a vacume. You reach a point where your success is directly impeding other people's success. If you succeed, it means someone has to go a different path. It's unavoidable:

Politics get involved. 

The individuals who you are interacting with get better and better at their own jobs

These things are simply the "weights" on the bar. They aren't obstacles, they aren't "negative" or "positive" - they simply are weights on the bar. The higher you climb, the more weight is going to be on the bar. That's the name of the game. The more weight on the bar, the more "technique" becomes important. 

In business, leadership isn't about authority. It isn't about telling everybody what to do. It isn't about other people getting everything done on your terms. Leadership is simply about uniting a team to accomplish a larger goal. "Leadership", simply put, is the "force" by which that unification happens. 

What does proper "technique" consist of? For me, the three pillars of proper leadership technique are:

Collaboration

Transparency 

There are plenty of other factors that go into proper leadership: Active Help, Discipline, Confidence, Positivity, Being Firm in One's Beliefs, and yes, even a certain ability to be a "Dick" if necessary... 

But it is my firm belief, that successfully executing the three pillars allows these other factors to fall into place. The pillars are the ground from which these other factors can grow. If you base your leadership on other factors, you may not be building from a firm base. 

Leadership Is Not Dictatorship: 

It is incredibly important to lead with a vision. It is important to know exactly where you want your team to go, and to be very clear in this. It is equally important to immediately set that vision aside. Communication is as much about listening, as it is about talking. Listen to what your team has to say.

Listen to your team's vision

Understand your team's personality

While it's important to always understand that you are the leader of your team. It's equally important to keep in mind what your goal as a leader is:

Your goal is to facilitate the unification of your team, in order to accomplish the larger goals for your organization.

Towards this end - understand who the leaders within your team are. Understand your team on as much of an individual level as possible. As you gain more and more responsibility, it may become impossible to interact with, and understand, everyone within your team, on an individual level. Understand the leadership on your team. Facilitate their growth. 

Lastly, it's important to understand from which direction this "force" of leadership comes:

The best type of leaders, after they get to the top, go to the bottom, and push everyone up

It needs to come from the bottom-up. This unification process occurs as a result of your team "Buying-In". Your team begins to be capable of "Buying-In", as they are allowed to grow both as individuals, but also within their role, purely in a professional sense. As your team goes through this process of growth, they will become more and more capable of "Buying-In", as a result of gaining a certain level of ownership of what they're doing. 

Leadership is a team sport. It involves being in-tune with your team, and having an extremely firm grasp on what it is you want to achieve, and how you're going to achieve it, while simaltaenously being capable of setting that aside entirely and listening to your team. 

Not everyone is cut out to be a leader, but those who are cut out for it, quickly learn to forget themselves in the process.