Get the Picture

People cannot be managed...Inventories can be managed, but people must be led.

- H. Ross Perot

Here's a question often asked: Isn't leadership something people are born with? Aren't some people referred to as born leaders?

Yes, but it's a myth. Leadership is a skill, like gardening or chess or playing a computer game. It can be taught and it can be learned at any age if the commitment to learn is present. Companies can turn their managers into leaders.

But if companies could transform all their managers into leaders, why wouldn't every company just do that?

They don't know what a leader is, most of them. They don't read books on leadership, they don't have leadership training seminars, and they don't hold meetings in which leadership is discussed and brainstormed. Therefore, they can't define it. It's hard to encourage it or cultivate it if you can't define it.

The remedy for this is to always have a picture of what a good leader is. People are not motivated by people who can't picture great leadership. Can't even picture it!

In his powerful, innovative book on business management, The Laughing Warriors (Lumina Media, 2003), Dale Dauten offers a picture of a leader with a code to live by: "THINK LIKE A HERO (Who can I help today?), WORK LIKE AN ARTIST (What else can we try?), REFUSE TO BE ORDINARY (Pursue excellence, then kill it.), and CELEBRATE (But take no credit.)."

Continuously picturing that code in and of itself would create quite a leader.