27What Is and Isn’t Leadership, and Who Are and Aren’t Leaders?
TEAM LEADERS ARE held to two standards: Accomplish the mission, and take care of your teammates. Great team leaders are those who consistently do so.
We will discuss these standards in much greater detail in the following chapters. They are incredibly powerful and their achievement is critical to any organization’s long-term success, but before discussing them, we must first define what is and what isn’t leadership and who are and who aren’t leaders. Most of us can’t do so, which unfortunately ensures that individuals who should not be in vitally important leadership roles are nevertheless placed there. More egregious, our inability to effectively define true leadership, and to determine what individuals should be developed and selected for even greater responsibility, leads to mission failure, and ultimately to the collapse of entire organizations.
Best-selling author and leadership expert John Maxwell famously wrote, “Leadership can be defined by one word—influence.” Influence is leadership, but it does not necessarily make you a leader. A leader has the desire and ability to use that influence on those around them.
Very few people, of any age, understand this. During any televised sporting event, announcers will inevitably praise the highest-scoring athlete, as they score more and more points, for “the great leadership they are showing.” The same is true in our schools: teachers and principals consistently ...