Developing the Leaders Around You – Grace Lee

Developing the Leaders Around You

Why do leaders need to reproduce leaders? My first impression of the new concept of developing other leaders was being a little perplexed. All my last school years, the concept of being a leader meant, leading followers to complete tasks as a team, not to develop the followers into a leader. This realization of a misconception a lot of people have in society today, left me retracing my definitions of what I think a leader is. 

 

In the book, Developing the Leaders Around You by John C. Maxwell, it is stated that leaders need to reproduce leaders because the organization’s growth potential is directly related to its personnel potential. Simply put, growing the people leads to growing the organization. There is never a success without a successor, never a leader without another leader. In order to be a leader that develops other leaders, you must be an unselfish thinker, providing all the resources and knowledge you have towards your mentees. This may be hard to do in a cruel society full of competition and comparisons. But, building a team of trust is how you can rise above the competitions and comparisons, and turn them into compassion and cooperation. I will remember this concept by heart and always try to develop the leaders around me and to turn my competitive and comparative mind into a mind with compassion and cooperation. 

 

When you are able to fully become an unselfish thinker, you must obey “The Law of the Chain”, “The Strength of the Team is Impacted by its Weakest Link”. This quote implies that you need to prioritize strengthening the weakest member of the team compared to the strongest in the team. This connects to the TALONS hikes, where we have to pace ourselves according to the slowest member in the class. We cannot pace ourselves with the fastest members, or else the slowest member will fall behind and never be able to catch up, making the team fall apart. The organization paces itself according to the weakest member of the team, therefore as an unselfish leader, you have to work on developing the weakest link in your team and finding the leadership strengths and potentials in the weakest link in your team. 

 

Just like how the weakest link is being influenced by the leader, the example of others profoundly influences me. You can always learn and grow from others. There is always room to grow. According to “The Law of Magnetism”, who you are is who you attract. These two concepts of influence and attracting got me thinking about how you could learn from others when you already are on the same level. Although you may not have your role model or your mentor as someone on the same level as you; but if you are with someone on the same level, how can you learn from them? I think recognizing the leadership strengths of a team member as a leader is crucial to this concept. From the people of similar leadership levels, finding the differences compared to you that still allows them to be in that position is essential. From this, you can learn from the different leadership styles you want to emulate and add to your leadership strategies, building onto your assets and placing yourself on higher levels on the pools of the level of growth.

 

I am skilled in finding the good in everyone and examining other member’s leadership styles. But, before climbing on the levels of growth and the five levels of leadership, you need to know your own leadership style and strengths. I have noticed that it is easier to identify other people’s leadership style compared to your own leadership style. This may be because you can never have worked with yourself before. You must search for your own leadership style and strengths before anything else. It all starts with you. To understand your leadership style better, you must have other leaders that can evaluate developing leaders. Leaders must be able to evaluate developing leaders, and developing leaders must be evaluated in some way. Evaluations can take on the form of constructive feedback, questions to check for understanding, a test, or even a task to prove what they are capable of. If you understand what kind of leader you are, you can learn and add to your leadership knowledge. When you lead, remember that you must answer the four questions of whether you have done or is doing or is willing to do a good job on a certain task you are asking your team members to complete. The leadership challenges and changes all start with you. You cannot blame the ones you lead for bringing bad outcomes, those outcomes are also led by you. I will work on myself before I work on others and I will work on myself more than I will work on others.  

 

In Session Two, John C. Maxwell mentions “The Leadership Challenge” and tells us about the struggles of finding, gathering, uniting and keeping the leaders. This is somewhat similar to what I felt coming into the TALONS program at the beginning of grade nine. Everyone was full of leadership potentials and had such creative ideas and opinions. However, when you get a room full of individual leaders, you wouldn’t get such organized discussions and outcomes as you would with a team of leaders. So, how do you overcome “The Leadership Challenge”? From my experience in TALONS, the most important aspect of overcoming the leadership challenge is to learn more about each other. When leaders get to learn more about each other they can understand each other’s perspectives, leadership styles, and eventually use that knowledge to place them into environments where they can utilize their leadership strengths to their fullest potential. After learning more about each other, you can have a better understanding of how to convince one another, uniting the leaders into having one goal as a team. For instance, when we were on the sunrise trip at Burnaby Lake we all talked to the nines in a circle, switching around, getting to know one another and sharing our goals, then we all came together as a group to form a goal for the TALONS program as a whole and came up with the ABCs that summed up everyone’s opinions as a whole. This is the process we need to overcome the Leadership Challenge. 

 

In conclusion, the book, Developing the Leaders Around You by John C. Maxwell, completely flipped my views on what leaders should do to develop other leaders. Leaders must be an unselfish thinker who knows their own leadership style and take responsibility for the team’s outcomes. Leaders must be able to develop the weakest member, find leadership potential in others and learn from members even on the same level. Leaders must be able to overcome “The Leadership Challenge”. There are mountains of such profound concepts in the book. I am so lucky to have learned from these lessons. Above all, I will always remember to develop the leaders around me.