How are leaders made?

Simon Sinek: “Leadership is most similar to parenting, because you love your children, but you don’t like them every day. When you build a team of completely different individuals, you need to work every day to build love for them and their love for you.”

In one of the previous blogs, I wrote about whether leaders are born or made. As I mentioned, I deeply believe that leadership is a process of creation.

Through professional work with many companies throughout the region, I have noticed that almost every one of them has a problem with the lack of real leaders. It is therefore wise for companies to deepen their concept of working with people and provide an environment in which leaders can be created. When I say deepen, I mean the fact that it is not enough to work only on the link between activity and result, but it is desirable that they start from the root:

1. THOUGHT: THIS IS HOW WE THINK IN THIS COMPANY!

Vision, mission, purpose, values, principles, clients, employees, management, interpersonal relationships, proactivity, positivity, influence. It is advisable that people be constantly surrounded by messages that direct their thoughts. They need to be constantly reminded of how positively they affect other people’s lives.

2. WORD: THIS IS HOW WE SPEAK IN THIS COMPANY!

No excuses, blaming, accusing, gossiping, judging. Stimulate positive words at every level. One negative person can infect up to 300 people in a company. Company vocabulary is extremely important because it conveys messages at all levels. Also, it is necessary to have a company vocabulary for communication with clients adapted to a particular client for easy understanding of the message we send.

3. ACTIVITIES: THIS IS HOW WE WORK IN THIS COMPANY!

Precisely defined key result areas and key activities, as well as the dynamics of their implementation. What exactly is the key to my job, what steps do I need to take to get my job done successfully, how exactly is my performance measured? When working with sales teams in many companies, we first had to agree on what their job was. Many have told us that their job is to sell a product, but that is only a consequence of the following steps:

• prospecting
• making sales calls
• closing the deal

It is advisable that 80% of their working time be focused on these three things, and 20% on everything else. Believe it or not, it’s usually the other way around. When we started to control activities every day and measure how much time people spent with clients, the results multiplied. The same people in the same company, for the same time with a different focus, achieve much greater results.

4. RESULTS: THESE ARE THE RESULTS WE ACHIEVE IN THIS COMPANY!

Results come as a consequence of what the team thinks, says and does.

It is advisable for managers to become aware of the fact that they become leaders only when each individual on their team wants to follow them instead of having to follow them. True leaders are those whose personal authority is stronger than the authority of the position they hold.

Fear and doubt are the two biggest enemies of top performance, so the real leaders are those who, by personal example and relationship with team members, have created an environment in which each individual can and wants to give his/her best.