The Five Stages of Effective Leadership

One thing I don't talk a lot about is the fact that I grew up in a family where my father was a pastor and minister of the gospel in the Christian faith. And you might be, what is this all about? I'm talking about leadership. And the reason that I'm talking about leadership specifically is because it stemmed literally 30 minutes ago as I was just kind of thinking and pondering about my father. And he's recently started a church. And I've become a student of leadership in the fact that I look at people, people that I respect, and I look at their leadership style, and then I look at other individuals who are leaders and lead people, but do so in a very detrimental way. And I try to ask myself, like, obviously I'm trying to pick from the people who I want to emulate, and then I want to shed or reject the ideology of leadership that create leaders, but not necessarily do not allow the followers to get to a positive place. And as I look at my father, and I've seen throughout my entire childhood, the ability for him to lead other individuals is not through force. It's not through even charisma. It is a matter of service, and it's a matter of giving. And I saw that my whole childhood. We moved 25 plus times before I moved out when I was like 18, 20 years old, and we moved all over the country. And he is pastor and ministering and trying to help people. And we didn't have a lot of money, mostly due to the fact that because he just spent his whole life giving to other people. And he still continues to do that today, unselfishly, never thinking about himself, and has the purest of intentions when trying to give and help other people. Very humble and never looking for any sort of pat on the back or reward for how much he pours out for other individuals. And so that's a leader that I look to. I'm like, hey, that's why people want to follow. That is why people would look at that and want to learn and gain from that. And so I also, though, have to look at other individuals and leaders like Putin and individuals like Hitler and say, look, they were leaders. People followed them. Therefore, they were leaders in the sense of they were out in front leading somebody. Why? How did they do that? How did they become leaders? So I started thinking about all these things and literally in the past 20, 30 minutes, came up with this diagram, and I want to share it with you. All right, so this is the diagram that I created, and I think it is an extremely effective way of, in my mind demonstrating the different levels of leadership. And I'm sure there's people have much better diagrams and better steps than I have here. And there's probably like 50 different steps of leadership and ways to lead individuals. But this is what came to my mind just a few minutes ago. Okay, so first and foremost, the number one way you can lead other individuals is through force.

This is where you get slavery. This is why you get wars, this is why you get dictatorships. This is why is you force people into doing things. And you look at wars that have been started against the will of the people, but because of a dictator that forced them and basically said, if you do not do this, you will be killed. And that's leadership at a political level. You can look inside of a family though, it's like, look, I can ask a child to do something or I can force them to do it and they're probably gonna hate me in 10 years. They're probably going to reject the ideologies, the beliefs that I put on them if I force them to. And my leadership is a form of force. That's the most surface level in my opinion of leadership. Again, there's probably better ways of explaining this. This is what just came to my mind. And the reason I put on the outside is because this is the vast majority of leadership is actually through force. Not just physical force. There's emotional force, psychological force. And we force our children to go through certain school like you hate. You start kindergarten, grade one, grade two, grade three. We force them to go through many of those systems and we wonder why they hate it. We won, why they don't want to go to school. If an individual, a parent, for example, forces their child to believe a certain way, whether it be religion or economics and money or relationships, and they force them to do something, there's a really good chance they're going to get that individual to follow them. They're going to lead them for so long. But force is always a short term form of leadership. Always. When you look at our businesses, you can force employees to do things, but you're probably not going to keep them around very long. They're going to leave. No one wants to be forced. No one wants to follow a leader that is forcing them to do something. The next way to have leadership is this next circle inside of here. All right, and this is positional authority. Positional authority. All right, now this is where you say as a parent, again, I'll use the parent in the business analogy. As a parent, you say you will go to bed because I am your mom, I am your dad, you will listen to me. You use a position to then dictate that you are the leader. And the only reason you're the leader is because you have positional authority. An employee says, well, why has it done this a certain way? You say, well, I'm the boss, I'll tell you what to do. I'm the boss, I'm your manager. I'm the one that, I'm the one that hired you. If you have to use positional authority again, it's better than forcing someone to do something. But it's still not ideal. It's the next layer of leadership. And this is what is so often used in, in so many different types of business, management, politics, et cetera. In the military, positional authority is actually very useful and is used very frequently because it's a hierarchy, right? You have generals and you have captains and you have lieutenants. All of that hierarchy is created so that everyone's very clear in terms of leadership. Positional authority. Who has authority over the next rank is through that hierarchy, positional authority. Okay? That's the next layer of leadership. And we could spend an hour on every single one of these. And I wrote a whole bunch of notes. Maybe one day I'll go to. If you like this kind of content, you want me to go really deep on each one of these comment down below. I'm just starting to get more confident actually sharing some of my thoughts that are a little bit more philosophical about business and leadership. So if you like this type of content, let me know in the comments because I'll try to do more. If not, I won't. Okay, next step, the next thing that gets closer to what, in my opinion is the heart of leadership. In my opinion, the center point, the bullseye, is the heart of leadership. But the next layer that is used in the form of leadership is passion.

I messed that up. But the next stage of leadership is incentive. Okay. And this is where most employees live, Most of them live here, right? You don't force your employees, you don't tell them. You have to listen to me because I'm the boss. But the reason they actually listen to you and they follow after you as being the leader is simply because you will get ice cream. That's an incentive based form of leadership. They will listen to you. They will follow the actions you are telling them to do because of incentive. And so you've got to ask yourself, okay, great, I'm not forcing them, I'm not telling them I'm the boss and I'm. I'm. But now I'm just giving them incentive. I'm giving them a reward in order for them to follow the actions that I want them to take. This is, again, every single stage of organization and leadership this follows and applies to in your business. Yes, you can give bonuses, you can give incentive bonuses, you can pay for performance, you can have profit sharing, you can incentivize people to do certain things in your business. But at the end of the day, you still have not reached the heart of leadership. And it's not to say that this or this is bad. It's not to say that incentive based compensation, or giving bonuses based upon certain behaviors, or giving a paycheck, because at the end of the day, the reason you show up to work is because of incentives. You need a paycheck. Okay.