Leadership Is Influence, That’s It
Thank you to everyone who opens this email again. This week I want to share some of my thought on leadership, something I recently learned from work and a book I reread recently - Developing the leader within you.
I guess everyone had experience working with a fair leader and manager. Maybe they are not giving you the right direction and resources or simply can't help you. For me, I also had tons of these experiences. It makes me wonder how can we become better leaders in the future.
Even we can't make any change now; these experiences also make me want to learn about leadership and avoid all the mistakes I observe from others.
💡 What is Leadership
"Leadership is Influence. That's it - nothing more, nothing less" even though we don't have any title and authority, as long as we try to influence people and positively impact them.
📐 5 Level of Leadership to influence people
💢 Level 1: Position (Title)
- People follow because they have to
- But a title and position won't get a person very far in leadership
This level echoes me a lot as we have all encountered this type of leader before, most of the time at work. We follow them because we have to, but if we remove their title and ranking. Their position and title can no longer influence us.
😇 Level 2: Permission (Relationship)
- People follow you because they want to
- Leader focuses their time and energy on the needs and desires of the individual on their team.
- People unwilling or unable to build solid, lasting relationships soon discover that they can not sustain ongoing, effective leadership.
Building a community within your team would be a good idea to foster good relationships; people are more willing to trust each other.
📊 Level 3: Production (Result)
- Teamwork together because they can create results with the leader
- Leaders help people get things done, and they help their team members get things done. It might be building a process and system for the team to work efficiently. Together they produce a result.
- When you lead a productive team of people who like working together, you give others a reason to want to work with you, to follow you.
I believe this is what we should strive for, to deliver results with the team member we enjoy working with.
👨🏻🏫 Level 4: People Development (Reproduction)
- If you gain influence from levels one, two and three, you are already considered a great leader. But there is a higher level of leadership.
- A leader's primary responsibility is to develop other people: to help them reach their potential, to help them do their jobs more effectively, and to help them learn to become leaders themselves. This kind of people development leads to reproduction.
👼🏻 Level 5: Pinnacle (Respect)
- Only a few people reach it.
- People follow you because they respect you.
I hope this can give you a different perspective on leadership, and have a great week ahead !!!
Cheers,
Tim
❤️ My Favourite Things
💡 LinkedIn Post - Data Analytics Marathon. Saw this chart on a Linkedin post. Pretty much sum up my job from data collection to insight communication and taking action. Next time when someone says data analytics is about coding or marking fancy charts. You can then show this to them 😂
📚 Book - Bad Blood by John Carreyrou. A fantastic book about one of the biggest corporate frauds in history. Backed by prestigious investors, a health tech company sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion and was a fraud. Recently I have been hooked on books about scandals & crime. After finishing Billion Dollar Whale past month, I decided to read this book.
🖌 Article - Why MasterClass Isn't Really About Mastery. An article about what Masterclass is selling. The truth - is not knowledge but rather credibility. MasterClass took people who were already famous and gave their fans even more access to them
🍱 Restaurant -米気. A Japanese restaurant located in Hung Hom serves homemade dishes. Their starter, main dish, and side dish are all in small portions reasonably priced. And you can try a lot of words in only one meal.
✍🏻 Quote of the week
“ For a relationship to be healthy, both people must be willing and able to both say no and hear no.”
From The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson
Resurfaced using Readwise.