Developing the Leader Within You 2.0

John C. Maxwell

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780718074005
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Learn how to develop the influence, character, service and vision that it takes to be a leader in every aspect of your life.

First released in 1993, John C. Maxwell's now-classic work revolutionized the way leaders are made. By examining the differences between leadership styles, Maxwell outlines principles for inspiring, motivating, and influencing others from any type of leadership position--including as a business executive, a church leader, a teacher, or even a parent.

In this thoroughly revised and updated edition, Maxwell includes two new chapters to include the leadership insights and practices he has learned in the decades since the first edition so that you'll receive everything you need to take a significant step in your leadership journey.

In Developing the Leader Within You 2.0, you will successfully learn and understand:

• Influence – using the 5 Levels of Leadership as a roadmap to influence others
• Character – embracing good ethics, practicing self-leadership, and valuing people
• Service – asking eight questions to develop into a leader who serves others daily
• Vision – including eight components when painting a vision for your people so they can experience it

These foundational principles provides both new readers and longtime fans with the necessary wisdom to help any leader and organization succeed in fostering integrity, self-discipline, and effecting positive change.

Developing the Leader Within You 2.0 will help you transform the way you think about leadership.

ONE

THE DEFINITION OF LEADERSHIP:
INFLUENCE

Everyone talks about it; few understand it. Most people desire to cultivate a high capacity for it; few actually do. I can put my hands on more than fifty definitions and descriptions of it from my personal files. If you google it, you’ll get more than 760 million results for it. What am I talking about? Leadership.

When I wrote the first edition of this book in 1992, people who wanted to succeed in businesses and other organizations focused their attention on management. Every year another management fad seemed to be in fashion. But few people paid any attention to leadership. It wasn’t on most people’s radar.

I have earned three degrees: a bachelor’s, a master’s, and a doctorate. Yet I had not taken a single course in leadership during my studies before the 1993 publication of Developing the Leader Within You. Why? Because none of the universities I attended offered a single course on the subject.

Today, however, leadership is a buzzword. And schools and universities have embraced it. If you wanted to, you could earn an advanced degree in the subject at more than a hundred accredited universities. All three of the universities I attended now offer courses in leadership.

Why has leadership become so important? Because people are recognizing that becoming a better leader changes lives. Everything rises and falls on leadership. The world becomes a better place when people become better leaders. Developing yourself to become the leader you have the potential to be will change everything for you. It will add to your effectiveness, subtract from your weaknesses, divide your workload, and multiply your impact.

WHY MANY PEOPLE DON’T DEVELOP AS LEADERS

More and more people recognize the value of good leadership, yet not very many work to become better leaders. Why is that? Despite the widespread prevalence of leadership books and classes, many people think leadership isn’t for them. Maybe it’s because they make one of these assumptions:

I’M NOT A “BORN LEADER,” SO I CAN’T LEAD

Leaders are not born. Well, okay, they’re born. I’ve never met an unborn leader. (And I wouldn’t want to.) What I really mean is that your ability to lead is not set at birth. While it’s true that some people are born with more natural gifts that will help them lead at a higher level, everyone has the potential to become a leader. And leadership can be developed and improved by anyone willing to put in the effort.

A TITLE AND SENIORITY WILL AUTOMATICALLY MAKE ME A LEADER

I believe this kind of thinking was more common in my generation and that of my parents, but it can still be seen today. People think they need to be appointed to a position of leadership, when the reality is that becoming a good leader requires desire and some basic tools. You can have a title and seniority and be incapable of leading. And you can have no title or seniority and be a good leader.

WORK EXPERIENCE WILL AUTOMATICALLY MAKE ME A LEADER

Leadership is like maturity. It doesn’t automatically come with age. Sometimes age comes alone. Tenure does not create leadership ability. In fact, it’s more likely to engender entitlement than leadership ability.

I’M WAITING UNTIL I GET A POSITION TO START DEVELOPING AS A LEADER

This last assumption has been the most frustrating to me as a teacher of leadership. When I first started hosting leadership conferences, people would say, “If I ever become a leader”—meaning if they were ever appointed to a leadership position—“then maybe I’ll come to one of your seminars.” What’s the problem? As legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said, “When opportunity comes, it’s too late to prepare.” If you start learning about leadership now, not only will you increase your opportunities, but you’ll also make the most of them when they arrive.

HOW WILL YOU DEVELOP THE LEADER WITHIN YOU?

The bottom line is that if you’ve never done anything to develop yourself as a leader, you can start today. And if you have already begun your leadership journey, you can become a better leader than you already are by intentionally developing the leader within you.

What will that take? That’s the subject of this book. These ten chapters contain what I consider to be the ten essentials for developing yourself as a leader. I’ve also created free bonus materials that you can access at MaxwellLeader.com. Included is an assessment that will help you gauge your current leadership ability. I encourage you to take it before reading any further.

Let’s start with the most important concept of the ten: influence. After more than five decades of observing leaders around the world and many years of developing my own leadership potential, I have come to this conclusion: Leadership is influence. That’s it—nothing more, nothing less. That’s why my favorite leadership proverb is “He who thinketh he leadeth and hath no one following him is only taking a walk.” For you to be a leader, someone has to be following you. I love what James C. Georges, founder and chairman of the PAR Group, said in an interview I read years ago: “What is leadership? Remove for a moment the moral issues behind it, and there is only one definition: Leadership is the ability to obtain followers.”¹

Leadership is the ability to obtain followers.

—JAMES C. GEORGES

Anyone—for good or ill—who gets others to follow is a leader. That means Hitler was a leader. (Did you know that Time named Hitler their Man of the Year in 1938 because he had greater influence on the world than anyone else?) Osama bin Laden was a leader. Jesus of Nazareth was a leader. So was Joan of Arc. Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy were leaders. While the value systems, abilities, and goals of all these people were vastly different, each of them attracted followers. They all had influence.

Influence is the beginning of true leadership. If you mistakenly define leadership as the ability to achieve a position instead of the ability to attract followers, then you will go after position, rank, or title to try to become a leader. But this type of thinking results in two common problems. First, what do you do if you attain the status of a leadership position but experience the frustration of having no one follow you? Second, what if you never achieve the “proper” title? Will you keep waiting to try to make a positive impact on the world?

My goal with this book is to help you understand how influence works, and use it as the starting point for learning how to lead more effectively. Each chapter is designed to help you acquire skills and abilities that further develop you as a leader. With the addition of each skill set, you will become a better leader.

INSIGHTS ABOUT INFLUENCE

Before we get into the particulars of how influence with others works and how to develop it, let’s nail down a few important insights about influence:

1. EVERYONE INFLUENCES SOMEONE

My friend Tim Elmore, the founder of Growing Leaders, once told me that sociologists estimate that even the most introverted individual will influence ten thousand other people during his or her lifetime. Isn’t that amazing? Every day you influence others. And you are influenced by others. That means no one is excluded from being both a leader and a follower.

In any given situation with any group of people, the dynamic of influence is always in play. Let me illustrate. Let’s say a child is getting ready for school. During that process, his mother is usually the dominant influence. She may choose what he will eat and what he will wear. When he arrives at school, he may become the influencer in his group of friends. When class begins, his teacher becomes the dominant influencer. After school, when the boy goes out and plays, the neighborhood bully may have the most influence. And at dinnertime, Mom or Dad has the most influence at the table as they eat.

If you are observant, you can discover the prominent leader of any group. Titles and positions don’t matter. Just watch the people as they gather. As they work to resolve an issue or make a decision, whose opinion seems most valuable? Who is the person others watch the most when the issue is being discussed? Who is the one with whom people quickly agree? Whom do others defer to and follow? Answers to these questions point you to who the real leader is in a particular group.

You have influence in this world, but realizing your potential as a leader is your responsibility. If you put effort into developing yourself as a leader, you have the potential to influence more people and to do so in more significant ways.

2. WE DON’T ALWAYS KNOW WHO OR HOW MUCH WE INFLUENCE

One of the most effective ways to understand the power of influence is to think about the times you have been touched in your life by a person or an event. Significant events leave marks on all our lives and memories. For example, ask people born before 1930 what they were doing on December 7, 1941, when they heard that Pearl Harbor was bombed, and they will describe in detail their feelings and surroundings when they heard the terrible news. Ask someone born before 1955 to describe what he or she was doing on November 22, 1963, when the news that John F. Kennedy had been shot was broadcast. Again, you will hear no loss for words. Each generation remembers events that mark them: the day the space shuttle Challenger blew up. The tragedy of 9/11. The list goes on. What major event stands out to you? How is that event continuing to influence your thinking and actions?

Now think about the people who influenced you in a powerful way, or the little things that meant a lot to you. I can point to the influence of a camp I attended as a youth and how it helped determine my career choice. My seventh-grade teacher, Glen Leatherwood, began to stir a sense of calling in my life that I continue to live out today in my seventies. When m...