The 360 Degree Leader
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The 360 Degree Leader

John C. Maxwell

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eBook - ePub

The 360 Degree Leader

John C. Maxwell

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About This Book

Regardless of your position, learn how to lead with impact by utilizing John C. Maxwell's thirty years of experience teaching people how to make a significant difference in their organizations.

As one of the most trusted leadership mentors, John C. Maxwell debunks the myths that hold people back from leaning into and developing their influence. In this inspiring call-to-action, he shows middle managers how to leverage their unique positions and become 360 degree leaders by exercising influence in all directions--up (to the boss), across (among their peers), and down (to those they lead).

In The 360 Degree Leader, you will learn how to:

  • overcome the challenges facing the vast majority of professionals;
  • understand the pressures and pain points that come from being caught in the middle;
  • and gain the confidence and competence to step into their roles as significant influencers.

Complete with a workbook to help you personalize your leadership journey and the authors' plethora of stories, studies, and development models and strategies, The 360 Degree Leader equips you with the skills you need to begin making a difference in your organization, career, and life, today--with or without the promotion.

There are endless opportunities for those trying to lead from the middle of an organization. From what you are, your influence is already greater than you know.

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Information

Year
2011
ISBN
9781400203628
SECTION III

THE PRINCIPLES 360-DEGREE LEADERS PRACTICE TO LEAD UP
“Follow me, I’m right behind you.”
If you are trying to make an impact from the middle of an organization, then you probably relate to the myths and challenges outlined in the previous two sections of the book. More than likely you have to deal with one or more of them every day. So how do you make the best of your situation while overcoming the challenges and avoiding the myths? You develop the ability to be a 360-Degree Leader by learning to lead up (with your leader), lead across (with your colleagues), and lead down (with your followers). Each of these draws on different principles and requires different skills.
“If you want to get ahead, leading up is much better than kissing up.”
—DAN REILAND
Leading up is the 360-Degree Leader’s greatest challenge. Most leaders want to lead, not be led. But most leaders also want to have value added to them. If you take the approach of wanting to add value to those above you, you have the best chance of influencing them. Dan Reiland said as we talked over ideas for this book: “If you want to get ahead, leading up is much better than kissing up.”
In the fall of 2004, I got a glimpse of a world that was totally new to me. At “Exchange,” an event for executives that I host every year, I invited the attendees to experience a presentation by noted Boston Philharmonic conductor Benjamin Zander along with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. It was an interactive leadership experience where we got to sit in among the musicians of the orchestra as they rehearsed, and the conductor gave us insights into communication, leadership, and followership within a world-class team of artists. It was incredible.
That experience prompted me to read the book Zander wrote with his wife, Rosamund Stone Zander, called The Art of Possibility. In it, they tell a story that wonderfully illustrates the value of leading up and how it can add value to a leader and an organization. Benjamin Zander wrote:

One of the most supremely gifted and accomplished artists I have known sat for decades as a modest member of the viola section of one of America’s leading orchestras. Eugene Lehner had been the violist of the legendary Kolisch Quartet, and had coached the distinguished Juilliard String Quartet as well as innumerable other ensembles . . . How often I have consulted him on thorny points of interpretation—to have the scales removed from my eyes by his incandescent insight into the music!1

Zander went on to say that he wondered if any of the other conductors—who have a notorious reputation for being egoists—had consulted him and drawn on his immense knowledge and experience as an artist and leader. Following is Lehner’s response:

One day, during my very first year playing with the orchestra, I remember an occasion when Koussevitsky was conducting a Bach piece and he seemed to be having some difficulty getting the results he wanted—it simply wasn’t going right. Fortunately, his friend, the great French pedagogue and conductor Nadia Boulanger, happened to be in town and sitting in on the rehearsal, so Koussevitsky took the opportunity to extricate himself from an awkward and embarrassing situation by calling out to her, “Nadia, please, will you come up here and conduct? I want to go to the back of the hall to see how it sounds.” Mademoiselle Boulanger stepped up, made a few comments to the musicians, and conducted the orchestra through the passage without a hitch. Ever since that time, in every rehearsal, I have been waiting for the conductor to say, “Lehrer, you come up here and conduct, I want to go to the back of the hall to hear how it sounds.” It is now forty-three years since this happened, and it is less and less likely that I will be asked.2

I’m sure you don’t want to wait forty-three years for an opportunity to lead up. You want to be a person of influence beginning today.
Influencing your leader isn’t something you can make happen in a day. In fact, since you have no control over the people above you on the organizational chart, they may refuse to be influenced by you or anyone under their authority. So there’s a possibility that you may never be able to lead up with them. But you can greatly increase the odds of success if you practice the principles in this section of the book. Your underlying strategy should be to support your leader, add value to the organization, and distinguish yourself from the rest of the pack by doing your work with excellence. If you do these things consistently, then in time the leader above you may learn to trust you, rely on you, and look to you for advice. With each step, your influence will increase, and you will have more and more opportunities to lead up.
Lead-Up Principle #1

LEAD YOURSELF EXCEPTIONALLY WELL
Every now and then at a conference, sharp young kids will come up to me and tell me how much they want to become great leaders and how hard they’re working to learn and grow. But then they’ll lament, “I don’t have anyone to lead yet.”
My response is to tell them, “Lead yourself. That’s where it all starts. Besides, if you wouldn’t follow yourself, why should anyone else?”
Have you ever worked with people who didn’t lead themselves well? Worse, have you ever worked for people in leadership positions who couldn’t lead themselves? What do they do other than set a bad example? They’re like the crow in a fable I once read. The crow was sitting in a tree, doing nothing all day. A small rabbit saw the crow and asked him, “Can I also sit like you and do nothing all day long?”
“Sure,” answered the crow, “why not?” So the rabbit sat on the ground below the crow, following his example. All of a sudden a fox appeared, pounced on the rabbit, and ate him.
The tongue-in-cheek moral of the story is that if you’re going to sit around doing nothing all day, you had better be sitting very high up. But if you are down where the action is, you can’t afford to be sitting around doing nothing. The key to leading yourself well is to learn self-management. I have observed that most people put too much emphasis on decision making and too little on decision managing. As a result, they lack focus, discipline, intentionality, and purpose.
I believe this so firmly that I wrote an entire book on it called Today Matters. The thesis of the book is that successful people make right decisions early and manage those decisions daily. We often think that self-leadership is about making good decisions every day, when the reality is that we need to make a few critical decisions in major areas of life and then manage those decisions day to day.
Here’s a classic example of what I mean. Have you ever made a New Year’s resolution to exercise? You probably already believe that exercise is important. Making a decision to do it isn’t that hard, but managing that decision—and following through—is much more difficult. Let’s say, for example, that you sign up for a health club membership the first week of January. When you sign on, you’re excited. But the first time you show up at the gym, there’s a mob of people. There are so many cars that police are directing traffic. You drive around for fifteen minutes, and finally find a parking place—four blocks away. But that’s okay; you’re there for exercise anyway, so you walk to the gym.
Then when you get inside the building, you have to wait to even get into the locker room to change. But you think, That’s okay. I want to get into shape. This is going to be great. You think that until you finally get dressed and discover all the machines are being used. Once again you have to wait. Finally, you get on a machine—it’s not the one you really wanted, but hey, you’ll take it—and you exercise for twenty minutes. When you see the line for the shower, you decide to skip it, take your clothes, and just change at home.
The key to leading yourself well is to learn self-management.
On your way out, you see the manager of the club, and you decide to complain about the crowds. She says, “Don’t worry about it. Come back in three weeks, and you can have the closest parking place and your choice of machines. Because by then, 98 percent of the people who signed up will have dropped out!”
It’s one thing to decide to exercise. It’s another to actually follow through with it. As everyone else drops out, you will have to decide whether you will quit like everyone else or if you will stick with it. And that takes self-management.
Nothing will make a better impression on your leader than your ability to manage yourself. If your leader must continually expend energy managing you, then you will be perceived as someone who drains time and energy. If you manage yourself well, however, your boss will see...

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