Be a Connector, Not Just a Climber

John Maxwell

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781400275526
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Smart leaders learn from their own mistakes. Smarter ones learn from others' mistakes—and successes.  John C. Maxwell wants to help you become the smartest leader you can be by sharing Chapter 19, Be A Connector, Not Just A Climber, of Leadership Gold with you. After nearly forty years of leading, Maxwell has mined the gold so you don't have to. Each chapter contains detailed application exercises and a "Mentoring Moment" for leaders who desire to mentor others using the book. Gaining leadership insight is a lot like mining for gold. You don't set out to look for the dirt. You look for the nuggets. You'll find them here.

BE A CONNECTOR,
NOT JUST A CLIMBER

When I first started out in my career, I thought leadership was a race. My goal was to prove myself and improve my ranking. I worked hard. And each year I couldn’t wait as the annual report came out with the stats for every leader in our denomination. I would compare my numbers with everyone else’s. I charted my progress. I checked to see whom I had overtaken. I noted which leaders ahead of me were within reach. Every year I inched closer to the top, and it gave me a great sense of satisfaction. I was climbing!

However, there were major problems with my thinking. I was working under two major misconceptions: First, I thought my leadership title made me the leader. Second, I thought that climbing the leadership ladder was a higher priority then connecting with people. The bottom line was that I didn’t realize that leadership is relational as much as positional.

I had my first wake-up call when I led my first board meeting. I had the “rights” to be the leader, but not the relationships. The people in the meeting listened to me politely, but they didn’t follow me. They followed Claude, a farmer who had been a part of the church since before I was born. Watching people follow based on the relationship instead of the position was at first a frustration for me. It took me nearly a decade to understand that people do not care how much you know until they know how much you care. I wish somebody had told me that sooner. Perhaps they did, but I was too busy trying to get ahead to listen. As a result, I wasn’t connecting with people.

That’s not to say that climbing is all wrong. You can’t create progress by staying on the plateau. Leaders are naturally wired to climb. They are aggressive. They initiate. They see opportunities and seek them before others do. Most leaders are competitive, and getting to the top is part of their DNA. So the question for leaders is not, should you try to get to the top? The question is, how should you try to get there? Getting to the t...