EntreLeadership

If you're interested in Leadership, Dave Ramsey's book EntreLeadership is well worth your time. Here's an excerpt:

To be a real EntreLeader you have to realize you have great power but seldom use it. Having great power and managing it as a tool is what real EntreLeaders do. When you hold the pen over the paycheck - the right to fire a team - you have power over their lives. That is positional power, the power given to you by your position. If you lead only with positional power, you are simply a boss. Any idiot can be Barney Fife. A "boss" is the kid at McDonald's who has been there a week longer than everyone else, so the manager gives him a twenty-five-cent-an-hour raise and promotes him to be in charge of fries. He then becomes the Fries Nazi - he has positional power and he uses it...

EntreLeaders understand that ultimately the only power they can use to grow a quality team is the power of persuasion. Persuasion is pulling the rope and positional leadership is pushing the rope. And we all know you can't push a rope. If you want employees, then boss them around; if you want team members, explain why you do what you do. If they won't do what you ask, explain it again and again. Then, if they are simply contrary, they have to work somewhere else. But don't lead with threats and fear.

I have three wonderful children, and my wife and I have enjoyed all the ages of their lives. I have heard parents moan and groan about the teenage years, but we had fun with our teens and had good (not perfect) teens. Part of the reason for our success was a leadership decision. I discovered that fourteen-year-olds have multiple personality disorder. They have within their little growing bodies two people: a four-year-old and a thirty-four-year-old. The problem is, you as the parent never know which one is going to appear in a given exchange. Teens have a desperate desire to be treated like adults and oftentimes have an inability to act like adults. I decided to ask my teen with which person I am speaking: the four-year-old or the thirty-four-year-old? Because if I am speaking with the four-year-old, I will simply tell them what to do, and if they don't do it, there will be parental problems for them. As Bill Cosby says, "I can take you out and make another one that looks just like you." That is positional leadership, and if I resort to that with my teen or my team, I am not building to the future. I may get what I want right then, but I did not equip them to perform when my back is turned. If I am speaking with the thirty-four-year-old, I can explain why they can't stay out until two A.M., smoke a joint, and get pregnant: because it will destroy their life. I am older and wiser and will persuade them to perform within boundaries that accomplish all out goals. If I can persuade them, I have built into our future; we will both get to go places we could not have gone otherwise.

The weird thing is that while persuasional leadership takes longer and takes more restraint at the time, it is much more efficient over the long haul. When you teach team members or teens the why, they are more equipped to make the same decision next time without you. You don't have to watch their every move, you don't have to put in a time clock, and you don't have to implant a GPS chip in their hide when they learn how to think for themselves. Positional leadership doesn't take as long in the exchange, but you have to do it over and over and over and over. You never get to enjoy your team or your kids because they become a source of frustration rather than a source of pride.

Benjamin Zander has been the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra since 1979. At age forty-five, something changed within him. He explains, "I'd been conducting for twenty years, and I suddenly had a realization. The conductor of an orchestra doesn't make a sound. [His power depends] on his ability to make other people powerful. And that changed everything for me. I realized my job was to awaken possibility in other people." He continues, "If their eyes are shining, you know you're doing it. If the eyes are not shining, you get to ask a question: who am I being that my players' eyes are not shining?"