IF you approached someone today and asked if what they understood of the word ‘leader’, they would probably say that a leader is someone who leads at work or is someone who directs.
During the recent FMF three-day Legacy Leadership Symposium at the Sofitel Fiji Resort and Spa, a leader was described simply as someone who had the power to influence people around them.
This means someone who not only influenced people but who also inspired, impacted, transformed, and guided people around them.
Ray Popham, a faculty president of the Maxwell Leadership certified team is an international speaker, teacher, business, pastor, and coach, spoke on leadership influence during the first day of the symposium.
During the three-day event, the 200-plus participants from the region learned about who they were as leaders, how they could influence people, build relationships, unlearn and relearn, how to value and trust people, and how to have a vision and purpose as a leader.
“Leadership is about understanding and developing people and if you want better results learn as a leader to create better people around you,” Mr Popham said.
He said John Maxwell (author and speaker) introduced the definition of leadership as “leadership is influence – nothing more nothing less”. “Influence is the beginning of true leadership,” he said.
“If you want to understand how to be a leader, the conversation and the awareness needs to start with understanding influence because the more you learn to influence other people – the greater your impact will be.
“Your impact is directly connected to your ability to influence other people. “When you influence people you have an effect on their being, their beliefs and their behaviour.
“We are all influencing someone. You cannot get away from influencing people but the question is – are you influencing them in a positive or negative way or in an intentional or unintentional way?
People need to know that they can make an impact by influencing someone else whether its at work, their community, or church. “The best investment you can make as a leader is to develop the ability to influence others in a positive and intentional way,” Mr Popham said.
During the symposium, he categorised leaders into three category – new leaders, emerging leaders, and seasoned leaders. He said new leaders were those who were being trained to lead or had been given or had taken up a small responsibility.
On the other hand, emerging leaders were those who dealt with others (people) and had the potential to take on leadership roles in their career. Seasoned leaders were who had been leading for a while.
“They try to setup systems, processes, and accountability charts that make life easy for them and they get more and more disconnected from people and the work they do.
“What seasoned leaders do is they are not thinking into the future, they are thinking of right now and those are people who need to wake up and realise that they could leave a legacy if they learned how leadership works.
“You cannot get away from people when it comes to leadership.”
In order for a leader to have some influence within society Mr Popham said they must first *development leadership influence. They are five levels of leadership that we will unpack in this feature.
The first level of leadership as described by Mr Popham is positional leadership. This is based on rights – that is, you have been given a position or title and have the right to lead other people.
“The problem with this leadership is that it’s the lowest form of leadership, not the highest form of leadership,” Mr Popham said.
“Sometimes we think the highest form of leadership is when we get a title or get an office or have the right to lead other people.
“This is why its the lowest form of leadership, its because people only follow you because they have to – that is their only reason.
“They don’t follow you because you have an influence in their life, they follow you because they want a pay-check or to avoid losing their job. You’re the boss and they follow what the boss says.
“With seasoned leaders when they’re in the room people do what is required but when they leave people won’t do any extra work.
“Most of the leadership ideas in the world are built on teaching you on how to be a positional leader – how to exercise your authority, how to exercise your responsibility in order to get thigs done and in the process you really don’t develop any influence with people.
“Leadership is about the effect you have on people – you can lead from any seat, you don’t need a title, you don’t need an office and you don’t need permission to lead because you realise that leadership is influence and that you can lead from any seat (position) within society.”
The second level of leadership is permission, this is built on relationship. This is where people follow you because they want to.
“They have developed a relationship with you and they know you and you know them. They give you permission to lead their lives,” he said.
“In the position level, if you challenge somebody they will get upset but if you’re on the permission level they want you to speak to them and they give you permission to help them.
“When you have the permission of somebody – you know what they do, whenever you’re not around they going to do their job and they will even go the extra mile because you have that relationship with them.
“They start to respect you and you start to have that influence on their lives because you now know more than what office number they work in – you know a little about their family, their home, about their dreams and about who they are.”
The third level of developing influence is production. This is based on results. People follow you because of what you have done for the organisation.
“You are getting results for the organisation so that means your team is getting results and now they want to follow you,” he said
“People respect you at a different level and a different way because you are a person who gets results.
“Success is built-off results. You have to have the ability to be able to get better results.”
He said if leaders influenced better people – the people would collectively give them better results. “Level three is the one that is task-oriented but they know that they need people,” he said.
The fourth level is people development based on reproduction. In this level people follow you because of what you have done for them.
“People follow you in this level because of how you have invested in them and have made them better,” he said.
“It’s because of the way you brought a training program to them or sat down with them and helped them develop goals.”
He said with that, the person realised that you dont just care about their ability to crunch numbers better but you care about their ability to show up at work and be engaged because you help them in life.
“You see this is about people development or reproduction – people follow you because of what you have done for them,” he said.
“True leaders or real leaders are not people that have followers but are people who develop other leaders.
“As a level four leader I challenge you to start investing in people. Help people to understand their purpose.
Show them the bigger picture of what they do and the difference they make.”
The fifth level of leadership is the pinnacle which is based on respect.
This is where people follow you because of who you are and what you represent. This is the highest level of leadership and is the most *different for a leader to attain.
In respecting others they create opportunities that other leaders don’t.