The 5 Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential (32 page)

Begin by identifying the essential qualities and skills any good leader must possess. This will be your blueprint for introducing key experiences and testing potential leaders as they become ready. Here is a list I developed after my fortieth birthday when I realized I needed to dedicate myself to developing my inner circle of leaders:

Once I had settled on the list, I began to look for opportunities to put leaders in situations where they could learn experience-based lessons in those areas. For example, whenever there was a problem in the organization, I didn’t solve it myself. Instead, I sent one of the leaders I was developing to try to figure it out. Afterward, we’d discuss how he or she solved the problem and what he or she learned. To help their communication, when leaders were ready, I’d give them an opportunity to speak: to various groups, to the leaders, or to the entire organization. Afterward we’d talk about what went wrong and what went right, and what they could do the next time to improve. If I wanted to help them develop their influence and improve their teamwork, I’d ask them to recruit a team of volunteers for an event or a program and work with that team to follow through. You get the idea. When you lead an organization, you can’t be focused on just fulfilling the vision or getting work done. Every challenge, problem, opportunity, or initiative is a chance for you to pair potential leaders to a leadership
development experience that will change who they are. Try to think in those terms every day.

People don’t learn things just because we want them to. Level 5 leaders understand that teachable moments often come as the result of “levers” in their lives. Change occurs in people’s lives when they…

Wise leaders look for moments that fall into those three categories. Some can be created, but many simply occur. Good leaders help the people they are mentoring to learn from them and make the most of them by explaining the experience and asking the right questions.

For example, when people describe a loss in their life, I do more than just sympathize with them. I ask them to tell me what they’ve learned from it. That’s the only way in life to turn a loss into a gain. The greater the loss, the greater the potential lesson and crucible opportunity for leadership development. All of us experience far more than we understand. Your job as a Level 5 leader is to help the high-level people you are developing to make sense out of what they experience and find value in it.

Every leader needs to draw upon his or her own crucible experiences and breakthroughs as material to help the next generation of leaders
lead. To do that, you must have examined those experiences and identified the lessons you’ve learned from them. It’s very likely that the experiences and lessons that allowed you to break through the leadership lids in your life will help others break through theirs.

My recommendation is that you set aside time with pen and paper (or computer) to identify your own crucible moments. Then figure out how they might be able to help the people you’re developing. Here are the categories I used to analyze my leadership crucible experiences:

These are experiences that encourage people to start developing a leadership quality or discipline. For example, in 1972 when someone challenged me to articulate a concrete personal development plan that I was using to grow—and I couldn’t—I made a commitment to adopt a personal growth plan and follow it daily.

These experiences help leaders to move forward after a period of stagnation. For example, in 1980 I made the difficult decision to leave the organization I had been with for my entire career to work in a different one that I believed would afford me more opportunities to reach my potential.

These experiences lift leaders higher, allowing them to see things as they could be. As a pastor of a small church, I began to visit large churches and interview their leaders. This gave me insight into a much larger world outside of my own limited experience.

These experiences allow people to make a decision that will determine their leadership direction. In 1995 I left an organization that I had led successfully so that I could start and lead a company of my own that had unlimited potential.

These experience cause leaders to stop and evaluate where they are and what they are doing. I had a heart attack in 1998. It changed my entire perspective on life, family, work, and leadership. I turned my attention to my health, and I planned how I would purposely live my days.

These experiences are exhilarating, as they allow leaders to break through their leadership lids. When EQUIP reached its million-leader goal—which had seemed nearly impossible when we set it—I realized that the team and I were capable of more than we imagined if we worked together.

The purpose of reflecting on and listing your leadership breakthroughs is to share them with other potential leaders. Why do coaches have past successful players come back to the team and tell stories of past victories? Why do companies elevate past leaders who built the organization, making them legends that live beyond their years of service? Why does the Church remember heroes of the faith? Why do we study great leaders from history? For that matter, why do I share so many of my own stories? Leaders do these things because they hope that the stories will inspire another generation of leaders to reach its potential.

I want to encourage you to identify your breakthrough experiences
and tell them as stories to the leaders you desire to develop. At the same time, I have to warn you: some people will call you arrogant or egocentric when you tell them. Don’t let that deter you. I know of no better way to communicate important truths to others. People have been using stories to teach life’s lessons for as long as human beings have been walking the earth. Tell yours and help the next generation to take its place as leaders.

One of the best ways I found to instill leadership qualities and skills into my developing leaders was to ask them to interview good leaders. Asking questions and looking for ways to develop a certain quality is a wonderful way for a person to grow. First, they have to keep their eyes open for good leaders and well-led organizations, which begins to develop a leadership awareness in them. Second, they have to take the initiative (and sometimes be persuasive) to get the interview. Third, they have to prepare for the interview, which causes them to go deeper in their thinking about leadership. Fourth, the experience of the interview itself puts them in another leader’s world and exposes them to another culture that helps them to grow. And finally, analyzing the interview and talking about it with the person who gave them the assignment helps to make the lessons concrete—especially if they are required to implement and teach what they’ve learned. Many a time after I asked my developing leaders to do an interview, they came back and said, “I thought that this leadership quality was strong in my life until I witnessed it in their life. I’ve got a long way to go.”

I learned the value of experiences with great leaders and well-led organizations from my father, Melvin Maxwell. Dad introduced me to Norman Vincent Peale when I was in the seventh grade. Dr. Peale was an excellent communicator with a positive attitude. He made a strong
impression on me to maintain a positive attitude. Dad also introduced me to E. Stanley Jones when I was in high school. This giant of the Christian faith was a missionary, a writer, and the founder of a renewal movement. These and other experiences at the initiative of my father marked my life as a very young person.

I’ve tried to emulate my father in a similar way both with my family and the leaders in my organizations. For example, when my son Joel was sixteen, Margaret and I arranged for him to meet Mother Teresa in India. Joel’s most prized possession is a picture of the two of them together. And during the 1990s when my church needed to expand its vision to be challenged to grow, I took one hundred of the leaders to South Korea to visit what was then the largest church in the world. It changed their entire perspective.

Leaders on Level 5 have access to leadership, organizations, opportunities, and experiences that your emerging leaders don’t. Make the most of them for their benefit. Even if you are not yet on the Pinnacle level, you still have access that your leaders don’t. Share it. You can give your leaders experiences that will impact them for the rest of their lives and that may continue to create leadership ripples in future generations. Don’t squander that opportunity.

As a Pinnacle level leader, you never know how great the impact will be each time you develop a Level 4 leader. Consider this. In ancient Greece, there was a leader named Socrates. No doubt you’ve heard of him. You may be surprised to know that even though he was an important philosopher, one who is still influential today, Socrates never wrote anything. However, one of the people he mentored did. That leader’s name was Plato. Unlike his mentor, Plato founded his own academy, where he taught and mentored other leaders and thinkers. One of those young leaders was a man named Aristotle, perhaps the
most influential today of all the thinkers and philosophers of ancient Greece.

When Aristotle was a young man, he was approached by Philip of Macedonia, who was looking for a tutor for his son, who was thirteen. That boy was Alexander, who became one of the greatest generals and rulers in the history of the Western world. We know him today as Alexander the Great. Experts disagree about how long Aristotle mentored young Alexander, some saying as little as a year and others as long as eight. But it seems clear that the student of Plato had a profound impact on his young charge.

It’s said that Alexander once asked Aristotle, “How many is one?” The question was very simple, yet the boy was no fool, so Aristotle wondered how he should respond. Should his answer be philosophical? Mathematical? Theological? Dramaturgical?

“I’ll give you an answer tomorrow,” the teacher replied.

The next day, Aristotle gave him an answer: “One can be a great many.” In other words, one can make a huge impact—especially when that one is a leader! And in Alexander’s case, one did make a great impact. Before age thirty, Alexander had conquered the Western world.

Every time you develop a leader, you make a difference in the world. And if you develop leaders who take what they’ve learned and use it to develop other leaders, there’s no telling what kind of an impact you’ll have or how long that impact will last.

A
s you reflect on the upsides, downsides, best behaviors, and beliefs related to the Pinnacle level of leadership, use the following guidelines to help you grow as a leader and develop others to become Level 4 leaders.

1.
Remain Humble and Teachable:
The greatest potential internal danger of working your way up to Level 5 is thinking you’ve arrived and you have all the answers. That can lead to an arrogance that has the potential to derail you and your organization. The best way to guard against that is to remain teachable. To help you develop and maintain that attitude, do three things:

These three activities should help you to remember that you haven’t arrived and that you still have much to learn.

2.
Maintain Your Core Focus:
If you’ve made it to the Pinnacle level of leadership, you possess a primary skill set—a sweet spot or strength zone—that got you there. Don’t allow yourself to be distracted from using it. Identify that core strength and write out a plan for making the most of it in the coming years.

3.
Create the Right Inner Circle to Keep You Grounded:
All successful leaders need an inner circle of people who will work alongside them to achieve the vision, help them to enjoy the journey, and keep them grounded. Who are the people who will fulfill these roles in your life? Identify them and invite them into your life and leadership. My inner circle has become one of my greatest joys in life. Here is what I ask them to do: