By Chad Cook, Chief Catalyst, Cook Consulting Group LLC Editors
Note: Finding a job you love is the first step in a fulfilling career. The Interview Doctor is pleased to provide another perspective for growing in a job you love.
Being a leader is a tricky thing. Everyone has a boss. It is easy to throw stones but until you are a boss, it is difficult to appreciate how hard it is.
The biggest secret is that people always follow the leader. Sometimes this is a good thing and sometimes it is not. Successful teams come from successful, positive, fully invested leaders.
Great leaders usually learn a critical lesson sometime during their career – that other people follow their example. People especially want to follow leaders who believe in, have passion for, and actively lead change. If a leader is not willing to be fully invested and fully committed to the change, the team will not follow either. The team won’t create something the leader cannot or will not create.
You can spot a bad leader by looking for distrust and disillusion among the followers. It never fails.
Here are some other kinds of leadership styles that are not usually successful.
Dreamers are leaders who try to coalesce teams around their dreams. The team keeps waiting for the Dreamer to take action and do something. Unfortunately, the Dreamer either doesn’t have the commitment or energy needed to achieve the dream, or lacks the skill to know how to achieve the dream.
Visionaries are very similar kinds of leaders. They can see the future and can speak to it eloquently. Most times though, they are lacking the passion and energy to take action that will make the vision become reality.
Experts like to make change happen on an incremental basis in order to refine the current state of things and assure that their world is safe, secure and consistently delivers the outcomes they desire. They are great at following up on significant change in order to improve it and make it efficient and effective, but they don’t always move as fast as needed.
Professional Followers enjoy supporting change and rally in support of Dreamers, Visionaries and Experts, as well as true leaders of change. Unfortunately, they frequently disappoint as leaders when they can’t make something actually happen. You will encounter these followers and will need to build a solid trust relationship before they will follow you.
Dreamers, Visionaries, Experts, and Professional Followers are critical players in making change happen. They need true leaders to help them achieve what they long for.
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