Influential Leadership Can Be Learned!
You’re an established business leader in the prime of your career, or an emerging leader who intends to advance. Like the hero of my first book, The Power of Strategic Influence, you’ve come a long way from having no influence to being known for your reputation, experience, and expertise. You’ve acquired some valuable leadership skills, success and status. Many people would be happy to be in your position.
But you’re not satisfied with status quo success, and for that reason, you are confident that your journey is far from over. You’re someone who wants to seize the bigger opportunities that lie over the distant horizon. Your goal is to make a lasting contribution to your company, industry, and community. In the future, your mindset and legacy objective will be that you gave back more than you received.
In short, you want to rise to the level of Influential and Become a Super Leader. The ultimate goal in that process? To master leadership, to achieve business performance excellence, to win for your team, and to benefit others around you.
Like the gallant explorers who traveled to distant lands in their mighty ships, you also seek to forge new alliances, open new markets, pursue world-changing innovations, build wealth, and influence.
Few people are winners on this scale. It’s not a job for the faint of heart.
But here’s the secret: Influential leadership can be learned! Acquiring competitive competencies is achievable, and developing one or more leadership attributes into a personal superpower is doable. It just requires a weekly self-development plan, that you consistently apply to your daily routine. You will see that little by little, stride by stride, over time your skills, your confidence, and your ability to lead others to will magnify and the results will off the charts. The success formula is threefold, 1. Personal Assessment, 2. A Weekly Plan, and 3. Consistency are keys to making it happen. You don’t need to be born a prodigy, or a genius. In fact, if you look back through history, many of our greatest and most influential leaders began life as perfectly ordinary people. Examples are Jeff Bezos, Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk, Howard Schultz, Larry Ellison, and Ralph Lauren. No one could have predicted what they would become later in life. Through their own dedication, they developed themselves step by step, reached a high level of success, and then instead of settling, wanted to go higher.
No one is born with the ability to be a super leader but, it can be learned. If you’re determined, you can teach yourself the necessary habits which in turn develop over time into highly competitive skills. But to achieve these skills you must raise your sights, look to the horizon, envision yourself as a high performing leader, and—this is the most important thing—follow a personal plan to identify, develop, and acquire the leadership competencies and then the competitive superpower that will set you apart from the competition.
If you’ve read my first book, The Power of Strategic Influence, you’ll recognize that this book is a deep dive into Success Factor 8, “Identify and leverage your competitive competencies.” Developing some level of proficiency in multiple competencies will add a competitive element to leadership skills, thusly named, competitive competencies. For leaders who want to go to the ultimate level of leadership and create a legacy by mastering their expertise in one or more competencies, these we shall call Super Competencies , or Competitive Superpowers. You may recognize this idea from Malcolm Gladwell, who proposed that to become an expert or master of something, you must spend an enormous number of hours practicing, exercising, and developing your skill—10,000, he suggested. It’s common sense that no leader could become an expert or master in 13 different competencies (to do that would require 130,000 hours, or about 42 years of training eight hours a day!), so I will share a process so you can identify the 13 leadership competencies that you can acquire more quickly, and over time master one or more of them into competitive superpowers.
LIFE AND LEADERSHIP COMPETENCY PROGRESSION PATH
Look at it like a Life and Leadership Competency Progression Path with four levels (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Life and Leadership Competency Progress Journey
At the broad base—level one—are all the Human Competencies in the world that anyone can acquire. Ranging from playing the violin to leading a team of mountain climbers, there are far too many to name! So, the base of the mountain, comprising every human competency, is very wide.
On level two, you’ll find the Career Competencies. These are about independence and career achievement that will become relevant for building a foundation and reputation for creating personal value in your industry. While still very numerous, this is a much more limited set than level one, with many competencies omitted. For example, on level two you won’t find the competencies of singing nursery rhymes or fly fishing in Canada. These are wonderful skills but generally won’t help you achieve Influential Leadership Mastery. (There can be exceptions, which we’ll mention later in the book. Right now, we’re keeping it simple.) On level two, you will find Career Competencies such as personal communications, financial acumen, and innovation. There are hundreds more, but this collection has a limit.
On level three are the Influential Leadership Competencies that you will identify and choose to develop as taught in this book. They are the competencies most valuable to you in your career and life. When a leader is labeled influential, they have the skills to affect positive change within a team or organization. Possessing influencing leadership skills give you the ability to encourage and persuade others to adopt your ideas. It’s important to note that having influential competency is a skill necessary to motivate people, and make teams more productive but without demanding or coercing. Influential leaders are inclusive and understand how people want to be influenced, with the ultimate goal to enhance commitment toward achieving goals.
At first, these competencies, especially those associated with leadership and influence competency may seem daunting because you feel that it all up to you. Nothing could be further from the truth. Leaders who achieve the title of influential do not go it alone. Independence was your objective when you were progressing from Human to Career Competencies, but once you become a leader and are ready to commit to the journey of becoming influential, with the hopes of arriving one day at the level of Legacy, interdependence or inter-reliance is your objective. Figure 1 illustrates that the climb is steep, a solo act, and seemingly impossible. But, as demonstrated in Figure 2, influential leadership and achieving legacy status, is all about inter-reliance.
Figure 2. Life and Leadership Competency Progression Path – Inter-reliance
In summary, to achieve influential leadership embrace inter-reliance. Do not try to go it alone. The greatest deeds are accomplished by people (leader and team) working together toward a common goal. This is where exponential growth and success can happen!
Top 40 Ranked Competencies
In this book, I present 40 top ranked competencies, which you’ll want to winnow down to 13, a manageable number once you learn to use the Influential Leadership Mastery System I will teach you in Part Two.
At the very top, are the Legacy Competencies. These are the one or two leadership competencies that you have identified, and for which you have a high degree of passion and have chosen to develop into competitive superpowers. This is what will set you apart among other leaders. As you develop a high degree of expertise in certain leadership competencies they will earn you the potential of legacy status. It will allow you to board your ship and take your leadership to the ultimate level, that of leadership mastery, as you sail to distant lands, meet other leaders, and form strategic alliances with them.
Acquiring a competitive superpower is a process, not a destination. Even Benjamin Franklin said that after a lifetime of working on his character mastery self-improvement program, he failed in becoming perfect in them: “On the whole, tho’ I never arrived at the Perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell short of it,” he wrote. “Yet as I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier Man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”[i]
In this book, the reason we’ll discuss 40 leadership competencies is because leaders need to become competent, proficient, or skillful in multiple aspects of business so they can offer a general view, a professional opinion, and provide value toward the entirety of the business. I offer 40 that were developed from a three-year survey study I conducted with more than 1,000 leaders who ranked their favorite competencies resulting in a top 40 list. This allows you to choose from the best of the best competencies as chosen by leaders around the world. This doesn’t mean the leader needs the expert skills to perform in every job, but they need enough competency to be able to contribute and relate to the whole of the business. Without that general and competent viewpoint, a senior leader, entrepreneur, or business owner can’t effectively guide a world-class company.
As you read this book, and begin to focus on a rigorous self-development program of 13 leadership competencies—and by using the Benjamin Franklin-style program—you can set a realistic bar of first becoming skillful, with the loftier goal and determination to turn one or two of your leadership competencies into competitive superpowers, thus attainting the Mastery of Influential Leadership and Becoming a Super Leader.
