Chapter 1
So You Don’t Think You’re a Leader, Huh?
The Top 10 Reasons You Already Are
Helping professionals possess the personal constitution, education and professional training, and hands-on field experience that not only prepare them, but already equip them, to hold positions of organizational leadership. They may not think so, but they do. They may not believe they’re qualified or calculating enough to be the head honcho (or the head honcho’s sidekick!), but leadership, like almost everything else, is about people far more than balance sheets and quarterly reports, and the realm of people is where you excel.
Business is often about dollars and cents. The helping professions are often about life and death. And people who are entrusted with young, impressionable, and vulnerable lives can certainly be trusted to handle the kinds of challenges and obstacles that populate a typical business executive’s day.
Let’s take a look, David Letterman–style, at the many ways and reasons you’re already poised to advance to positions of leadership in the organizations in which you want to make the greatest impact … and why you’re particularly well-situated and well-suited to do so.
Reason #10: You’re a Natural
Some things just come naturally to people. Certain kids seem to come out of the womb knowing how to draw, others put a mitt on their hand and it’s like an appendage that belongs on their arm, still others take to foreign languages or early reading remarkably easily. Proclivities, natural aptitudes, inborn talents, inclinations—call them what you will, we all have a collection of assets inside us that will unfold over the course of our lives and set us on the courses right for us.
Your assets include things like feeling compassion for those who are struggling, a compulsion to reach out your hand when you see someone in need, the desire to want to do something to correct an injustice instead of just standing by as a spectator. You know how to properly treat people, your communication style invites camaraderie and connection, and you reliably choose right over wrong—not because you consider yourself morally superior, but because you recognize that it’s just easier, and better, to do the right thing. People would say you have an admirable character, that you’re innately altruistic, and that you emit an aura of trustworthiness and genuineness. You are as concerned about others’ well-being as you are your own.
We’re not talking about skills here as much as what’s called a “helping mentality.” Helpers have it in spades. And although it’s a muscle that can be overworked or taken advantage of, if you learn to harness its energy so that it leads you to accomplishment rather than burnout, your helper mindset is one of the strongest mechanisms in your arsenal of personal power. It’s what led you to become a helping professional in the first place, and it will stay with you wherever you go, whatever you do, because it’s a part of you.
Raise your hand if you want a boss who has a “helping” mentality as opposed to a “help me” mentality.
Reason #9: You’re Already Viewed This Way
If you’re a professional helper of any sort, people already see you as a fixer. A problem solver. A confidant. A doer. That’s why they come to you seeking advice (don’t they?), why they depend on you to point them in the right direction.
You know how to keep a level head when things get unbalanced; you’re accustomed to upset people venting to you, maybe even blaming you for this or that dilemma; and you know how to be rational when the situation calls for it, how to lead with emotion when compassion is more in order. You can see solutions where others see complications, and you’re ready and willing to step in to assist.
Perhaps you’re the teacher who’s asked to teach the most difficult-to-reach students. Perhaps you’re the physician’s assistant called into the room to assuage the most irritating patients. Or the caseworker the rest of the agency turns to when an especially complex case is assigned by the county. If so, these are all signs that people think of you as a professional guidepost and they look to you to guide them.
Someone who fixes problems, listens to others’ needs, is counted on to dole out fair and just counsel, and always at the ready to help? Hmm, sounds like leadership material, wouldn’t you say?
Reason #8: You Don’t Need an MBA
This is a biggie that trips people up, that makes them think they can’t pursue their dreams because they don’t have the right degree. Simply not the case. That’s not to say an advanced business degree can’t help you in business—of course it can—only that someone who wants to advance to management or lead an organization isn’t required to have one.
In North America, 46 percent of CEOs lack an MBA.[i] Like who? Like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Barry Diller, and Ralph Lauren (among many others), that’s who.
Some form of higher education or graduate degree certainly can and will advance your career, but it doesn’t have to be an MBA; in fact, an MBA might not do you much good. A 2019 analysis by Institutional Investor found that CEOs with an MBA and those without performed equally well, leading to the conclusion, “MBA programs simply do not produce CEOs who are better at running companies.”[ii]
And an MBA holder can actually weaken a business. One 2015 study found that MBAs focused more on their own welfare than on their companies’ and thus let market value decline.[iii] MBAs may also refuse to ask for help, like drivers who get lost and won’t pull over to get directions. But helping professionals will ask for help—they’re in the business of help—another reason they make great leaders.
Point being: the lack of an MBA is no bar to leadership. You will need some specific business skills—you’ll need at least a basic understanding of finance, accounting, marketing; you’ll need to be able to read spreadsheets and profit-and-loss statements, comprehend the implications of debt and operating expenses. But you can acquire such knowledge from alternative sources, like books, evening or online classes, your organization’s accounting department or CFO, a mentor.
What you can’t acquire from books or classes or colleagues, however, is passion for your job, vision for your organization, and an appetite for expanding the good for the one into the good for the many. That’s your terrain, that’s your university.
Reason #7: You Have Essential Training
Both your formal education and your fieldwork have trained you quite a lot—trained you more than you probably realize—to manage both people and situations. As a helper, any decision you make at your desk—or in your car or on the street or in a school office or anywhere else you deliver your hands-on expertise—affects more than just you (sometimes not even you at all). By default, just by being a helping professional, your role is to serve others, and so you’re already conditioned to put their best interests first. That’s what leadership is about.
Maybe you’re saying, “Doesn’t everyone do that?” No, actually, they don’t. Graphic designers design. Electricians wire. Woodworkers craft, housepainters paint, and authors write. Now, their work certainly reaches others, touches others, and is usually commissioned by others, but their output is a reflection of their own proficiency and talent—it’s a direct manifestation of what they choose to create or produce or repair in return for compensation by a second party. You get paid for what you do too, but your work is a direct response to a societal need, and you deliver it through the vehicle of service. Human service.
To succeed in your job, you’ve learned to listen to both the words and the silences, you’ve become attuned to what motivates people, you’ve figured out what rewards they are seeking, and you know how to read the “vital signs” of a room. The ER worker is trained in triage. The teacher is trained in behavioral interventions. The youth counselor is trained in self-esteem building.
Additionally, you’ve been trained in the tools of your trade. The eco-maps used by social workers is a good example. An eco-map is a graphical representation that depicts all of the systems at play in a person’s life—a structural diagram of that person’s primary relationships with people, groups, and organizations that, in turn, identifies the resources available to them within their community. In employing and executing such tools, you’ve learned to measure, measure, measure. You know how to gauge outcomes, to evaluate improvements, and to separate results that don’t matter from results that do matter.
All of this adds up to a pretty cool (and useful) kind of leadership training!
Reason #6: You Know How to Defuse Crises and Formulate Plans
Suppose you’re a family therapist. One night you’re called to make a home visit after neighbors called the cops about the angry ruckus next door. When you enter the house, the adults are red-faced and shouting, one seems to be wielding a weapon in their hand. The kids are cowering in a corner, a baby is crying from another room. You viscerally absorb the stress in the room as you walk in, but you’re there to do a job. As quickly as possible.
That job is to immediately conduct an on-the-scene assessment and make on-the-spot decisions. Risk analysis, basically. What is the probability of actual violence here? Are there any illicit substances in sight, any alcohol involved? Should the kids be taken away or just sequestered elsewhere? Is there a need for an ambulance, for Child Protective Services … or just for a sit-down calming session? Have the adults’ reactions since I entered the room given me reason to believe we can talk this out peacefully?
Well, you do what you’re trained to do, everything and everybody calms down, and the police feel it’s safe to leave.
But skillfully managing the crisis isn’t the last stop on this train. Now what? What do you do next to help deter such incidents from happening again among this particular group of people, in this particular setting? Well, you create a plan to enact the next time the same tensions flare, and you get buy-in on this plan from the involved parties by pointing out the likely incentives for cooperation and the likely consequences of noncooperation.
You’re able to create this plan so promptly because your skill set includes astute examination, analysis, and interpretation of the facts and circumstances of troubling situations so that you can guide people away from them and toward effective solutions.
Sounds a lot like what business leaders do in their roles.
Reason #5: You See the Whole Picture
Just as the family therapist in the last example had to gather the pertinent details of a particular situation to generalize them to a larger pattern of behavior or performance, so any helping professional makes it their business to investigate whatever background information is needed to make an informed decision that best addresses the issue at hand in the foreground. So you use a combination of specific and wider observations, both concrete facts and abstract principles, to reach conclusions and then plan actions based on those conclusions.
We’ve all heard the expression “can’t see the forest for the trees”—it’s about focusing too much on the little stuff at the expense of seeing the big stuff. Scuba diving is another relevant analogy. The joy of the sport lies in going down deep enough to see the minutiae of the biosphere there, the very particles in the water beyond your mask. But the farther down you go, the darker the water gets, until you’re in utter blackness, unable to make out any dangers in your path. Only once you start rising toward the light can you regain the vision of what’s below.
Most organizations are similar—the nitty-gritty happens at the lower levels, but things can get awfully murky and confusing down there. The day-to-day operations happen on the ground, but if you’re just looking at leaf after leaf hanging from tree after tree, you can’t make out the whole of the forest from the bird’s-eye view, which helps you see exactly where you’re situated and in what direction you need to head.
You know how to do this. You know how to notice the details, but also the larger perspective they point to. You know how to deduce that the senior citizen’s refusal to eat his rice pudding isn’t because he doesn’t like rice pudding; it’s because he has a swallowing issue that he doesn’t want to admit because he’s desperate to be released home. You grasp that the kids weren’t fighting on the playground because Theo dropped the ball; they were fighting to release the hostilities bottled up inside from events at home.
Helpers have excellent micro- and macro-vision because they’re regularly tasked with scrutinizing the plight of one human being while simultaneously endeavoring to comprehend the human condition at large. And this is a precious skill to have: “When you step back and look at your entire enterprise—the ‘whole picture’—you see how all the small individual elements of it need to fit together with other pieces to create something masterful.”[iv]
Reason #4: You Have Insider Information
Lynette is a BCBA (a Board Certified Behavior Analyst) who works with individuals with autism in various home and educational settings. At lunch with a friend recently, she was overheard saying, “We’re getting a new director—another corporate suit who has no experience with autism. This has happened to me before, people coming in from the outside who actually hold us back. If I were an alcoholic, would I want to be in a recovery program run by someone who was never an addict? Why should I have to be directed by someone who doesn’t even understand what I do?”
Alcides Marte, a teacher in the Bronx, feels much the same way: “I went into teaching because I love the work. I love working with children.” But, she adds, “You really don’t have as much power as you’re told that you do. There are people above me that are making the rules for a population that they’re vastly out of touch with.”[v]
There’s a huge advantage to coming up through the ranks within your own organization over coming into a leadership position from the outside, both for you and for your staff. In an organization where you have performed the client-facing jobs yourself, you know what the people in those jobs need to succeed. You know their frustrations and complaints, their pressure points and their victories, what they’re happy with and what they’re not happy with about their bosses.
You already understand the organizational milieu and the environments in which the organization operates. You understand the services being rendered and the functions being performed because you’ve delivered and done them yourself. Most importantly, you’re intimately familiar with the populations being served.
When that “end user” is placed at the start of all processes and procedures, satisfaction levels soar for both the provider and the providee.
There’s a reason that all the head coaches in the NBA’s 2019–2020 season were former players at some level.[vi] You don’t just need to know the rules of the game—if you played the game yourself, you’ll have instantaneous creditability with everyone with whom you’ll work.
Reason #3: You Respect Others
We’re in the midst right now of a new phenomenon: the Great Resignation. People have been leaving their jobs in droves since early 2021, in spite of precarious global conditions, in spite of massive pandemic-related layoffs, in spite of the current economic downturn. Certainly there are generational and societal influences affecting quit rates, including evolving goals like an improved work-life balance, but generally and historically speaking, it’s safe to say that people quit their jobs when they don’t feel heard, seen, valued, recognized. People leave when they don’t feel respected.
But respecting others is built into your very constitution. You couldn’t be an effective helping professional if you didn’t view all human beings as equal, equally worthy of the dignity, decency, and opportunities you want for yourself and your loved ones. When you truly believe in egalitarianism, as helpers habitually do, you don’t condescend or patronize because you truly don’t see yourself as superior. You may know more than someone else or be more qualified in some areas, but you see that as an opening to share knowledge, not to embarrass or belittle someone else.
And the “toxic environments” everyone’s talking about these days? That’s something you’d never allow to stand on your watch, for you are dedicated to health and well-being. As you know, you don’t need to be in the medical field to be dedicated to well-being.
Professional helpers are usually adept communicators who wouldn’t allow disrespect or inequality or toxicity to take root in their workplace because they prefer to talk out issues rather than letting them fester. In fact, they’re very uncomfortable when things fester, and so they build conversations around and take measures to establish and maintain collegial harmony and goodwill.
As adept communicators, helpers are also prone to alleviate turmoil, to put people at ease; and because we work with people from all different types of backgrounds and education levels, we’ve become pros at breaking down complex information into accessible, easy-to-digest bits. We explains things to people in ways they can understand, meeting them where they are in the present moment, and they can feel that. They can feel when you’re talking to them and not down to them.
You can try to lure people with money, with promotions, with a bigger office window. But, ultimately, if they don’t feel you respect them for who they are, what they have to say, and what they bring to the table, they won’t stay. They won’t follow your leadership.
A good leader knows how to acknowledge and appreciate the contributions of others. That’s what you do every day, with virtually everyone you meet.
Reason #2: You Champion Others
The concept of “standing up for your people” originated in the helping professions in reference to clients. It translates directly to the business sphere as standing up for your team. It’s the same idea no matter how you look at it or how you phrase it. It’s more than having someone’s back. It’s more than encouraging them, providing emotional support to them, or believing in them. There’s action involved here too.
In your current job, championing others (both your coworkers and those you serve) looks like face-to-face coaching and mentoring when guidance would be helpful. It’s tracking down referrals and resources that people need to make positive shifts in their life. It’s sharing your knowledge and tools so that they can more closely approach their goals. It’s defending them, verbally and in writing, when they need protection, fighting for their rights when they’re being infringed upon, even acting as their guardian when they need family. Sound familiar?
In the tiers of organizational leadership, embracing the role of champion for all members of your team means promoting people based on merit, rewarding them based on performance, backing their creative ideas, investing in them by sending them to professional development workshops or covering the cost of their continuing education, preparing them for advancement. Champions aren’t afraid to broadcast loud and clear to anyone in the organization who will listen that this person is a rising star; they’re not threatened by others’ progress, they’re actually bolstered by it and take pleasure in their contribution to it.
Helpers who fill essential roles in society champion people naturally—they apply empathy and a generosity of spirit that cultivates fellowship and mutual respect, and the people on the receiving end of the champion’s efforts grow, evolve, and push themselves to do more because of that.
It’s the same in an office building as it is out in the field: “When you stand up for people, you show that you’re ‘on their side’ when they need help. This builds long-term loyalty, trust, credibility, commitment, and morale in your team, and it gives your people a confidence boost. It also shows that you are focused on your team’s well-being and interests, rather than on yourself. This helps to create a positive working environment and shows everyone that you’re a leader worth following.”[vii]
Ten to one—no, a hundred to one—that the people you work with now would say that virtually everything about you, your attitude, your dedication, your work ethic, your “cheerleading,” creates a “positive working environment” for them. That makes you a “leader worth following.”
Reason #1: The World Needs You
And the number one reason you’re ready to be a leader? Drumroll, please. Because the world needs good-hearted, good-intentioned, ethical people in charge, now more than ever. There is not one entity, network, association, institute, organization, consortium, or company the world over that cannot benefit from more understanding, more compassion, more righteousness, more benevolence. More humanity.
No matter what field you work in and for what employer, you can make it better. Your sheer humanity will make it better. (Not to mention your skills, smarts, know-how, discernment, competencies, and expertise!) Right now, you’re making things better for at least handfuls of people. As an organizational leader, you can extend that reach to all the people in that organization, who in turn better the lives of everyone they touch through the organization’s work.
You believe in community involvement and community immersion.
You practice the art of reciprocity.
You do good things for people and good things come out of that.
You know how to build relationships and rapport.
You work for the greater good over your own self-interest.
Your work is exhausting but it exhilarates you.
You regularly empower and encourage people.
You make a difference just by being you.
Someone like that—someone with those qualities and so many more—is exactly what the American business landscape needs right now, from sea to shining sea and from the mountains to the prairies: new and fresh seeds of promise and positivity to counter all the adversity and divisiveness flourishing around and among us.
Do not doubt your worth. Do not doubt the tremendous impact you can make. Do not doubt your power.
But you know who does? Women. Study after study shows that women are less confident than men,[viii] that they’re far less likely to self-promote,[ix] and that they undervalue their performance and leadership efficacy.[x] They shouldn’t. There has never been a better time in US history for women to lead, and there’s no better sphere in which they’re qualified to lead than the helping professions—a sector they have dominated since its inception.
[i] “The Academic Backgrounds of the World’s Most Powerful CEOs,” Study.eu, December 13, 2017, https://www.study.eu/article/the-academic-backgrounds-of-the-worlds-most-powerful-ceos.
[ii] Dan Rasmussen and Haonan Li, “The MBA Myth and the Cult of the CEO,” Institutional Investor, February 27, 2019, https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1db3jy3201d38/The-MBA-Myth-and-the-Cult-of-the-CEO.
[iii] In Irina Ivanova, “MBAs in Management Lead to Lower Employee Pay, Study Finds,” CBS News Moneywatch, April 4, 2022, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mba-degree-management-lower-worker-pay-study/.
[iv] Jason Villarreal, “The Importance of Seeing the Whole Picture,” TechNative, November 7, 2019, https://technative.io/the-importance-of-seeing-the-whole-picture/.
[v] Staff, “The Teachers Who Aren’t Coming Back to School This Year,” Chalkbeat.org, September 6, 2022, https://www.chalkbeat.org/2022/9/6/23220508/teachers-leaving-the-profession-quitting-teaching-reasons.
[vi] Cork Gaines, “Then and Now: What NBA Coaches Looked Like When They Were Players,” Business Insider, April 1, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/nba-coaches-who-played-2019-3.
[vii] Content Team, “Standing Up for Your People,” MindTools.com, accessed November 20, 2022, https://www.mindtools.com/aoae1dw/standing-up-for-your-people.
[viii] Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, “The Confidence Gap,” The Atlantic, May 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-confidence-gap/359815/.
[ix] Naomi Cahn, “Do Women and Men Have a Confidence Gap?” Forbes, February 26, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/naomicahn/2020/02/26/do-women-and-men-have-a-confidence-gap/?sh=58b12d8e7bd2; and Christina Pazzanese, “Women Less Inclined to Self-Promote Than Men, Even for a Job,” Harvard Gazette, February 7, 2020, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/02/men-better-than-women-at-self-promotion-on-job-leading-to-inequities/.
[x] Nadzeya Shutava, “Leadership Self-Efficacy and Self-Doubt: A Look at Women in the Workplace,” OurPublicService.org, November 3, 2022, https://ourpublicservice.org/publications/leadership-self-efficacy-and-self-doubt/.
