After a few years in the trenches, I have gained an appreciation for how to lead from the top down. I have been blessed to be able to follow in the footsteps of top executives like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg.
I think it’s crucial to learn how to lead (both effectively and productively) from people at the very top of the game. They lead from the view of others and are usually the best possible leaders. They are the ones who understand the whole thing and can explain it, and they will often get things done better and quicker than anyone else. They also have a natural understanding of what will work and what won’t work in a given situation.
This is why a lot of business leaders don’t have any ideas about what they plan to do, even though they know that they want to do it. They feel that they can’t do it without someone else to tell them what to do, and they’re afraid of being criticized for their ideas. So they simply don’t do it. But they should, because it’s an important skill to have.
Leadership is a skill that needs to be learned, but it also needs to be applied in an effective way. In the same way that someone can get a great idea, but have no idea how to implement it, a leader needs to have a clear understanding of what they want to do, what they need to do, and how they should do it. In fact, the best leaders often have a plan, even if they dont have a firm idea of what they plan on doing.
It seems like the best way to get a good idea is to ask the question, “what is the ideal state of the organization?” And then figure out how to get there. For instance, if a leader decides that they are going to do something that would be a bad idea in the short run, but is a good idea in the long run, then they should consider what they can do to get the idea implemented.
The question, “what is the ideal state of the organization?” is one of the most important questions you can ask yourself. The answer is usually a bit complex, but the short answer is that there’s no single “ideal state” of a company. What you should be asking yourself is, “what is the best state of the company as it is today?” and then figure out how to get there.
This problem is why I like to think of leadership as a series of action steps. I’ve heard many different ways of saying it. The short answer is that it’s not. The way I see it is that one of the most important characteristics of leadership is to lead by example. The more people you lead, the better off you are. Leading by example is not a one-time thing, it’s a continuous process.
This is a great way to think about it. The best companies are those that have been able to lead their entire organization into a state of continual improvement and innovation. In other words, if you want to be a leader, you have to change the way you lead. To illustrate this, I went to work for a company that was having trouble with an internal issue they were facing. I helped them develop a set of principles and procedures for improvement. The process they implemented was both effective and sustainable.
In a similar way, our idea for a business improvement project, leading change, is to take your company and build a set of principles and procedures that are both effective and sustainable.
What makes leading change so effective? For starters, leading change is not a linear process. It’s like having a conversation with your team. People on your team feel challenged and empowered by the conversation. They feel that they can do something about the problem and the solution. They are not “leaders”; they are the problem.
