Positive Leaders in History
Let’s take a quick walk through history…
- George Washington (1732-1799)
- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
- Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
- Mother Teresa (1910-1997)
- Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)
- Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
- Dalai Lama (1935-present)
What do the names on this list covering nearly three centuries have in common? To start, they all made the cut for an article leverageedu.com shared called Top Great Leaders of the World… But that’s just a small part of why I’ve included only these rather than their entire list. While all of these leaders provided great examples of The Lasting Impact of Positive Leadership, they had very different beginnings but all dedicated their lives to making things better for the people they served.
If you think back to the three specific Positive Leadership Qualities we worked through recently (humility, trust, service), I believe we could make a strong case for showing that all eight I’ve listed here exemplify each of them! Although they led at different times, for very different reasons, and with significantly different leadership styles, I’m not aware of any one putting their own interests ahead of the people around them. Without question, they each had a positive impact on the world around them during their lifetimes and an impact that we all still feel in one way or another today.
If you were to check out the entire list referenced in that article, you may wonder why I left out the other seven… They’re all very well known in history and achieved tremendous success by building their empires, be those geographic or in business. But let’s be honest, at least a few of those listed were more focused on conquering and controlling than they were serving in a way that provided better lives for everyone who followed them!
Make no mistake, fortunes can be made through the authoritative control of positional power just like they can from the authentic influence of genuine leadership. In many cases, those fortunes mount up faster and stack up higher - at least in the short term. But like Cindy shares in the second lesson of our Emerging Leader Development course, very few people are willing to make the investment required to truly lead if they’re only chasing money or power. Those who do make that investment, and do so with selfless motives, can absolutely expect to make an impact that lasts and see the kind of benefits over the long haul that others never will!
Leaving a Legacy Through Positive Leadership
If you did happen to click the link above to check out the complete list of who LeverageEdu thought were histories top fifteen leaders, I doubt you had any issue understanding what I meant in saying that some were more focused on conquering for their own glory rather than serving for the best interests of the people around them… While they did indeed rule their respective empires, I don’t see where they left the same kind of legacy that George Washington, Martin Luther King, or Gandhi did! I’ve had a few different conversations recently touching on this, and how the results can be so much better through a servant leadership approach than we can ever expect from the “because I said so” approach - especially if we’re hoping to achieve results that have the lasting impact we’ve looked at leading up to this point.
Twenty years or so back, one of my mentors shared a story with me about how he had to go into the facility we both worked at during a holiday shutdown. There were only a few maintenance team members working so the odds of him running into anyone during the few minutes he was in the building were pretty low. It just so happened that one of those maintenance folks was working in an electric panel box right by the door he went in, and that fellow just happened to be doing so without wearing safety glasses! Not only were safety glasses required throughout the facility, the potential for eye injury from this particular task was much greater than nearly every other job in the building. While Terry could have brought down the proverbial hammer, since he was that team member’s direct supervisor, he chose a different approach; he shared his concern for the electrician’s safety as well as an example of how someone very close to him was severely injured doing a very similar task without wearing safety glasses. The team member agreed to wear the glasses moving forward and they both went on with their day… As fate would have it, the plant manager walked through that same door just minutes after Terry left the building, and he would most certainly have used the hammer approach! Not only did Terry’s approach help the team member avoid disciplinary action, it resulted in a long term change in behavior that definitely lowered the risk that he’d suffer an eye injury for the remainder of his career.
When we base our management style on the carrot or stick approach, we’ve got to make sure the carrot and the stick are somewhere nearby for either to have any real bearing on the actions our team members choose. But when we lead our team based on what’s best for everyone involved, we will be able to impact their choices even when we’re nowhere around!
In the example Terry shared with me all those years ago, a very clear benefit was the reduced chance of his employee being injured. Having worked in the safety field for so long, I know all too well how injuries impact an organization’s bottom line - with the direct costs of caring for the injured person as well as the indirect costs of significant injuries affecting everyone involved.
Just in case safety and profit aren’t enough, I’ll challenge you to consider how thin your time is stretched in a leadership role… If you’ve got to be standing over everyone’s shoulder wielding the carrot & stick to have any hope of getting the results you’re after, can you have any real expectation of getting those same results when you’re not there? And there’s no chance at all of those results building any kind of legacy!
In just that one example, we can see how the lasting impact of positive leadership benefits a team member’s well-being, the organization’s profitability, and the leader’s overall effectiveness by allowing them to get results in multiple areas without being everywhere at once. Since that may still not be enough for everyone to buy in, let’s wrap this all up with a few more benefits of positive leadership…
The Difference Between Success and Failure
In digging through some material I could use to tie this all together, I found an article from a group in the UK called BusinessWest that opened by stating, “The leadership of a business is felt throughout an organisation and can be the difference between a company’s success or failings.” If we’re truly interested in leaving a legacy, the choice between success and failure is pretty obvious so we need to be sure we’re doing everything we can to strengthen the positive leadership qualities we’ve identified to be the most important in our respective organizations. By developing effective leadership, that BusinessWest article suggested that we can expect to see return in five areas; more buy-in to the vision, increased morale, improved communication, higher employee motivation, and better equipped employees.
Through our Building Buy-In Around a Clear Mission & Vision webinar, as well as several other lessons in our Leading At The Next Level program, we’ve provided some really specific detail on how each of the first four things listed can make a measure impact on a company’s performance so I won’t hash each of those out again here… The last one though, better equipped employees, almost seems like something that should go without saying. But apparently it does not!
I’ve often heard team leads, foremen, supervisors, or whatever title you wanna give them, comment on how frustrating it is to tell a team member what they need to do and that person just not get it… I've also seen more than a few scenarios where the employees engaged in getting the work done struggle to accomplish tasks due to lacking resources - whether that be machines malfunctioning or simply not having the parts necessary to complete the process. I get it, there’s a lot of pressure on those supervisors to see that things get done. But if we want to build a culture that succeeds both now and in the years to come, we need to work toward developing the skill sets of our leads, supervisors, and managers so they can genuinely have the lasting impact of positive leadership rather than just barking orders on a day to day basis.
I recently heard someone suggest that one of the most important things a leader can do is to remove the obstacles their team members face in completing their jobs. To me, that’s powerful! I’ve frequently seen where people have believed servant leadership meant stepping in and doing the work for someone. That’s not true. The most effective way a leader can serve their team is to make sure they have everything they need to perform their jobs well and work to eliminate the roadblocks they could run into along the way; the things those team members aren’t likely able to do themselves…
When we get good at fulfilling that part of our leadership role, we’ll soon see the direct impact this has on our organization’s productivity and profitability - as well as the first four things the BusinessWest article mentioned! But all too often, this gets derailed because executives and owners don’t have anything set aside in their budget for developing their leaders so they can make a lasting positive impact. That money is already being spent though so we’ll pick up there soon!