Leadership is a collection of behaviors and supporting skills that enable you to motivate people and organizations to work together toward a common cause more effectively than they could do alone.
The Value of Becoming a Leader
Being a leader can change your life. It can position you to lead your sports team, club or student group. It can make it easier to get into a good college. It can prepare you to be an entrepreneur and build your own business. It can also increase your impact and effectiveness and help you inspire others to be the best they can be. Becoming a leader can also help you get a better job, both now and in the future.
Learning to lead is one of the most important investments you can make. It is also easier than you may think.
Roadmap to Leadership
To become a leader, you must act like a leader so your team will trust you and believe you have what it takes to lead. To do that, you need to learn to employ the behaviors and skills that leaders use to lead. The roadmap looks like this:
Roadmap to Becoming a Leader:
Watch what other leaders do.
Start behaving like a leader.
Become noticed by members.
Earn trust and respect from members.
Be perceived as a potential leader.
Increase your self-confidence.
Do more things that leaders do.
Repeat as necessary.
This roadmap works well if you have good leaders to watch or know enough to be able to distinguish good leadership behaviors from bad.
Leadership Behaviors
Here are the ten leadership behaviors you need to learn and use. Five of these are Commitment Behaviors that relate to your commitment to and relationship with the organization and its members. These Commitment Behaviors are used by leaders and members, although they use them in slightly different ways. The other five are Execution Behaviors that relate to implementation and making things happen.
In their Commitment Behaviors, leaders do, and encourage their members to do, these things:
Care – They’re committed to their organization and its members.
Foster Connections – They grow and facilitate interpersonal relationships.
Contribute – They contribute their time, skill and ideas.
Collaborate – They are team players who encourage a culture of teamwork.
Motivate – They inspire their members to do more than they think they can do.
In their Execution Behaviors, leaders do these things with help and participation from their members:
Build – They build trust, people and the organization they lead.
Set Priorities – They focus on the things that matter most.
Make Sound Decisions – They make collaborative, objective, reasoned decisions.
Innovate – They create a culture where the best ideas win.
Create Positive Results – They have a sense of urgency to make things happen.
Supporting Skills
Leaders use supporting skills to make these ten behaviors more effective. These supporting skills are like the background knowledge we all carry around as we move through school, sports and life. We learn various skills and then use them to do things. The better we are at the skills, the less we need to think about them when we are applying them and the faster and more spontaneous we are in integrating them into our actions.
The supporting skills you need for a particular leadership position may vary from group to group and may change over time. This Guide uses a dozen supporting skills to make the point:
Communication, Confidence, Courage, Curiosity
Delegation, Dependability, Determination
Empathy, Enthusiasm, Ethics
Initiative, Resilience
You don’t need to have high marks in all these skills to be a good leader, but you do need reasonable competence, together with an understanding of why the skills are important and how they relate to your leadership responsibilities and behaviors.
The better you are at the supporting skills you need, the easier and more natural your leadership will seem.
Listen, Watch and Learn
Wherever you go and whatever you do during this early phase of your leadership experience, be a vacuum cleaner. Listen, watch and learn. Adopt what works and discard the rest.
Remember that people who are good leaders are not always leading for good. You may be able to learn some positive leadership behaviors from them, but you would not necessarily want to emulate the goals and purpose of the organizations they lead.
Start Your Journey
That’s it. You have completed the Quick Start Guide and you are ready to begin your pathway to leadership. It’s an exciting trip that requires practice, patience, resilience and tenacity. But the rewards are worth it.
Leadership is a life-long opportunity fueled by continuous improvement. No matter how much you know, you can always learn more. No matter how much you learn, you can also do more as you apply your leadership in new positions and organizations.
Leaders not only change their lives, they change the lives of the people they lead. Some of those people will become leaders who will change more lives, and so the torch will continue to be passed, improving more and more lives as more people learn to be leaders.
You can be a part of that endless chain. Lead for good, and pay it forward by helping more people learn to lead.
This article is based my article on Medium.com at https://medium.com/@CEHarris/quick-start-guide-to-leadership-for-teens-and-young-adults-9c1f5806ebcc
For more information about learning to lead as a teen or young adult, see Ticket to Lead: Young Adult Edition, which includes additional information about the leadership behaviors and supporting skills described in this post as well as examples of how young adults apply the behaviors.
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