What Makes a Good Leader?

Leadership and Legacy Defining leadership is never an easy task. Leadership is about managing people, but, quite often, it is about a lot more than that. It involves a visionary lookout into the future, it includes setting objectives and determining how to reach those objectives, as well as planning in the right manner to be able to handle the task of getting the human resource to perform in an adequate manner that will eventually lead to fulfillment. As such, leadership is not necessarily about the business world.

Leadership serves well as an attempt to define and understand how the military works, for example, and, in a more comprehensive and overarching manner, how countries are led in a successful way. Along these lines of defining leadership is Mark Sanborn's book. Sanborn looks at leadership in a comprehensive manner, not directed necessarily to leadership in an organization.

He tries to define leadership along general lines, including in relationship to our own actions in every day life, to how we related to others and how we pursue our objectives in different situations. This view includes the personal life, as well as our engagement in various situations, including volunteering or interacting with other individuals. On these lives, Sanborn presents six leadership roles, which are actually six principles of leadership.

This paper will look at these principles and analyze them from different perspectives, starting with how Sanborn describes and discusses each of them. The first principle is the power of self-mastery. The author proposes the idea that leadership starts with oneself and that, in order to lead others, one must first lead oneself. This is important, because it actually means that the individual needs to start by defining objectives for himself, decide where his life needs to go and understand how to reach those objectives.

The second leadership principle is the power of focus. Prioritizing is the key idea here. One needs to lead by prioritizing one's life and by properly understanding what our objectives are. Prioritizing is important because it means properly managing the various objectives. Leading starts with understanding what the key objectives are for the individual and then extrapolating these objectives towards the individuals around.

Sanborn makes a point out of various techniques, including, for example, having the patience to wait and to act only when the conditions are appropriate to reach the objectives. The third leadership principle refers to the relationship with the other people. I think this is likely the most important of all six principles. It translates from the first two leadership objectives/roles that refer to the individual and moves the focus to the relationship with the other people. Obviously, relating to the other people is essential in the leadership process.

Good leadership is often associated with being able to properly relate with other individuals and to making sure that they follow the objectives and tasks they are assigned. I think the key idea about this principle is that good leadership involves working with the people not through them. This ensures that there is proper teamwork and that the team shares the objectives that the leader has proposed. Likely, this makes the difference between a functional teamwork and a dictatorship.

One of the things that should be emphasized is that the team needs to embrace the objectives that the leader has proposed and agree with the line of action that he has set out. The next characteristic refers to the power of persuasive communication. The essential thing about this characteristic of leadership is the communication with other people. Passing down ideas and information is not enough, a true leader is able to pass on a vision and to make sure that the people understand and apply this.

This means effective communication, being able to have the others understand what the goals are and how to reach them. It also means that they are able to embrace these objectives in a coherent manner. The Power of execution, the fifth characteristic, refers to the ability to transform a vision.