There’s a great website that I’ve been blogging and commenting on called Sales Management 2.0. I’m involved with a group there and we’re reading and blogging on John Maxwell’s book "The 360 Degree Leader". The book is awesome for people in any role including sales that aspire to become leaders. I recently wrote the following post I’d like to share with you:

 

The next area of The 360 Degree Leader I’d like to talk about is Challenge #2 - The Frustration Challenge: Following An Ineffective Leader. I imagine we’ve all been in situations where we felt like our leader wasn’t very effective. Truthfully, that’s one of the ways I came upon my own personal leadership style - I had several ineffective leaders who I felt weren’t that good. Not to say that I was better, but I just knew that they weren’t effective. So when I began leading on a small scale all I really did was decide not to do the things that the worst leaders I worked for did. That actually was a good strategy for me. I knew that if I concentrated on the opposite of what it was I didn’t like that they did, I couldn’t fail. And you know what? It worked.

Later I learned that there were other ways to develop my leadership abilities. The most important one was to spend time with effective leaders in the organizations I worked for. That proved to be a very valuable exercise. Today this is known as "sharing best practices." Another way to spend time with effective leaders is to read their work and listen to them teach. That’s how I came upon books like this one, The 360 degree Leader by John Maxwell. One of the first books I read by him was Developing The Leader Within You which was originally written in 1993. It is still today one of my favorite books by him or any author for that matter.

But in this chapter, The Frustration Challenge, Maxwell talks about the different types of leaders that no one wants to follow. He gives poignant descriptions of 7 types of leaders that are difficult to follow. He then follows them with 6 solutions to become not only effective at following those difficult leaders but how to lead around them and help them become better leaders by adding value to them.

And that’s the key, I think, to following an effective leader. Maxwell states that "the stronger you are as a leader, the more likely you are to face a situation where you can lead more effectively than the person to whom you report." If you can find ways to add value to your leader in a tactful way, you’ll not only be helping them improve buy you’ll also begin building respect for yourself in your leader’s eyes.

And with that, I’ll leave to your reading assignment of Challenge #2. This is quite possibly one of the toughest challenges of leading from the middle. Maxwell nails it as you’ll soon find out. Happy reading!