Read The 5 Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential for Free Online Page B

located all his life, and everybody loved him. His influence was obvious as the other members of the board looked to him for direction and asked him questions regarding every issue. I could haveleft the meeting and no one would have cared. In fact, I could have left the meeting and no one would have noticed!
    I was shocked. In that first meeting and all the subsequent ones, all eyes and attention were focused on Claude, the
real
leader. The board members were not following me, even though I had the job title, the calling, the appropriate college degree, the office, the salary—all of the positional “stuff.” Claude had none of those things and yet they listened to everything he said.
    My mistake was thinking that I had become a leader because of my position, instead of recognizing it as an opportunity to become a leader. I didn’t understand that leadership was given to me but not yet earned by me. I was a little too much like the driver in this comic 4 :

    Back then I defined
leading
as a noun—as who I was—not a verb—as what I was doing. Leadership is action, not position. When Iarrived at that first church, Claude had been earning his leadership influence through many positive actions over many years. And people followed him as a result. Claude, who was a down-to-earth farmer, explained it to me later, saying, “John, all the letters before or after a name are like the tail on a pig. It has nothing to do with the quality of the bacon.”
    Leadership is action, not position.
    I have come to embrace leadership as action, and I endeavor to teach that concept to leaders in conferences and seminars at home and abroad. One of the ways I do that is through my international nonprofit leadership organization, EQUIP, which has trained more than 5 million leaders in 160 countries. The organization’s trainers and I have found the number one challenge in developing countries is introducing the idea of leadership as action instead of position. Leaders in these countries often possess an “I’ve arrived” mindset. We want them to understand one of the most important characteristics of leadership: leaders are always taking people somewhere. They aren’t static. If there is no journey, there is no leadership.
    Leaders are always taking people somewhere. They aren’t static. If there is no journey, there is no leadership.
2. Leaders Who Rely on Position to Lead Often Devalue People
    People who rely on position for their leadership almost always place a very high value on holding on to their position—often above everything else they do. Their position is more important to them than the work they do, the value they add to their subordinates, or their contribution to the organization. This kind of attitude does nothing to promote good relationships with people. In fact, positional leaders often see subordinates as an annoyance, as interchangeable cogs in the organizationalmachine, or even as troublesome obstacles to their goal of getting a promotion to their next position. As a result, departments, teams, or organizations that have positional leaders suffer terrible morale.
    Often to make themselves look better or to keep people from rising up and threatening them, positional leaders make other people feel small. How?
    By not having a genuine belief in them.
    By assuming people
can’t
instead of assuming they
can
.
    By assuming people
won’t
rather than believing they
will
.
    By seeing their
problems
more readily than their
potential
.
    By viewing them as
liabilities
instead of
assets
.
    Leaders who rely on their title or position to influence others just do not seem to work well with people. Some don’t even
like
people! Why? It’s a chicken-or-egg question, really. Do they not work well with people and as a result they rely on position? Or is it that because they rely on their position, they never take the time and effort to work well with people? I don’t know. Maybe both kinds of positional leaders exist. But