By Tom Davidson
What lucky kid doesn’t love to color with crayons, finger paint or shape clay? When I was a child, I loved to draw airplanes. I was particularly good at the PBY-5 and the Sabre Jet.
At one point, my parents gave me a “paint by the numbers” kit, which had small paint brushes, several brightly colored paint containers and pages of animal, car and airplane graphics with numbered spaces showing where to spread what color paint on each one. Eventually I grew into gluing together and painting model airplanes, and my older brother helped me hang dozens of them from the ceiling of our bedroom.
My parents encouraged the “artwork” – and the mess – for a while, either because they thought I was developing a talent or because it kept me quiet for reasonably long periods of time. But I never grew into any kind of artist.
Just because a person likes to talk, doesn’t make him a leader
Leadership is like that. We start out by developing basic communication skills, learning (as babies) that we can get what we want by exhibiting certain behaviors, and developing an individual style for getting along and getting ahead on the playground, random lessons that stick with us for years.
Pretty soon, the bullies and the wallflowers get jobs and get promoted into supervisory positions, usually not because of their leadership skills but because they were good at whatever individual job they were doing at the time. The most common mistake organizations make is promoting people for their technical skills, not their leadership potential.
Just because a person likes to talk, doesn’t make him a leader
In a study reported on in the Harvard Business Review, a global training firm found that supervisors are “operating within the company untrained, on average, for over a decade.”
Just as artists move up from random sketches to inspiring tapestries, leaders need to start early, learn simple models, collect basic principles, and study well-chosen mentors to get a solid foundation for leadership. Even then, we are only apprentices for years, practicing the basics so that we can learn from our own mistakes, develop our own range, and shape our own unique leadership style.
Only after years of practicing the basics do individuals learn enough to emerge as truly artful leaders
Whether you’re developing your own leadership or that of others, it’s important to do three things:
The author, Tom Davidson, CSP, PCC, SPHR is a former forester, fire fighter and survival instructor who learned leadership from the ground up to vice president of human resources and organization development. Tom trains new managers, coaches experienced ones, and speaks to audiences everywhere about leadership lessons from the great outdoors. He can be reached a tom@leadershipnature.com.