The 5 Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential (15 page)

Author and pastor Rick Warren observes, “You can impress people from a distance, but you must get close to influence them.” When you do that, they can see your flaws. However, Warren notes, “The most essential quality for leadership is not perfection but credibility. People must be able to trust you.”

Most people don’t want to admit their mistakes, expose their faults, and face up to their shortcomings. They don’t want to be discovered. They don’t get too close to people because of the negatives in their lives. And if people receive a leadership position, the urge to hide their weaknesses can become even stronger. Most people believe they must show greater strength as leaders. However, if leaders try to maintain a façade with the people they lead, they cannot build authentic relationships.

To develop authentic relationships on the Permission level, leaders need to be authentic. They must admit their mistakes. They must own up to their faults. They must recognize their shortcomings. In other words, they must be the real deal. That is a vulnerable place to be for a
leader. And truthfully, it is one of the main reasons many leaders never progress from Level 1 to Level 2 in leadership.

If we’re honest, we must admit that some individuals are naturally gifted with people. They interact well with others and easily develop relationships. Level 2 comes naturally for such people. But what about people who are not naturally gifted at working with people? For them moving up to Level 2 usually doesn’t come as easily. If they want to win Permission with others, they have to work to make themselves more likable.

For years I have observed people who do not work well with others, and I have asked myself why they don’t. My conclusion is that in most cases, people who are not likable don’t like people very much. I’m not saying that they
hate
others. But I am saying that they don’t care for others enough to commit the energy needed to make good connections with them.

I believe that people will not get ahead with others unless they are willing to get behind others. How can we do that? How can we become more likable? By doing the following:

• Make a choice to care about others. Liking people and caring about people is a choice within your control. If you haven’t already, make that choice.
  
• Look for something that is likable about every person you meet. It’s there. Make it your job to find it.
  
• Discover what is likable about yourself and do whatever you can to share that with every person you meet.
  
• Make the effort every day to express what you like about every person in your life.
  

If you want to win people’s permission and lead effectively on Level 2, you must like people and become more likable.

Auto pioneer Henry Ford once asked, “Why is it that I always get the whole person when what I really want is a pair of hands?” Let’s face it: relationships are messy. Many leaders would rather deal with people only in terms of their work life. But the reality is that when you lead someone, you always get the whole person—including their dysfunctions, home life, health issues, and quirks.

Good leaders understand that the heart of leadership is dealing with people and working with the good, the bad, and the ugly in everyone. They do this on Level 2. Leadership experts Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus put it this way:

I think if we’re honest, we have to admit that the messiness of people problems is what can make leadership no fun. So often, as we get to know others and we start to see their flaws, we become disillusioned with them. And we often end up like the woman at a cocktail party who was trying her best to look happy. Someone noticed a gargantuan sparkling rock on her finger and exclaimed, “Wow! What a beautiful diamond!”

“Yes,” she said, “it’s a Callahan diamond.”

“I wish I had one!” the onlooker replied.

“No, you don’t,” the woman tartly responded.

“Why not?”

“Because it comes with the Callahan curse.”

“The Callahan curse—what’s that?”

With a deep sigh and a forlorn look, she said, “Mr. Callahan!”

The more we learn about others, the more disappointed we may be. Why? Because each of us has imperfections and irritating habits. We all fail. After the Nixon years, Billy Graham said, “Everybody has a little Watergate in him.” We must learn to accept that about one another and still work together.

As a leader, you may be tempted to build relationships only with the people you like or with whom you are highly compatible, and to ignore the others. However, by doing that, you have the potential to lose a lot of people. It’s important to remember that while the things we have in common may make relationships enjoyable, the differences are what really make them interesting. Good leaders on Level 2 deal successfully with these differences and leverage them for the benefit of the team and organization.

Good leaders are able to look at hard truths, see people’s flaws, face reality, and do it in a spirit of grace and truth. They don’t avoid problems; they solve them. Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass once said that you can’t expect to get a crop without plowing, and you can’t expect rain without thunder and lightning. Leaders who build relationships understand that conflict is a part of progress. Often it is even constructive.

The bottom line on Level 2 is that most of the downsides of leadership come from dealing with people. If you care about people and understand them, then you expect things not to go smoothly. If you go into
leadership on the Permission level with that expectation, it frees you to lead with a positive attitude and an open mind. You know that as long as people still have a pulse, you will be dealing with messy and difficult situations.

I
f you find yourself in a place where you need to start working to win people’s permission on Level 2, what should you do? How can you make the most of the opportunity to develop as a relational leader? Do the following:

One of the secrets of connecting with people and building relationships is knowing and liking yourself. In my book
Winning With People
, I call it the Mirror Principle, which says, “The first person we must examine is ourselves.” The work in relationship building always has to start with yourself. What does that mean?

Human nature seems to endow people with the ability to size up everybody in the world but themselves. Very few people are gifted with natural self-awareness. So what is a person to do? Become a student of yourself. Learn your strengths and weaknesses. Ask others to evaluate you. Understand the way you think, feel, and act in every kind of situation. Then once you know who you are, forget about yourself
and place your focus on others. You will relate to other people from a place of strength.

I know people who’ve never gotten along with themselves a single day in their lives. They don’t like how they look. Or they wish they had been endowed with different gifting or a different personality type. They don’t like where they came from or where they’re going. There are a lot of things you can change about yourself. Work hard at those. But there are also many you can’t. Accept them. Take the advice of Thomas Jefferson: in matters of conscience, stand like a rock; in matters of fashion, go with the flow.

Comedian Jack Paar quipped, “Looking back, my life seems like one big obstacle race, with me being the chief obstacle.” Most people who don’t get anywhere in life have themselves to blame. They don’t believe in themselves. They create problems and then pretend they are someone else’s fault. They want change but won’t grow. It’s very difficult to be self-deluded and successful at the same time. Even the few who manage to pull it off can never sustain it. If you want to build relationships, you need to be honest—starting with yourself.

If you want to change your life for the better, then the first thing you must do is change yourself for the better. Author Samuel Johnson advised that “he who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief which he purposes to remove.” Too often we look outside of ourselves for the
source of our problems. The reality is that many come from inside of us.

Every significant accomplishment begins with one person stepping up and committing to make a difference. That person then takes responsibility to pass it on to others. If you don’t take responsibility for yourself, then don’t expect your life to become any different from what it is right now.

Permissional leaders don’t rely on rules to lead people. They don’t depend on systems. And they never try to rule with a stick. (Anyone who does needs to know that every stick eventually breaks.) Instead, they use a personal touch whenever they deal with people. They listen, learn, and then lead. They develop relationships. They have more than an open-door policy—they know the door swings both ways. They go through it and get out among their people to connect.

Herb Kelleher said, “Leading an organization is as much about soul as it is about systems. Effective leadership finds its source in understanding. Unless a leader has an awareness of humanity, a sensitivity toward the hopes and aspirations of those he leads, and the capacity to analyze the emotional forces that motivate conduct, he will be unable to produce and be successful regardless of how often other incentives are given.”

Another way to say it is that good leaders
never
take people out of the equation in anything they do. They always take people into account—where they are, what they believe,
what they’re feeling. Every question they ask is expressed in the context of people. Knowing what to do isn’t enough to make someone a good leader. Just because something is right doesn’t necessarily mean that people will let you do it. Good leaders take that into account. And they think and plan accordingly.

If you want to be successful on Level 2, you must think less in terms of systems and more in terms of people’s emotions. You must think more in terms of human capacity and less in terms of regulations. You must think more in terms of buy-in and less in terms of procedures. In other words, you must think of people before you try to achieve progress. To do that as a permissional leader, you must exhibit a consistent mood, maintain an optimistic attitude, possess a listening ear, and present to others your authentic self.

One of the criticisms of permissional leadership is that it can become manipulative. I agree that leaders who put an emphasis on motivating people can use leadership for personal gain at the expense of others. There is a fine line between manipulating people and motivating them. However, a permissional leader can keep that tendency in check and keep from crossing over from motivation to manipulation by following the golden rule.

I am often given the opportunity to travel internationally and speak to a wide variety of audiences with different cultures, languages, histories, values, and interests. However, all request that I spend some time teaching them about integrity in relationships. In those situations, I always teach the golden rule: “Treat others as you want others to treat you.” That simple rule can be universally understood and followed. It establishes the relationship standard that make sense and can be applied. And it is a core teaching that can be found in every culture and religion. It is the simplest, most profound, and most positive guide
to living there is. Take a look at how many variations on the golden rule I was able to find and the religions from which they come:

Christianity: “Whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them.”
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Islam: “No one of you is a believer until he loves for his neighbor what he loves for himself.”
⁸

Judaism: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary.”
⁹

Buddhism: “Hurt not others with that which pains yourself.”
¹⁰

Hinduism: “This is the sum of duty; do naught unto others what you would not have them do unto you.”
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Zoroastrianism: “Whatever is disagreeable to yourself, do not do unto others.”
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Confucianism: “What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.”
¹³