The 5 Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential (17 page)

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f you want to use the Laws of Leadership to help you grow and win Permission on Level 2, then consider the following:

If you boil leadership down to its essence, it is influence. Leaders help people work together to accomplish goals that benefit everyone involved. How does one person get others to do something willingly, excellently, and consistently? By influencing them.

When I first developed the 5 Levels, I called it The 5 Levels of Influence. Why? Because each time leaders climb a level, their influence increases. The influencing process begins at Level 2, where relationships are formed. That is where leadership begins the shift from coercion to cooperation.

Why do people initially want to be in leadership? Is it to gain power? To have more freedom? To receive a bigger paycheck? To feed their
ego? Many times leaders begin their careers with selfish motives. Maybe that’s not a good thing. But it doesn’t have to be a bad thing if we are willing to change and put our focus on others.

I’ve observed that most Level 1 leaders who have no desire to move up to Level 2 Permission haven’t gotten beyond the selfishness of wanting a leadership position for their own benefit. To move up to Level 2, leaders need to understand that great leaders practice the Law of Addition. They lead in order to help people and add value to them.

Trust is the foundation not only of leadership relationships but of all relationships. You cannot influence people who don’t trust you. You cannot build positive relationships with people if they perceive you negatively. Trust is the glue that holds people together.

Trust begins at Level 2 and it grows as you climb to the higher levels of leadership. If people trust you, they will be willing to move upward with you. Without trust, you’ll quickly find yourself back down at Level 1.

I’ve studied leadership dynamics since I was a teenager, and something I noticed early is that birds of a feather flock together. It is a fact of life that like-minded people are attracted to one another. Groups of people tend to be of similar age, values, and background. I’ve also seen that leaders attract who they are, not necessarily who they want.

As you gain influence in your department or organization, that can
be good news or bad news. If the people who start flocking to you are relational, nonterritorial, teachable, and productive, then that is a positive statement about your leadership. If they are positional, close-minded, and unmotivated, then that reflects negatively on your leadership. If you want to change your team, then change yourself.

If you want to build relationships and gain people’s permission to lead them, then work hard to connect with them. I define
connecting
as having the ability to identify with and relate to people in such a way that it increases your influence with them. That is what you must do on Level 2 to win them over and earn the right to lead them.

Leaders are by nature visionary. They have great hopes. They have big dreams. They want to win, and win big. But a great vision without a great team often turns into a nightmare. Teamwork makes the dream work. (I’ll discuss how to build a team on Level 3.)

Often leaders share their visions with me and then ask, “Do you think my people will buy into my vision?” When they ask me this, I know they don’t understand Level 2 Permission and probably haven’t won it yet with their people. Why do I say that? Because they’re asking the wrong question. Instead, they should be asking, “Have my people bought into me?”

The size or the worthiness of a leader’s vision often isn’t what
determines whether it will be achieved. The determining factor is usually the level of the leader. Before you ask people to move forward to achieve the vision, they must first buy into you as the leader. Before they buy into you as the leader, you must have earned their trust and gained permission to lead them. That begins on Level 2.

M
oving up to Level 2 from Level 1 is a significant advance in leadership ability. Very often an achiever or a producer will be given a leadership position at Level 1 with the expectation that the person can make the transition from worker to leader. Most of the people who fail to move up into leadership don’t make it because they never understand the importance of building relationships with the people they work with and gaining their permission to lead them. However, there are still more leadership levels to be won.

If you have worked your way up to Level 2 with people and have gained their confidence as a person who cares about them, then it’s time to start thinking the way a Level 3 leader does. To begin that shift, keep in mind the following three things:

Although the Permission level may bring you and your team great satisfaction relationally, if you stay on Level 2 and never advance, you won’t really prove yourself as a leader. The good news is that if you’ve connected with your team, you now have some influence with them. The question now is: what are you going to do with that influence?

True leadership takes people somewhere so that they can accomplish
something. That requires a leader to connect people’s potential to their performance. The Permission level is foundational to good leadership, but it is not your ultimate goal.

Throughout this chapter I’ve written about building relationships. In doing that, I’ve focused on how people need to grow
toward
each other. But for relationships to be meaningful, there is another kind of growth that’s also needed. People must also grow
with
each other. Growing toward each other requires compatibility. Growing with each other requires intentionality.

If you are married or in a significant long-term relationship, then you probably understand how these dynamics come into play. When you first met your partner, you moved toward one another, based on attraction, common ground, and shared experiences. You established the relationship. However, a relationship can’t last if you never go beyond those initial experiences. To stay together, you need to sustain the relationship. That requires common growth. If you don’t grow together, there’s a very good chance you may grow apart.

Similarly, if you are to have any staying power as a leader, you must grow toward and with your people. Just because you’ve developed good relationships with your people, don’t think that you’re done on the relational side. There is still more work to do.

Building relationships with people can be hard work. But to succeed as a leader and to move up to the higher levels of leadership, you have to be willing to risk what you’ve developed relationally for the sake of
the bigger picture. Leaders must be willing to sacrifice for the sake of the vision. If achieving the vision is worth building the team, it is also worth risking the relationships.

Building relationships and then risking them to advance the team creates tension for a leader. That tension will force you to make a choice: to shrink the vision or to stretch the people to reach it. If you want to do big things, you need to take people out of their comfort zones. They might fail. They might implode. They might relieve their own tension by fighting you or quitting. Risk always changes relationships. If you risk and win, then your people gain confidence. You have shared history that makes the relationship stronger. Trust increases. And the team is ready to take on even more difficult challenges. However, if you risk and fail, you lose relational credibility with your people and you will have to rebuild the relationships.

Risk is always present in leadership. Anytime you try to move forward, there is risk. Even if you’re doing the right things, your risk isn’t reduced. But there is no progress without risk, so you need to get used to it.

The bottom line is that you can slow down early in your leadership to build relationships on Level 2, or you can forge ahead trying to skip straight to Level 3—but if you do, you will have to backtrack later to build those relationships. And you need to recognize that doing that will slow your momentum, and it can actually take you longer to build the team than if you did it the right way in the first place.

Starbucks founder Howard Schultz said, “If people relate to the company they work for, if
they form an emotional tie to it and buy into its dreams, they will pour their heart into making it better.” I believe that is true. What is the key link between people and the company? The leader they work with! That leader is the face, heart, and hands of the company on a day-to-day basis. If that leader connects and cares, that makes a huge difference.

A
s you reflect on the upsides, downsides, best behaviors, and beliefs related to the Permission level of leadership, use the following guidelines to help you grow as a leader:

1. Be Sure You Have the Right Attitude toward People:
   The key issue when it comes to the Permission level of leadership is how much you like people and how much they like you. And here’s the good news. You can control how much you like people, and in general, if you genuinely like people, they will find you to be likable. This may seem too simplistic, but make a decision to like everyone from today forward—even if they don’t like you. Write out that intention, then sign and date it. If you need to, keep it in front of you as a daily reminder to make people a priority.
   

2. Connect with Yourself:
   To become someone who is good at building relationships with others, you must become the kind of person
   you
   would want to spend time with. Using the five components listed in the chapter for connecting with yourself, put yourself on a growth plan that will help you to win the following:
   

   Self-Awareness—
   know your personality type, temperament, talents, strengths, and weaknesses.
   

   Self Image—
   deal with any personal issues you may have so that you can think of yourself in a positive way.
   

   Self-Honesty—
   look at yourself realistically and decide to face reality, no matter how much it may hurt.
   

   Self-Improvement—
   make a commitment to grow in your ability to develop relationships.
   

   Self-Responsibility—
   acknowledge that you are responsible for your own actions and attitudes.
   

3. Understand Where You’re Coming From:
   Are you a naturally relational person who tends to put people ahead of productivity? Or are you an achiever who tends to put productivity ahead of people? You must recognize which you are, and learn to win both relationships and results.
   

4. Express Value for Each Person on Your Team:
   Take some time and come up with positive things that you can honestly say about each person on your team. Then take the time during the next week to tell each person at least one positive thing about themselves.
   

5. Evaluate Where You Are with Your Team:
   Write a list with the names of the people on your team. Now for each, determine how well you know them by answering the following questions (which come from materials the Eli Lilly corporation developed from the 5 Levels of Leadership):
   

   What three nonbusiness things do you know about this person?
   

   What does this person value?
   

   What are this person’s top three concerns?
   

   What does this person want or hope for in life?
   

   If you are unable to answer these questions for someone on your team, then you need to spend more time getting to know
   that person. Set aside time this week to get to know him or her better.
   

    
   

6. Accept the Whole Person As a Part of Leading:
   If you want to be a good leader, you don’t get to use people’s time and skills while ignoring or neglecting the rest of them as individuals. That’s not fair or right. Learn to accept responsibility for helping people and dealing with the messy side of leadership, or step down and get out of leading (without standing on the sidelines and criticizing the way other people lead).
   

7. Make Fun a Goal:
   One of the best ways for goal-oriented individuals to develop a more people-oriented style of leadership is to try to make the workplace more fun. If you’re more task-oriented than people-oriented, then make fun a goal on your to-do list. That will make it more palatable for you while at the same time making you more likable.
   

8. Give People Your Undivided Attention:
   Many people in the workplace today feel dehumanized and demoralized. They believe that the leaders and organizations they work for don’t care about them as people. To counter that, when you engage with people, pay attention and really listen. Few things communicate that you care for people better than giving them your undivided attention. And it doesn’t cost you anything but time.
   

9. Become Your Team’s Encourager-in-Chief:
   People are naturally attracted to people who give them confidence and make them feel good about themselves. You can be a leader who does that if you’re willing to become an intentional encourager. Try it out. For the next two weeks, say something encouraging to someone on your team every day. Then watch to see how the person responds. Do that with everyone on your team, and they will not only want to work with you, but they will also get more done.
   

10. Practice Care and Candor:
    If you care about your people, you’ll want to be honest with them in a way that helps them. When you see that someone on your team is making mistakes or in some way falling short, plan to talk with the person immediately. Use the caring candor checklist to make sure you do it in the right way. And remember, it’s hard to go wrong as long as you’re practicing the golden rule.