Why Are Most Managers Such Ineffective Leaders?
They are not leaders, they are firefighters. When you become a firefighter you don't lead anymore. You don't decide where your team is going. The fire decides for you. You become unconscious of opportunity. You become blind to possibilities, because you are immersed in, and defined by the FIRE itself.
If you're an unconscious manager instead of a true leader, when you put the fire out, you hop back on the truck and take off across the company looking for another fire. Soon, all you know is fires and all you know how to do is fight them. Even when there is no real fire, you'll find something you'll DEFINE as a fire because you are a firefighter and always want to be working.
A true leader doesn't fight fires 24/7. A true leader leads people from the present into the future. The only time a fire becomes relevant is when it's in the path of that future. Sometimes a leader doesn't even have to put the fire out. He sometimes just takes another path around the fire to get to the desired future.
A firefighter, on the other hand, will stop and fight every fire. That's the basic difference between an unconscious manager (letting the fires dictate activity) and the true leader (letting desired goals dictate activity.)
Can you teach an unconscious manager to be a true leader?
Of course you can. If you are going to turn me into a true leader, you begin by making what is unconscious (my commitments and operating principles as a leader) become conscious and clear. That's step one. That process is as simple as teaching someone how to use a computer, or how to speak a new language. Simple, but not easy.
Isn't leadership something people are born with, or, at the very least, develop at an early age?
No, leadership is a skill, like gardening or chess. It can be taught and it can be learned at any age if the commitment to learn is present. You can teach a mentally healthy 90-year-old to become good at gardening or chess. It's not something the person was born with or had to learn early in life. Companies can turn their managers into leaders.
If companies could transform all their managers into leaders, why wouldn't every company just do that?
They don't know what a leader is, most of them. They can't define it. And if you don't know what it is, how can they teach people to do it? If I don't even know what the game of chess is, much less how to play it well, how can I teach it to anyone else?
