Leadership Courses

[Bud Brown]

When I ask the question "What defines a leader?" I get a wide range of answers.
Some say that leaders care about their people. Others tell me that leaders are organized or goal oriented. Some say that leaders are charismatic or that they are dominating. All of these answers contain some of the truth.
The answer I like the best is that a leader is the person that people will follow.

So how do you get people to follow you?

If you have the title "boss" (in it's various forms) you will have the authority to require people to follow you (if they want to keep getting paid). The problem with that kind of leadership is that it is a lot of work. If you spend all of your time making people follow you, you will have no time to do the proactive things that leaders need to do.
A better way to lead is to do those proactive things like planning, goal setting, anticipating, communicating and knowing your people. When you do these things you will find that you attract like minded people to your cause and you act as a beacon to those who do not plan for themselves.

There are numerous course available on leadership. Most of them contain some terrific information but information by itself is useless until it is applied. This is the main problem that I have with on-line courses. There is no way for the instructor to tell if the people reading the information being made available are using those ideas or simply reading them and thinking "that's good stuff. I should do that."

Up to this point in my career, I have run courses in which the assignments are "go out and do what we just talked about and come back next week and talk about what happened when you tried it". The next week we fine tune the approach for that particular individual and everyone listening in on that fine tuning learns as well.

I will continue this thread in the days to come. If you want to see what my courses are about, you can review them at my website www.mcrgroup.net

[Bud Brown]

Leaders are people that others follow but how do you get people to follow you? I have been watching Michael Phelps lead the pack in swimming at the Beijing Olympics and thinking that all you need to do to be a leader is be first.

It is true that the rest of the swimmers are following Mr. Phelps but only because they chose to be in the same pool as he is in. The fact is that Michael Phelps has chosen his field based on his abilities. He has worked long and hard to be able to lead a group of extremely motivated hard working people in the same field. In such a group, it is true that all you need to do is be first in order to lead.

If you want to be such a leader then you have to pick the rest of your group based on their demonstrated ability and desire to achieve the same goals as you want. If you can find such a group in your field (and if you are able to be the best of such a group) then you are truly fortunate.

For the rest of us, leadership will require the ability to figure out what does motivate the people we do have and use that information to get them all swimming in the same direction.

[Bud Brown]

The Olympics is over and Canada accumulated 18 medals. This more medals than in any Olympics since 1996 (when we took 22 in Atlanta). Three of those medals were in the rowing competition where rowing coach Bent Jensen was serving as an inspiration.

Brent Jensen came to the rowing crews in Canada with a long history of successes so he had credibility. He understands the discipline well and gave good direction. He understands what motivates his rowers and keeps that motivation in front of them but Bent Jensen has kicked the coaching standard up one notch at this Olympics. He believes in his teams and the job he had taken on so much that he went with those teams to China for the games despite the fact that he is fighting cancer. He had to take regular chemotherapy treatments throughout the games and he could not ride a bicycle beside the rowers as so many coaches did. never-the-less, he inspired four of those teams to medal winning races.
What made the difference isn't the fact that he was engaged in a fight with cancer. It is the fact that even though he is watching the races from a wheelchair in the video room, even though he is going through debilitating chemotherapy treatments, he is still there to coach each of the rowers to their individual best contribution to the team. He is also there to ensure that when they do not perform up to their abilities they understand that and figure out how to get better. His philosophy is that you cannot beat someone if you are following in their footsteps that inspires his rowers to lead the pack.

That is what coaching is all about. Being right there to encourage your people on to their best performance. Correcting them when they fail and providing them with principles that will serve them well