New Paradigms on Becoming a Leader

Copyright © 2013 by Acene F. Fleurmons.

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Rev. date: 03/19/2014

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CONTENTS

Introduction

How To Become A Leader?

Chapter 1

The Future Leader And Self-Control

Chapter 2

Making A Difference In All Circumstances

Chapter 3

Avoid Seeking Position

Chapter 4

Good Work And A Model Of Management

Chapter 5

Readiness For Empowerment And For Taking Responsibilities

Chapter 6

Good To Great

Appendices

Appendix A

Source Of Capacity Of Production

Appendix B

Discrimination At Mctown

Appendix C

Of Necessity For The Managers To Respect Their Employees

Appendix D

About Employees’ Right To Complain

Appendix E

A School Bus Inspector Should Be A Person With Moral Character

Recommended Readings

INTRODUCTION

Becoming a leader should be one of the greatest ambitions a person could ever have. Leading other people seems to be such an honorable thing, which has potential to elevate one’s status with prestige, honor, and so on. It is so true that I will spend my lifetime to encourage you all to go for it, to fight with your soul and spirit—except with your body—to step after Mahatma Gandhi who was able to lead India to its independence using non-violent fight—in order to reach this mountaintop. However, it is not without prices and responsibilities. It seems that a leader’s responsibilities are greater than his rights in such a point there is nothing to gain in leading other people. It would have been better to be led than to be leading. So leadership would bring more pain to a leader’s life than satisfaction. However, as leadership must be about serving others and the spirit of service leads to greatness, it is good to aspire to become a leader. Now, what does it take for one to become a leader? Responding to this question will be all our endeavors in writing this book.

HOW TO BECOME A LEADER?

John C. Maxwell, the first leadership guru the world has ever known, is the one to teach us how to become a leader. In his book, Developing the Leadership within You, Maxwell (1993) defined leadership as art of influencing other people. It means that one who can influence others, or who can learn how to influence others is on his or her way of becoming a leader. Leadership, therefore, implies influence. Maxwell (1993) wrote the followings: Leadership is influence. That’s it. Nothing more; nothing less (Maxwell, P. 1). Maxwell contended that one cannot be a leader without followers, and to foster this idea, he referred to James C. Georges who had already declared that leadership is the ability to obtain followers (P. 1). Now, how can one make other people follow him/her?

One who aspires to become a leader and who wants to make others follow him/her should learn and get insight of the following ten principles:

1.   Self-control and Self-discipline: A leader should be able to control himself and to discipline himself, or herself in all matters.

2.   Making a Difference: A leader is the one who has desire to make a difference in all circumstances.

3.   Avoidance of Seeking Job Position: A leader is the one who avoids seeking any job position because he or she knows that job position does not make anyone a leader, but a manager.

4.   Avoidance of Competition: A leader does not compete, but works moderately toward accomplishment of a goal along with others, if it’s necessary.

5.   Responsibility: A leader is one who believes that taking responsibility should be one of the greatest things a person could ever do, which makes that individual accountable for himself or herself and for others.

6.   Relationship: A leader should be ready all the times to develop relationship with others at one level or another one.

7.   Decision-making Matters: A leader is one who is cautious when it comes to making any decision; he is trying to make the right one and act accordingly.

8.   Vision: A leader is one who sees things from very far and who’s never satisfied with status quo, but who always looks beyond limit, which is accessible to lay people.

9.   Search for Efficiency, Quality and Improvement: Not only a leader is one who wants to do the right thing, but he strives to do it right too in order to be efficient. In addition, he always wants to reach perfection (quality) in order to satisfy others. Therefore, he is always focused on continual improvement.

10.   Agent of Change: A leader is one who thinks of change continuously and looks for a way to make it happen.

Before I go any farther, I would like to summarize the main problems that leadership seeks to solve everywhere human beings exist and co-exist for common purpose. It seeks the development of a greater management of anything that needs to be managed in order to have a better result. Remark that I do not say the best result, but a better one. It is because there is no best way of doing anything, but a better way of doing things. Therefore, there will be different approaches, different processes and procedures based on the actual situations. This is what Frederick W. Taylor did not understand when he thought that he could present the best method of production to the world, and this is what decreased the value of his scientific management theory. He wrote the following: Before starting to illustrate the principle of scientific management, or task management as it is briefly called, it seems desirable to outline what the writer believes will be recognized as the best type of management which is in common use (Taylor, 1911, P. 12).

However Peter Ferdinand Drucker thought that Taylor was wrong in his book The Practice of Management by writing this: The belief that work is best performed as it is analyzed is also wretched engineering (Drucker, 1954, P. 282). Unfortunately, it appears that Drucker made the same mistake when he assumed in another book he published in 2001, which is The Essential Drucker that there must be one organization structure and one way to manage people. I too can assume, otherwise, that the reality doesn’t support Drucker’s ideas. This assumption is proven by the fact that some organizations have a hierarchic organizational and management structure while some others have a flat one.

We must accept that there are different organizations’ structures and ways of managing people if only we accept to welcome the idea of change, improvement and search for leadership dimension in the intent to have greater organizational results. Remember that searching for a better way of doing things is seeking improvement. Therefore, a manager who is looking for a better management is also one who is looking for greater results. That individual must be, without a doubt, a leader, and because there are different leaders having different perspectives and approaching the problems in different ways, there should not be a unique way of managing and solving organizational problems.

Because of the spirit of this inquiry, this manager will be in obligation to search for value and value his or her employees because the organization is forcibly made of employees, according to Abraham Maslow. If there should be employees to share their expertise in order to think organization, then managers should search for them and get them on board, and on the bus available where the boss is not a ruler, but a team supporter. According to my understanding and observations, employees form the centerpiece of the organization. In addition to the employees, there are the shareholders that need to be considered employees that can work along with different types of individuals and help meet their needs. So, a manager needs to make sure that he hires the right employees for the open positions. A good employee, however, is not defined only according to his or her skills, but also his temperament, his willingness and readiness to learn and to apply his or her learning experience to improve the quality production, or to progress from lack of perfection toward perfection.

Based on my knowledge of temperament as a certified temperament therapist and as one who holds an advanced certification of Clinical Pastoral Counselor, awards given by the National Christian Counselor Association, I want to advise hiring managers to put more emphasis on the new hire’s temperament. The reason why I think this way is that most of human’s dealings are based on our temperament and how we deal with it. One may have a simple temperament or a blend one. Temperament specialists such as Richard Gene and Phyllis Arno (husband and wife, founders of the NCCA) contended that human beings are born with their temperament (s), and some of them are more emotional than others (Arno and Arno, 1993). They wrote the followings: Temperament is the inborn part of man that determines how he interacts to people, places, and things (P. 1). It is good to know that all of us are emotional-temperament based, and if one stops being emotional, he or she stops breathing or he or she is not alive. One can be emotional while dealing with others, but he or she needs to be able to control his or her emotion in order not to exhibit bad mood and attitude that are dishonorable.

The first paradigm a leader should understand is self-control, the elements of which include control of emotion, control of mood, and control of attitude. Controlling these elements should be considered as the ABCs of what a future leadership candidate is required to do. If you can do this, then you will be able to make a difference and to be a leader. What is self-control and what are the elements that make it up? These elements are discussed in the first chapter of this book.

CHAPTER 1

The Future Leader and Self-control

The greatest problem of the world today is lack of self-control. The world is made up of people, leaders who have too much pride and who seek to be viewed and honored in the first place or above all; they want others to follow them blindly and develop alienating relationship with them; they need praise unconditionally and people to listen to them and pay attention to them. This is a one-way relationship. But it had to be a reflexive one, a symmetric relationship based on which leaders listen to followers and vice versa. There would be equilibrium in this kind of relationship. Therefore, it will be able to sustain and survive. Leaders who have problem balancing their relationship with their followers seem to be those who have self-control problem; they are self-centered and egoistic leaders. They pretend that they were born leader. They may have bile problem that may be of choleric nature. Those leaders have problems of assembling themselves when they have control of the environment. They over-estimate themselves by trying to just dominate others and claim their obedience. I think they need to know that leadership is not about themselves, but others. One of the ways leaders can forget themselves to serve others’ interests is by using their self-control. So it is good to instruct the future leader about self-control.

Walters (1987) has already stated that Self-control is managing our attitudes, feelings, and actions so they serve our long-term best interests and those of others (P. 17). I like this definition because it stipulates that it is not about the interest of others first, but of the leader first. Everybody needs some great things to happen in his life. According to the Golden Rule, which is found in all cultures (John C. Maxwell, 2003, Ethics 101), that person should want those things to happen in others’ lives too.

However, Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher, father of the existentialism, thought that we need to determine others, first, or we do not need to determine ourselves at all because when we determine other, we determine ourselves as our liberty depends entirely on others’ liberty. This could appear paradoxical because one cannot love others and hate himself in the same time. I should love myself in order to love others. The scripture teaches that one should love others the same way he loves himself. This infers that I love myself, first, and I love others, next, and I know what good thing I want to happen in me, first, before I want that same thing to happen in them too. Fortunately, Sartre is not paradoxical because he knows that while I determine others I determine myself, and other is nothing else than myself. Therefore it is good to see others, first, when it comes to leadership. Nevertheless, there should be engagement to govern our relationship, according to Sartre (1970) in his book Existentialism is Humanism.

What are the characteristics of self-control? A man who has self-control is one who is able to control his mood, his attitude. He is also one who is humble and consequently one who never exposes himself in order to receive praise, but who always gives praise to others. In addition, a man who has self-control talks less and listen more to others; he avoids vain discussion and has a special manner to disagree with anyone when they’re wrong. If he gets himself into any discussion, it is to enlighten some paths, in the proper way.

Moreover, a person who has self-control is one who avoids being the winner, but instead wants that everyone to be a winner. This is why that person never wants to compete, but to work as team with others. This part will be developed in a separate chapter. Additionally, a self-controlled man does not want to represent a threat to other and to his environment; if possible, he tries to be nice consistently. He expresses his apologies when he is wrong, and smiles appropriately. Last, a self-control man takes advantage of all occasions to congratulate others for their accomplishments and encourages them to do more, or to initiate steps that lead to success, according to Kouzes and Posner (2007). We are going to see each of those characteristics individually in this present chapter of this challenging book Principles on Becoming a Leader.

Control of Mood

Mood looks like something that belongs to our body that is difficult for someone to hide when he/she appears to be sad or mad. It is like emotion. Dictionnaire.com defines mood as a state of feeling at a particular time. Someone may say that it is my temperament. Mood is different from temperament because one is not born with it, but on the contrary, it is a personal expression in different situations based on some events related to our view of the world. It conditions the way we sleep, dream and wake up in the morning. It is also a part of our education, our past experience, but still attached with our body composite, or our personality.

Why someone has always bad mood while someone else gets the exact opposite? Sometime, you can find a person who stands in the middle. Is it because that person has received great education at any university, or because he or she learns to deal with different and difficult situations? Sometimes, people who are more educated than the others commit the graver mistakes than some people who have been not at school at all.

Self-control is synonym to self-education. However, one who has been at school and who takes some