Summary: The author argues that leadership is mostly learned through experience rather than formal training. While some leadership skills can be taught, effective leadership often requires personal growth and adaptability in real situations. Ultimately, the best leadership development comes from discussions and reflections among peers, allowing leaders to learn from each other’s experiences.
Leadership is the act of inspiring, influencing, and guiding others towards a common goal or vision. In short, a leader is someone who says, “This way everyone!” (View Highlight)
leadership inherently means not following prescriptive guidelines. Leadership is about independently assessing situations. (View Highlight)
A leader must have vision and foresight. (View Highlight)
A leader must make decisions in an ambiguous space. (View Highlight)
A leader must be able to inspire and motivate others. (View Highlight)
A leader needs to inspire and motivate others because the leader is convinced that a decision should be made despite lack of proof. This means you need to get others on board when you cannot prove that you’re right. (View Highlight)
Every leader needs to find ways of interacting with others, with a combination of authority, influence, and social understanding. (View Highlight)
Management is the responsibility to coordinate and organize resources (usually people) to achieve an objective or set of objectives. In short, a manager must ensure the work is organized, everyone knows their role, and resources are on track to achieve their objectives. (View Highlight)
A manager ensures that everyone is working on the next item on their list. A manager makes sure that the beds are cleaned in a hospital, and staff is assigned to those cleaning jobs. A manager ensures that all warehouse shipments are made on the right schedule. (View Highlight)
When does a manager become a leader? When they have ambiguous problems. When the step-by-step instructions no longer work. When the training ends, and common sense begins. (View Highlight)
You turn experience into leadership by adapting your behaviors, and learning from your mistakes. This skill of leadership is about self-improvement, and continual adaptation to actual experiences we’ve been through. (View Highlight)
college isn’t about learning specific knowledge, but it’s about learning how to learn. You’re building a framework for learning (and basic knowledge in your field) so that you can quickly learn when you hit the real world. (View Highlight)
leadership training, if done right, should be about learning how to become a better leader through our experiences. (View Highlight)
In the end, I think we grow leaders, we don’t build them from scratch. (View Highlight)