Leadership Determines Effectiveness


I believe that success is possible for almost everyone. But I also believe that the better you lead, the more successful you can become. The higher you want to go and the more success you want to achieve, the more leadership you will need. The greater impact you want to make, the greater your influence needs to be.

What you can achieve is limited by your ability to lead others.

Leadership is the key to personal and organizational success. If a person's leadership is strong, the team or organization can achieve more. If leadership is weak, success is limited. That is why organizations often look for new leaders during difficult times. When a country faces problems, it elects a new president. When a company loses money, it hires a new CEO. When a church struggles, it looks for a new senior pastor.

The same is true in sports. When a team keeps losing, it looks for a new head coach. In professional sports, talent is usually not the main problem. Leadership is. Good leadership starts with the owner and continues with the coaches and key players. When leaders at every level are strong, the team has a good chance to win. When leadership is weak, the team rarely succeeds.

You can find many smart, talented, and successful people who can only go so far because of their leadership limitations. One example is Apple Inc.. When Apple started in the late 1970s, Steve Wozniak created the technology behind the Apple computer. However, his leadership ability was limited. His partner, Steve Jobs, had strong leadership skills. He built Apple into a world-class company and one of the most valuable businesses in the world. This shows the Law of the Lid.

Another example is McDonald's. Dick McDonald and Maurice McDonald founded the company, but they did not have the leadership skills needed to grow it into a large business.

In 1954, they met Ray Kroc, who sold milkshake machines. After visiting their restaurant, Kroc saw its potential. He believed McDonald's could expand across the country. In 1955, he started McDonald's Systems, Inc., which later became McDonald's Corporation.

Before Kroc joined, the McDonald brothers had sold only fifteen franchises, and only ten restaurants had opened. Their leadership and vision limited the company's growth.

Kroc thought differently. He bought a franchise and used it as a model for future restaurants. Between 1955 and 1959, he opened one hundred restaurants. Four years later, there were five hundred McDonald's restaurants.

During his first eight years with McDonald's, Kroc took no salary. He borrowed money to pay key leaders and build the company. He had the vision and leadership ability to make McDonald's a nationwide business. In 1961, he bought the exclusive rights to McDonald's from the brothers for $2.7 million and turned it into a famous American company and a global brand.

ON A PERSONAL NOTE, this is how I learned about leadership. I was an associate at my workplace, where new business opportunities were handled by the senior leaders. Another junior associate and I were assigned to work on a project, and when all the senior leaders returned, they were going to use our contribution.

So we decided to do the work ourselves. We collected the data. We wrote the deck, came up with the strategy, and completed the entire project. When the senior leaders came back, we told them we had finished the whole deck. They used our strategy, but we lost the business.

What I learned from this experience is that a leader takes responsibility. When something goes wrong, I don't blame others. I am the first person to say, "This happened on my watch."

Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell is the best leadership book I have ever read. I trust you will enjoy and benefit from reading this book, just as I did.


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