Performance vs Leadership

Recently, I've been evaluating what makes a great leader. I think for years I have subtly had a perception that great leaders are people who get the job done. They are able to be QB and make the decisions that get the ball into the right person's hand at the right time to score the touchdown. But the more I work pursue leadership the more I find out the subtle problems that accompany this mindset. Without a doubt there are fundamentals that we should all be able to accomplish, but being a great QB doesn't make me a terrific leader.

Think about those leaders that you see as great... there's our problem. Most of our standard of great leadership is based off of how many people they have following them. Here is what I'm finding though... What is the level of leadership of the people following them? This is quite a challenging question, because if you can't define what leadership is to begin with it can make it quite difficult to assess the level of leadership of the person's followers.

Let's look a little closer. If we have a QB mentality the the ball always has to pass through our hands. Every play is dependent upon us and our ability. Every success becomes our success and every failure becomes our failure.

What I am struggling, straining, and striving to move towards is becoming a coach. See a coach knows all the positions. He knows the fundamentals that make people a success at every position, although he himself may never have played the position "professionally". But it's difficult to move from QB to Coach.

For those few people that have made the transition to coach, the hard part is training assistant coaches. For many of us, we make the initial move to coaching our teams, but we fail to ever build a structure that sets us up to coach coaches instead of just players. IF WE ALWAYS COACH PLAYERS WE ARE REALLY JUST QB'ING FROM THE SIDELINE!!! We must establish a structure that allows us to coach other coaches and develop them to coach players.

Of course recognizing that you need to make them coaches and actually making them coaches are two very different things. You can't just warp yourself to success, you have to move from where you are to where you're going... and that is a blog for another day!