Darrell L. Browning is a principal founder of BrowningLaFrankie LLC, a Philadelphia-area based company specializing in helping companies manage crises, train leaders in media and presentation skills and facilitate strategic change through leadership development and organizational development training, workshops and individual coaching. Browning is the trainer-of-choice at The Wharton School MBA Program at the University of Pennsylvania in crisis communications, media training and business writing. Browning has more than 20 years of media experience with CBS-Radio, daily newspapers and national magazines. He holds degrees in Journalism and Social Sciences from The Ohio State University. For more information see http://www.browninglafrankie.com.
By Darrell L. Browning
Tom Peters may be a business guru, but he fails to list courage as an essential ingredient of leadership. He does have the tried-and-true on his list: performance-freaks; straight shooters; the vision thing--but we think he misses the point.
Effective leadership is grounded in others--not you. A better list of ingredients would be Courage, Integrity, Humility and Compassion. Especially humility.
Courage isn't having the gumption to downsize the company when necessary. Courage is getting up in front of those employees-and exposing your vulnerability-while listening to criticisms, anger and disappointment. Leaders don't run from a fight; they embrace it head-on. And you can't lead from behind a closed office door. It is equally impossible to be a good leader without having-and expressing-feelings for others.
The first thing a leader must be is a human being. That being said, what you do next will determine if people will follow you, believe you or dismiss what you say as nonsense. The most common example of the latter is the oft-heard (but rarely believed) expression: "People are the most important asset around here..."
My father was a salesman, and a very good one. He once told me that if someone has to <i>tell<i> you a product is good, it probably isn't. And I've been in many companies that say they value employees yet their leadership actions say otherwise. You can't just say it and make it so: good leaders with real convictions know that. They know how to communicate reality.
Courage has a layer of self-awareness underneath that contains personal characteristics that do not waver. John Kenneth Galbraith, the famous economist, said leadership was the ability to get others to change while having the strength of character to set the right examples--and stick with it. In other words, if you have courage, you get the behaviors you reward in yourself--and others--back in return.
Simply stated, leadership is knowing what is right--and then doing it.
For more information see http://www.browninglafrankie.com.
©BrowningLaFrankie 2008.
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