How can I build a great leadership team?

A good way to clear the ground for building a great leadership team is to first dispel five (or six) myths about leadership:

1.     Only some people are leaders

2.     Leaders are born, not made

3.     If you are an “X” leader, then under pressure you are XXX

4.     If you’re not leading the pack the view never changes

5.     There are only two types of leaders: Entrepreneurs and Managers

I unpack each of these myths in a short video on https://www.brettjohnson.biz/lemonpreneur which you are free to peruse.

There’s an ancient construct of leadership that has gotten lost in the hierarchies of the industrial revolution and not solved during the information era, namely, plural leadership. There were hints of it in the writings of the late 1970s, but for the most part, the cult of the top dog, “boss and < boss” thinking still persists. Talk of servant leadership and collaboration and congeniality do not erase the C-suite titles and thinking. Plural leadership is neither a committee nor a lowest common denominator of timidity and risk aversion. Rather, it is a collaboration of gifted leaders where “iron sharpens iron” is to be expected and where a clamoring to be in charge is subjugated to a need to sensitively discern who should be on point in any situation. Mostly it is not the CEO.

Against the backdrop of plural leadership we build great teams when we ensure we are covering all essential leadership types, however uncomfortable this may be. Apart from people skilled in their crafts, we seek out leaders who have all five slices of leadership: Luminaries, Entrepreneurs, Managers, Organizers and Networkers. I have often worked with leadership teams that suspect something is not quite clicking; after running assessments we find that they have either failed to hire or unintentionally driven away leaders not like them. Once we see the gaps we can figure out why they occurred and how to fill them. Striving for full representation of leadership types on an executive team is essential to building a great leadership team.

Want to know more? Follow this link:

1. LEMON Leadership