What kind of leader are you? Part IV

By Wisdom Kwame Nuworkpor FCCA, ICA, MBA

Throughout this month, we have been studying leadership and have so far looked at the first three stages of John Maxwell’s leadership hierarchy: Position, Permission and Production.  Today, we will be looking into detail, the 4th stage of the hierarchy which is People Development.  

Level 4 - People Development

Great leaders are those who are able to empower their people.  This is a distinguishing feature at the 4th level of John Maxwell’s leadership hierarchy.  Leaders at this stage use their position, relationships, and productivity to invest in their people until they become leaders in their own right.  

The development of people starts from the recruitment phase.  It is important for the leader to hire the right people at the on-boarding phase but that should not end there.  There is also the need to nurture your people as great leaders personally deal with the issue of nurturing their people.

In nurturing and developing your people, ensure that they are assigned demanding tasks that will help them use their strength to their advantage.  Set a process in place to regularly assess their performance and development. Provide feedback and monitor the outcome of the feedback.  

Level 4 leaders usually end up reproducing themselves.  As a result, people follow these leaders because of what the they have done for them personally and this is usually a lifelong relationship.

According to John Maxwell,1 two things happen at Level 4 of the hierarchy. First of all, teamwork goes to a very high level because people know each other and the more people know each other, the more their loyalty strengthens.   Secondly, because there are more leaders on the team, they help to improve each other's’ performance and as a result, overall performance increases.

The fastest way to grow the performance of an organisation is to invest in its people. There is  positive correlation between number of leaders in an organisation and the organisation’s performance.  John asserts that “Production may win games, but People Development wins championships”.  

In researching into why some companies make the leap and others don’t, Jim Collins2 observed that, great leaders first looked out for “who” and then “what” followed.  According to Collins, during their research, they had expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy and getting people to pursue the vision.  On the contrary, what they found was that, great leaders first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats -  and then they figured out where to drive it. Collins added that, the old adage “people are your most important asset” turns out to be wrong.  This means that the right expression should be “the right people are your most important asset”.  

Next week, we shall conclude the series by looking at the 5th level of the leadership hierarchy (Pinnacle).  

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References:

1 John C. Maxwell (2011), 5 levels of Leadership

2 Jim Collins (2001), Good to Great: why some companies make the leap....and others don't.