The Experience: Leaders Developing Leaders
Leadership is learned, rather than taught. The responsibility of developing leadership rests primarily with the aspiring leader. Learning is part reflection, part observation, and primarily a process of conscientious practice. Learning to lead is learning to “Be Yourself.”
Leaders emerge through a subjective process of self-knowledge and self-mastery. It requires a discipline of practice to uncover and develop one’s distinctiveness - one’s Leadership Fingerprint™.
Be Yourself
In this experiential process, The Centre’s position is that access to those who have led is fundamental to the development of authentic leaders. Leadership is information rich, knowledge poor, and wisdom impoverished. The wisdom and insights gained in the trenches of experience, shared by those who have led, creates a practice of leaders developing leaders.
It is helping the aspiring leader discover and find avenues “to be themselves.” When the confidence plundering effects of the challenge tempt the emerging leader to conventional action, those who have led embody hope and inspire the apprentice leader’s intention with courage.
Learning to lead occurs in the spiral of doing, reflection, and being. Reflection is essential to leadership learning and growth. It is the insights gained from experience that transforms knowledge into meaningful understanding.
Experienced leaders enrich the action/reflection process, holding a mirror to the aspiring leaders, helping them see more than they had seen. How does the emerging leader learn to discern the storms, the barrier reefs, the signs of troubled waters? Thus the need for those embodying leadership to help the emerging leader delineate the intricacies of patterns, read the signals, decipher opportunities.
Seasoned leaders offer wisdom gained through reflection, intuition, failure and recovery, and deep humility. Their wisdom legacy transcends the fad techniques embraced by popular culture’s search for leadership formulas.
Leaders developing leaders creates a legacy of leaders for the future.