By Michael Shenkman
We have often heard how leading is a calling. That means
certain people step into the role, accept it and build their lives around
its challenges, demands and joys. But ask anyone who leads and they'll
tell you that the call doesn't come through a bullhorn blaring the message
that others are anxiously awaiting your leadership.
The call to leadership is subtle. It usually starts
with a nagging dissatisfaction with the status quo. The potential leader
detects that something isn't right (as we all do) and wants to take responsibility
for making things better. What's more, this potential leader envisions
something so large that it requires the collaboration of many people to
accomplish it. Some people feel they have a technical or service solution
to a problem that others couldn't solve. But only those who take responsibility
to act on that, joining with others, actually translate that feeling to
a company.
For other potential leaders, the call comes as a feeling
that the situation demands more from them but they don't know what more
they can do. The engineer can't be any more brilliant; the marketer can't
be any more prescient in her analysis. Yet, those technical accomplishments
don't seem to satisfy the way they used to. These people seek a different
kind of satisfaction.
So what turns the trick? What can tune the person in
to the call to leading? Every leader I work with cites the fact that someone
else took notice of his or her longing and identified it as the kind of
longing leaders have. "She saw something in me I didn't realize I
had" is a common recollection. And having recognized the calling
to leadership, the mentor nurtured his or her prospect on that path, taking
care to get the prospect's "skills of character"—self-awareness,
people skills, practical insight, and drive—in balance. Then the
mentor helped the prospect meld that combination of concerns and skills
into a state of resolve and acceptance, so that the leadership energy
that was welling up would strike a heart and mind ready to take action.
Heeding the call to lead, unlike heeding a call that
comes to an artist or a prophet, is one of those rare human events that
happens only in the context of significant relationships with other people.
The call can be missed because of its subtlety but, mostly, it can be
missed because leaders need to be recognized. Alone, most of us wouldn't
know what that static we are hearing is all about. That first recognition
is the crucial step, and a mentor is often the one who dampens the noise
so that the potential leader can get the message.
That call itself may be welcomed, feared or even refused.
But with a mentor's help, at least such noise can become a strong signal
capable of getting translated into a critical decision: to lead or not.
To learn more about mentoring and leadership, consider
these AMA seminars:
Author Bio: Michael Shenkman is president of
the Strategic Implementation Group of Keystone International, Inc., a
consulting firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico, specializing in leadership
development and organizational change. Contact him at 505-797-8881 or
mshenkman@archofleadership.com
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