Leadership in a Nutshell

By Freddy Davis

Leadership is not a position of authority, it is a place of influence!

If you don't get this, you will never become a great leader. Most people tend to look at leadership based on the position a person holds within an organization. Certainly, many people rise to the top because they are good leaders. But sometimes the real leader is not the person who holds the top position.

If you want to be a great leader, it is not enough for you to work your way to the top. You will have develop the qualities that compel people to follow. In this book you will learn:

- What leadership is, and what it is not,
- How to prepare yourself for leadership,
- How to exercise leadership in real life,
- What personal and moral characteristics are necessary for leadership, and
- How you can effectively step into leadership.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Freddy Davis
• Release date: Jan 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466186088

Freddy Davis

Freddy Davis is the president of MarketFaith Ministries. He is married to Deborah and has one son, Ken. Freddy did his undergraduate studies at Florida State University in Speech Communications and received his MDiv and DMin degrees from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. In addition to his pastoral ministry and work with MarketFaith Ministries, Freddy served overseas as an international missionary for nearly 17 years (in Japan and in the former Soviet Republic of Latvia). Freddy is the author of numerous books, workbooks and other works.

Book preview

Leadership in a Nutshell

How to Lead with Confidence

By Freddy Davis

Leadership in a Nutshell

By Freddy Davis

Copyright © 2005 Freddy Davis

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 - What Is Leadership?

Chapter 2 - Preparing for Leadership

Chapter 3 - Exercising Leadership in Real Life

Chapter 4 - Developing Leadership Styles and Skills

Chapter 5 - The Leader’s Personal Qualities

Chapter 6 - The Leader’s Moral Character

Chapter 7 - Stepping into Leadership

Introduction

I have a very dear friend who is one of the most wonderful and faithful friends a person could ever have. Not only that, he is talented, very intelligent and a hard worker. In fact, he is quite a good manager. Give him a job to do and he puts great effort into seeing that it gets done effectively and efficiently. On top of that, he is not afraid to step into a position of authority. He has strong ideas about what he wants and about how things should be done in order to accomplish his goals. In fact, he really wants to be a leader.

The only problem is, most people don’t connect with his vision. As long as he is managing an established operation under the guidance of a competent person, he does an excellent job. But put him in the position where he is setting the parameters of the organization and things start falling apart. Try as he may, he is not usually effective as a visionary leader. This does not mean that he could not turn it around. I believe anyone can become an effective leader. But to do it he would have to change the way he approaches leadership.

Everybody wants things to go their way. Everybody has an opinion about how things ought to be run. But the fact is, very few are willing to take on the responsibility that leadership requires. Many want the prestige of the position, but want to leave the struggles of the responsibility to others.

Those who want to become leaders must grasp an essential fact. Leadership is not a position of authority, it is a place of influence. It is not about being the person with the highest rank, it is about having a vision and mobilizing other people to work together to accomplish that vision. A person can be in an official leadership position and not be the leader. It works from the other side, too. A person can hold sway over the outcomes that a group produces without being in an official leadership position.

Leadership in a Nutshell was written to help leaders, and aspiring leaders, understand the task of leadership. Leadership is lonely. It entails huge responsibility, and only those who are willing to honestly look out for the good of the group and carry the weight of responsibility for its well-being, regardless of the outcome, will ever achieve success as leaders. Read on and find out what you can do to become more effective in your leadership responsibilities.

Chapter 1

What Is Leadership?

Lee Kuan Yew is probably not a name that most people would recognize and, even if they did, would not likely agree with many of the tactics he has used as a leader. But, by most accounts, he has been a person who has very effectively shouldered the mantle of leadership.

Yew is the man who led Singapore to independence and served as its first prime minister. Under his guidance, Singapore has become a financial and industrial powerhouse, despite being a country which has very few natural resources.

His leadership style has been very authoritarian. He is the one behind the laws that make it even illegal to chew gum. But in spite of his authoritarianism, he somehow gained the deep respect of the people of Singapore to the extent that he was regularly reelected from 1959 until he voluntarily stepped down from power in 1990.

But Yew’s influence didn’t stop when he decided he would no longer be prime minister. Even after he was no longer in office, he remained in the cabinet as senior minister and, as of this writing, is still commonly recognized as the power behind the power. He is still the puppet master, pulling the stings behind the scenes. He finds himself with this kind of influence because, to this day, he is still regarded as virtually a national institution. How can that be? How can it be that a person still has that kind of power even though someone else is in the position of leader?

The Meaning of Leadership

Many people think of leadership in terms of position. They believe that the leader is always the one who ascends to a high station to exercise control over those in subordinate positions. Now, this observation is not meant to minimize the importance of position. In fact, most leaders do end up taking on the highest positions. When we look at high government officials, company presidents, club officers, military generals, and the like, we see confirmation of this fact.

But think about people in high positions that you have known. Among