Read To Lead

We have said that leadership is fluid, flexible and often frustratingly hard to define. Fundamentally, however, it is about influence and direction: going somewhere with someone.

Leadership comes with such diversity that it would be impossible to experience every facet or expression. Still, the only real way to see the true art of leadership is to experience it; to explore and experiment with it. The problem is that if we are starting our leadership journey, we may not have much experience to learn from and opportunities to do so, while plentiful, may prove hard to exploit.

One powerful way to make up for limited experience, and thus augment our personal knowledge of the art, is through vicarious experience by learning from others.

There are three primary ways to do this: by speaking with, watching, or reading about experienced leaders. Speaking with, or observing them, is great, and I encourage it. It is, however, a limited resource. You have to know them, then you need a location and their time. Aligning space, time and association is a science in itself. Reading about leaders, by contrast, is an unlimited resource. Reading only requires your time; and it can be done in any location, and you need no affiliation with them what so ever.

Reading for leading is an essential source of knowledge for a leader. Life and history is full of leaders: from every background, in every situation and through every conceivable scenario. We can exponentially expand our experiential-understanding of leadership through reading about leaders.

Leadership books are a good place to start, as they extract explicit leadership application. Biographies and histories are also incredibly valuable as they show personal and situational experience in context. They may be a little harder to learn from, though, as you will need to recognize and extract the leadership lessons from the accounts yourself.  

Another way is to find little leadership lessons from within any book or article you may be reading: not just “leadership” books. Many a random read of mine has given up a life-lesson or leadership-tip from the text often unexpectedly and usually unannounced. From books on History (well, no shock there, I suppose) to teaching; from science to sport; from professional journals to paperback novels, if the text or tale includes people, you can certainly find a leadership-lesson somewhere within. The key is to recognise them. Now, that might take a little practice, but once you have spotted a few, it gets easier to capture more. 

If reading is a struggle, then listen: the same rules apply. Podcasts are plentiful these days, and audible books are abundant: both will get the job done. So, plug into a pod or pick up a publication, and look out for those latent leadership lessons. Whichever works for you, increase your sources of inspiration & read to lead