In this episode, we talk about the 4 stages of leadership progression and what it takes to shift and create movements while leading from behind as a thought leader. Without elevating yourself to the highest level of leadership, things get messy and don’t turn out the way you want them to. If you are not good at leadership, you will find yourself in a solitary pursuit and your pace of movement will not be inertia-full.

However, when you understand the key principles of leadership, you are going to build momentum in which things move at an accelerating pace. You also end up with a bigger vision to look at things differently and people will march with you as champions and cheerleaders. So, what you need to know about it is that good leadership is empathy based, you come at it from a communication perspective and service is the fuel as it comes from a place of serving.

The Leadership Progression Model

There are 4 levels of leadership that create influence and change in people. All of them are phenomenal and as you move up this model, the level of influence increases.

1. Tasker: They are the doers who do the heavy lifting part. They operate from to do lists and check off the tasks from it. Taskers are focused on completion of tasks.
2. Manager: They focus on delegating the duty to the taskers and they are in fact driven by processes and systems. They manage those to get an outcome. The result that they look for is consistency.
3. Leader: They are there to create a bigger vision for people to see and get behind as they are the role models. They focus on evolutionary change which allows things to move positively and grow.
4. Thought Leader: They have elements of all the other levels of leadership and they focus on thinking. They are the thinkers who want to create a movement and people will rally for it. A thought leader creates revolutionary change by shifting the thought process and behavior.

— Begin Transcript —

Hey there, I’m Mel Abraham, the author of the #1 best-selling book, The Entrepreneur’s Solution and the founder of Thoughtpreneur Academy where we teach you how to capture, package and monetize the ideas in your head, the wisdom and expertise you have so you have more impact, more time and more income.

And welcome back to this episode of The Entrepreneur’s Solution show. In this episode, we’re going to talk about this element of leadership—the different levels of leadership as I see it and what it takes to shift and create movements and how to lead from behind as a thought leader. So, in this episode you also have the access to getting my tool call The Thoughtpreneur Expert success guide. You can download it by going to MelAbraham.com/session060. Can’t believe we’re at episode 60. 60+ actually because we had a few extra ones in there.

But welcome here and I feel honored and blessed to have you here. If you are not at a place where you can download it at a computer, you can text me. Just text me MYLEGACY one-word to 38470. I will send you the download link. We will make sure that you get all the tools, all the templates, all the things that I have for you to help you with your success:

• To get your thought leadership out there.
• To get your practice up and running.
• To get your business up in a bigger way.
• And to create success in your life.

So, let’s get on with this episode. I happen to call this episode: Lead the Pack From Behind, The 4 Stages of Leadership Progression and one of the things to think about when we talk about leadership, if we don’t get this right.

Why is it so important to be a leader?

Well, if there is any question about why we need leadership in this country or in this world, just look around us. Look at what’s going on in society. Look at what’s going on with our crazy elections here in the United States even and then ask yourself the question, “Do we need leaders?”

Absolutely, we need leaders and I believe that you are those leaders. That you are the ones that society and the public and globally they are looking for.

And so, here’s the challenge. Here’s why I think this is important is that without leadership, without these skills, without elevating yourself to the highest level of leadership, things get messy.

Things don’t go the way you want them. You don’t get the results you want. It becomes a challenge and you actually end up at the whim of other people’s choices, other people’s decisions.

The second is that if you are not good at leadership, you’re going to find yourself in a solitary pursuit.

You’re going to find yourself alone. You’re going to find yourself in a situation where you have not mobilized champions and cheerleaders for a cause, for a movement, for a mission towards an outcome and you’re going to be doing this on your own.

And I got to tell you, it ain’t fun when you’re doing it on your own. So, what we need to do is figure out what are the traits to bring people along in that process.

And the third thing is that you’re going to be inertia-full.

In other words, you’re going to move like a snail. Without leadership,

• Things aren’t going to move.
• Things are not going to gel together.
• Things aren’t going to move forward.

You are not going to gain momentum in the process.

But here is the cool thing. When you understand what you need to know. When you understand the key principles that I’m going to share with you here things shift, things change. You’re going to build momentum.

You’re going to build momentum in a way that things are going to start to move and not just move, they move at an accelerating pace.

I will give you a for instance. I know that in my practice and some of the things that I’ve done with in my world, I created, I was doing a lot of marketing and a tremendous amount of marketing at the very beginning. I’m not doing a tremendous amount of marketing today but it’s because I gained all this momentum. This momentum is really pushing me forward and the phone rings, the clients come in, the projects come in and we continue to grow.

Now, I’m still coaxing it along but not at the same level as I did before because I was able to build that momentum. So, when we get that you have a lot of support and momentum behind you.

The second thing I think is that you end up with a bigger vision.

When you are perceived as a leader, when you are elevated to the level of leadership that I’m going to invite you to move to, you are seen as having a bigger vision

• To look at things differently,
• To see a different perspective,
• To see a different world and a different possibility, and
• To try to bring that to life in the process as you move forward.

And then the last thing I think is this: People will march with you.

• You’re going to have champions,
• You’re going to have cheerleaders, and
• You’re going to have marching with you

Because ultimately you’ve created a movement. You’ve created a mission and people that get behind. It’s a rallying cry that they move forward. It’s not something of just mundane existence. It’s not something that someone is going to just serve time. But it means something viscerally and emotionally to them and they get behind you as a leader.

So, if that’s really why; what do you need to know about leadership? What do you need to know about what I call The Leadership Progression model in doing this?

And I think that there is a couple of principles to consider. (1) Is that good leadership I believe, good leadership is empathy based.

It’s empathetic leadership. In other words, I understand the plight. I understand the journey of:

• My team,
• My customers,
• My vendors,
• The people that are in my life.

That I’m coming at it from their shoes. That I’m stepping into it from their perspective. That I’m taking the time to understand them so I can then understand how I can serve them. So, that’s the first thing.

The second is that, you’re going to come at it from a communication perspective.

I had a conversation just last night with someone at an HOA that was creating a divisive email and he is saying that, “Will you stand on my side on this?”

And I said, “Absolutely not.” I said, the community, it’s in a community where we own a property down here and not necessarily where we live. But I said, “Your communication is creating divisive lines.” What we need is to understand what community is about, what neighborhood is about. It’s about creating connection. It’s about creating community and bringing people together and the way that happens is through communication. Not communication through necessarily just digital means and taking sides but rather sitting in front of each other and understanding—going back to principle no. 1—empathetically where they are coming from and coming from that place and communication is the core to resolution.

When we learn to communicate, when we elevate our ability to communicate, we start to change and shift people’s lives through that communication. So, communication is at the hub, the core skill I think when it comes to leadership.

And then the third piece is that service is the fuel.

We need as leaders to come from a place of service. This is not about what’s in it for me but what can I deliver to you. It’s really coming from that place of:

• Serving our community
• Serving our team
• Serving society
• Serving a community need
• Serving a problem, a solution to those that are in need.

Granted, in business through that service you get compensated. You may get compensated real well and I don’t fault anyone for that. In fact, I think you ought to be compensated

• When you are solving problems
• When you are creating solutions
• When you are bettering people’s lives

I have no issue with that. What I want to make sure is happening though is as a leader, you show up to serve.

I will give you a for instance. A good friend and a client of mine, Gary Erickson who is the founder of Clif Bar. He, at one point, before he founded Clif Bar was the manager of a bike shop and the owner (he wasn’t the owner, he was just the manager) and the owner of the bike shop comes in to find Gary cleaning the toilets. And the owner looks at Gary and says, “Hey Gary, this is not what I pay you for.”

And Gary looks at him and he says, “Oh no. This is what you pay me for.”

He says, “Absolutely not. That’s for them to do.”

Well, there is your first indication, “FOR THEM to do”. Absolutely horrendous statement.

And he says, Gary looks at him and he says, “You pay me to make sure that morale is high here. Is that correct?”

And he said, “Absolutely.”

“And that our employees are performing. Is that correct?”

“Yes”

“And they are performing at the highest level. Is that correct?”

“Yes”

“That they show up and that they enjoy their work and that they are willing to get behind us to move through this.”

And he said, “Yes”.

He says, “Great. For us to do that, for that morale to be there, for them to show up that way, I need to be cleaning these toilets. I need to be being a role model. I need to be doing this differently.”

I think that that’s the thing that we need to come from is a place of service. Who are you serving as a leader? Right now, if you look at your life, if you look at your business, if you look at your relationship, are you coming from a place of service or are you coming from a place of getting?

I would submit to you. I would invite you to see what it would feel like and what it would do for you over time when you come from a place of service.

Now, if you’ve always been coming from a place of getting which I know that that’s not the case because you wouldn’t be here with me now because of the values that we talk about. So, I think that I’m preaching to the choir here but if you come from a place of getting, and all of a sudden you’re trying to shift to a place of service there might be some people that go, “Uh, what are they trying to get from me?”

And it will take a little time for them to trust it but trust me in saying that when you come from a place of service that it serves everyone and everyone grows.

So, that’s really kind of the 3 core principles. There is more but these are the core principles that I want you to consider moving forward as a leader and then take those principles and look at what I call The Leadership Progression model to understand where this starts to arrive.

And it’s a model and it’s a way I kind of look at leadership and it’s to me, these are the 4 levels of leadership that create influence and change in people. And so, if we look at this, as we move up the model, the level of influence that we have

• With our audience,
• With our marketplace,
• With our team,
• With the people that we are leading

> Increases.

And also, you might even see that as that level of influence increases—the value placed on your leadership skills, the value placed on what you are able to produce and come out of there.

Now, I’m not talking about just producing in the sense of products but producing in the sense of impact and change. The value that’s placed on that increases also. So, as your level of influence increases, the value may increase also.

But at the very base level, we have what I call taskers. Now, most of the time with taskers, they are doers. They are the ones that are in the trenches doing the heavy lifting. They may be on the assembly line. They may be the workers. They may be… and they are absolutely necessary, they are absolutely the core of the economy, they are the core of everything that we do.

They operate though from a to do list. They are taskers. What’s the task and they are checking off the to do list. And so, understand as I’m discussing these it’s; I am not elevating them in the context of which is bad or good. They are all phenomenal. They all have their place.

The question is: Where do you want to operate and where do you choose to operate?

It’s not about bad or good. They all exist and they all need to exist at all levels in an organization, in relationships and association. So, don’t look at this hierarchy or this progression as from bad to good because they are all good. They all accomplish things and they are all necessary.

The second level once we move from taskers to what I call manager and most of the managers, when you talk about management, they focus on 2 things. Delegating, so they’re the delegator, they’re standing over and delegating some of the tasks to the taskers in many cases or other managers and what they are really driven by is not a to do list.

They are driven by process and systems. So, they’re managing processes and systems in there to allow them to get an outcome and they are delegating to processes and systems which could be technological or a human/labor intensive processes.

Until we then move beyond the construct of a manager and move one step above, which is what I call a leader. Now, the leader is really driven by what I think is vision. They’re typically more visionary and they show up, much like Gary Erickson, as a role model. Do as I do (in that context) versus do as I say.

And so, they’re there to create the bigger vision for people to see, to get behind, to become part of that and to create that bigger vision in that way and to be a role model, to be the cheerleader, to be the one that says, “Yeah, this way. Let’s go. Let’s go.” To really bring that home.

Then there is this other level and this is the last level. And this is the one that I’m going to invite you:

• To try and elevate yourself to
• To strive to
• To aspire to
• To work to

And that’s what I call a thought leader. And with a thought leader, most of the as you move up this progression, they have the elements of those below. So, you’re bringing the characteristics of the lower levels with you as you come to this place. So, thought leader still is visionary and still is a role model but they focus on thinking. They are the thinker and in the thinker, what they want to do is they want to create a movement. They want people to rally in a movement.

And so, when you look at these elevations and how this plays out,

• Tasker,
• Manager,
• Leader, and
• Thought leader

> Are at various different levels and they produce a certain type of result.

For instance the tasker is focused on completion. Their result is completion of the task. Completion of the to do list. Check it off, get it done. We need that. Everyone needs that in an organization, association. Even in a family life.

If you get the groceries in the house and they sit in the back, someone’s got to complete the task. Usually, hopefully it’s you guys together, working together, creating a relationship and doing things and supporting each other in the process but the tasker is; the result is completion.

When it comes to the manager perspective, the result really is what we call consistency and that’s why they focus on process and systems is they want to get a consistent result over and over and over again. If you think about some of things that Michael Gerber wrote about in E-myth and E-myth Revisited and his whole series of E-myth; it’s about creating a process that gets a known result that is the same result each and every time.

And it obviously uses McDonalds as an example of that. Forgetting the health qualities or lack thereof in McDonalds, let’s look at the process there. They created a process and a set of systems that allow you to get the same experience, hopefully the same experience from one McDonalds to the next. And so, the question is; from a manager standpoint is:

How do we make sure that we get consistency?

• Across shifts
• Across people
• Across systems
• Across processes

So, when the taskers are getting the tasks completed, they get them completed in a consistent way and know that our quality is there. So, the manager is focused on is their result is consistency.

Whereas the leader and at these two levels, I think that we are looking at change. Change in these two levels. The leader is focused on evolutionary change. Allowing things to grow and shift and move in a direction that they wanted to move it into a positive direction of growth and more impact in the process. And that’s evolutionary change as I call it.

From there, we move to that thought leader and this is where I think, we can shift things tremendously and I will explain why and that is revolutionary change. A thought leader creates revolutionary change and here is why. The thought leader is a thinker and what a thought leader does is he shifts, he or she shifts the thinking, the thought process of the people they lead and through that thinking shift, through that thought process shift, they shift behavior.

So, if what we’re really trying to do is create a behavior change, create a behavior change in people we need to first create a thought process change and that’s what thought leaders do. Thought leaders will take the time to dig in to what the conventional thinking and the conventional wisdom is;

• To analyze it,
• To dismantle it,
• To dissect it

And to put it back together and to lend to it some new perspectives. Maybe, it’s add-on perspectives that says, “Here’s what others have done and here’s some other things that can add on to it.”

Or maybe it’s contrary in perspectives, to look at it and say, “Here’s what others have done and here’s though some things that may be they didn’t consider.” But what their real focus is, is to expand the thinking and to shift the thinking

• Of their readers
• Of their audience
• Of their marketplace

And through that shift of thinking, we shift behaviors. And it’s through that shift of thinking, that we allow ourselves to expand society; to do things different.

• To see possibility in a different light.
• To create movements.
• To create societal change.
• To create social change.
• To create environmental change.

If you look back on the great changes in society, it’s not just because they were doers and taskers, it’s because they were thought leaders; that they went out there and they shifted the public’s thinking on a topic whether your believe it or not, climate change or genetically … (and I’m picking things that are emotionally charged) genetically modified foods or global warming or petroleum fuels; all of those things.

You have thought leaders that are leading the charge to create what I call revolutionary change. Not this slow evolutionary change which is great but if we want to shift society, things like women to vote (way back when?), desegregation. I was just literally just watching the movie Help recently and it just, it amazes me; the kind of thought process that went it to looking at blacks and whites versus just looking at it as humanity. I just, it appalls me that as a humanity that we can’t elevate ourselves above that or that we didn’t elevate ourselves above that and see that.

But it takes thought leaders to get out there and expand the thought process and say, “What about this” and think differently and through that thinking differently and that thought process of a different level, we shift behaviors and it’s through that shift of behaviors that we create change and we create great change as we move forward.

So, here is my invite to you is really to find your way to become a thought leader. To know that even though when you start to try and shift thinkers,

• You’re going to get pushed back
• You’re going to get resistance
• You’re going to get ridiculed
• You’re going to get people that fights you

You look at the people like a Gandhi and what he did and how he was getting pushed back and those types of folks. But if we really want to have a great impact, if we really want to shift things, we need to shift thinking first. That comes from a thought leader. We shift the thinking, we’ll shift the behavior. When we shift the behavior, we shift the results. That’s the equation as we move forward.

So, I invite you to try to work your best to elevate to a thought leader and if I can help you in that process. I hope you found value in this because this is where I think our society needs you.

• Needs you to think differently
• To behave differently
• To show up differently
• To show them the way
• To carry that beacon
• To carry that light of change for them
• To be okay with knowing that some people will push back on you as you move forward.

And if you found this of value, make sure that you share it with a friend because I really believe that this information in as many people’s hands will make a difference in society that’s going to give you the opportunity to define your life, refine your life and have a life that you’ve done by your own design through your own thinking to become your own thought leader in your own space in your own time as you move forward.

And if you haven’t done so already, hit the subscribe button. Subscribe, stay with me. It’s the only way that I get a chance to hang with you on a regular basis and give you the tools and the tactics and the strategies that I’ve used to build my businesses, my high level clients businesses and give you the tactics that really, really, really work.

And if you have a question for, if you have a comment; just go to AskMelNow.com and leave it for me. I will be more than happy to may be make it a topic of an upcoming episode on The Entrepreneur’s Solution show.

And again, if you want to download this episode’s tool, The Thoughtpreneur Expert Success Guide, just go to MelAbraham.com/session060. That’s MelAbraham.com/session060 or just text me. Text MYLEGACY one-word no-spaces to 38470. I will make sure that I get you the download link.

And so, again thanks for being here. Realize where you are in that progression. Realize that you have the ability to have all those elements. If I can support you in that journey, in that progression to thought leadership, to build you in that space where people are following you, that you are leading the movement from behind because they are championing you, they’re cheerleading for you and the cause that you’ve created, just let me know. I’d feel blessed and honored to be on that journey with you.

And until we get a chance to see each other in the next episode,

May your vision be grand, your journey epic and your legacy significant!

See you soon. Cheers. Bye!!

— End Transcript —

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