5 Leadership Lessons Every Emerging Leader Must Learn

The day you are promoted, nothing inside you changes. The same person who was a good worker on Friday walks in on Monday carrying a new title. Then comes the quiet shock: people nod at your instructions and do things their own way.

I have seen this in churches, offices and startups across Africa. A gifted person gets a position and assumes the position will do the leading. It won’t. Potential gets you noticed. Performance, the kind that carries other people, has to be learned.

Here are five lessons I’d want every emerging leader to learn early.

1. A title gives you a seat, not a following

John Maxwell’s 5 Levels of Leadership begins with Position, where people follow because they have to. The next levels are Permission (people follow because they want to), Production (because of results), People Development (because of what you’ve done for them) and Pinnacle (because of who you are and what you represent).

Most emerging leaders arrive at Level 1 and stay there too long, issuing instructions instead of building relationships.

The stakes are higher than they look. Gallup’s analysis of engagement data found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. That figure comes from Gallup’s State of the American Manager work, so test it against your own context. Still, the direction is clear: the person leading the team shapes the team more than the logo on the wall does.

Takeaway: Move to Level 2 on purpose. Learn names, families, fears and ambitions. People give permission to leaders who know them.

2. Your blind spots lead before you do

Organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich, in a 2018 Harvard Business Review article, reported on a research programme of nearly 5,000 participants. Most people believed they were self-aware, but she estimated that only 10 to 15 percent of those studied actually met the criteria. She calls it an estimate, so I hold it loosely too.

She separates two kinds of self-awareness. Internal means knowing your values, reactions and aims. External means knowing how others experience you. In her research the two were not reliably linked. You can be deeply reflective and still have no idea how you land in a meeting.

Her practical advice is to replace “Why do I feel this way?” with “What is happening here, and what can I do about it?” Asking “why” can trap us in rumination. Asking “what” moves us toward action.

Takeaway: Find one or two “loving critics”, people who care about you and will tell you the truth, and ask them directly.

3. Faithfulness in small things is the audition

Jesus said, “He who is faithful in what is least is faithful also in much” (Luke 16:10, NKJV). He was teaching about stewardship, about how we handle what has been entrusted to us. Our habits with small responsibilities show what we will do with large ones.

Emerging leaders often want the platform before the process. Maxwell’s Law of Process says leadership develops daily, not in a day [from The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership]. The unglamorous work is where character is formed.

Wangari Maathai is a good example from our own continent. On 5 June 1977, World Environment Day, she and women of the National Council of Women of Kenya planted seven trees. That small act became the Green Belt Movement, and in 2004 she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Nobody started with a Nobel. She started with seven trees and kept at it.

Takeaway: Do the small assignment you’ve been overlooking as if your whole calling depends on it. It might.

4. If you are the bottleneck, you are not yet leading

Exodus 18 shows Moses judging the people from morning until evening. His father-in-law Jethro, a priest of Midian visiting the camp, watched all day and said plainly, “The thing that you do is not good” (v. 17, NKJV). He added that the work was too much for Moses to do alone (v. 18). He did not question Moses’ calling. He questioned his method.

Jethro’s remedy was to choose capable people who feared God, were trustworthy and hated dishonest gain, and give them real authority over smaller matters (v. 21). That is Maxwell’s Level 4, People Development, in a tent in the desert.

Nelson Mandela described the same instinct in Long Walk to Freedom. He compared a leader to a shepherd who stays behind the flock, letting the more nimble go ahead while the rest follow, directed from behind.

The emerging leader’s temptation is to be the hero, the one who knows everything and fixes everything. But a team built around your heroics will stop where your energy stops.

Takeaway: Hand off one real task this week, with the authority to decide, not only the duty to report back.

5. Make the truth safe to say

Google’s Project Aristotle studied 180 teams to find out what made some of them excel. Psychological safety, whether people feel safe to take interpersonal risks, came out as the most important of five dynamics. The concept comes from Harvard’s Amy Edmondson, whose 1999 work found that teams with higher psychological safety were more willing to learn.

Psychological safety is not niceness or low standards. It means the junior person can say “I made a mistake” or “I think this plan has a flaw” without being punished for it.

In many of our workplaces and churches, honour for elders and authority runs deep. That is a strength, but it can make silence feel like respect. As a leader, you have to invite the truth, because people will not volunteer it to someone who reacts badly.

Takeaway: The next time someone brings you bad news, thank them first and react second.

The Sunday Night Five: Once a week, ask: Did I earn permission? Did I seek honest feedback? Was I faithful in something small? Did I release something? Did I make truth safe?

Try This Week

•Run the Sunday Night Five. Take ten minutes tonight with a notebook. Begin with a short prayer: “Lord, show me what I cannot see.” Then answer the five questions in one line each.

•Ask one loving critic one question: “What is one thing I do that makes your work harder?” Listen without defending, and say thank you.

•Delegate one real decision. Pick something you usually hold on to, name the outcome you need, and let the other person decide how.

Reflect

•Which of Maxwell’s five levels do the people you lead would honestly say you operate at?

•What small, overlooked task has God put in front of you, and how have you been treating it?

•Where am I still the bottleneck, and what am I afraid will happen if I let go?

•When did someone last tell me something hard, and how did I respond?

A closing charge

None of these lessons will make you famous overnight. They will make you trustworthy, and trust is what carries a leader for decades. You don’t need to master all five this month. Pick one and start tonight.

Lord, I do not want a title without character. Teach me to be faithful in small things, honest about my blind spots, generous with authority, and safe to tell the truth to. Make me a leader people grow under, not one they merely obey. Amen.

Sources

•Gallup, “Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Employee Engagement” (2015): news.gallup.com/businessjournal/182792/managers-account-variance-employee-engagement.aspx

•Tasha Eurich, “What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It),” Harvard Business Review (2018): hbr.org/2018/01/what-self-awareness-really-is-and-how-to-cultivate-it

•Google re:Work, “Understanding Team Effectiveness” / Project Aristotle (2015). The site is archived, so links may have moved

•Amy Edmondson, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly (1999)

•John C. Maxwell, The 5 Levels of Leadership (Center Street/Hachette, 2011; 10th anniversary ed. 2021): hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-c-maxwell/the-5-levels-of-leadership/9781599953632/

•Green Belt Movement, history and Maathai’s 1977 founding; Nobel Peace Prize 2004. Swap in greenbeltmovement.org and nobelprize.org

•Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (1994/95)

•The Holy Bible, NKJV: Luke 16:10; Exodus 18:17-18, 21