Leadership happens at all levels

I met recently with one of my leadership groups to discuss an article we had recently read. We talked about the leadership and management techniques it proposed, then attempted to apply them back to our individual situations in our company. The discussion was going really well, until someone observed, “has anyone else noticed that we have just spent the last 30 minutes talking about things we have no control over?”

It was true. We had verbally solved all kinds of company issues. The problem was, we had little ability to actually apply our solutions. At least not in the methods we’d discussed.

The challenge was we had approached the problems from the vantage point of the article. As with most leadership and management articles, the author had approached the solution from the perspective of a leader at the top of the organization.

While senior management have definite leadership responsibilities that warrant the breadth of literature targeting their challenges, there is very little guidance for the many more leaders, several levels lower, tasked with implementing their grand strategies.

Hopefully this site will provide a venue to share experiences and tools to start bridging this gap.