Leadership Ladder

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying and associated answer, “How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time”.  Leadership can often be viewed as an elephant - massive in size, complex in relationships, slow to change directions, and life-long in impact.  Can you break leadership into bite size pieces or is this one of those times where the cleaver saying is purely that, a cleaver saying?   The leadership ladder is a tool that will help break the challenge of leading into bite size pieces, breaking down the overwhelming nature of leading into smaller segments that are easier to comprehend and apply. 

If you were to search the Internet for leadership ladder, you would find many images that differ in their number of rungs or what each rung stands for.  However, they find common ground in their shape, vertical stringers with horizontal rungs connecting them, and function, starting at the bottom and climbing up.  The leadership ladder you see below differs in shape and function from both an actual ladder and a “typical” leadership ladder.  I’d like to take complete credit for this, but that would be both dishonest and poor leadership, so I will give John Maxwell the credit for the different rungs of the ladder.  What you see below is a modified version of Maxwell’s leadership ladder to drive home the two differences mentioned above:

·    Different shape:  The top rung of the ladder has the most people and each subsequent rung has fewer.

·    Different function: As you grow as a leader, you move down the ladder, becoming less not more visible.

I will let you digest the picture, and in subsequent posts I will describe each rung of the ladder and how to move between rungs.