Why Leadership?

I decided to digress with this post before continuing our discussion of the leadership ladder.  I know I refer to John Maxwell’s ideas in many of these posts but as the prominent voice on leadership, it’s hard not to use his concepts.  The graph below illustrates the multiplicative effect of leadership.  Maxwell uses success dedication as the horizontal axis where I think a better label is work dedication or work ethic.  A casual review of the graph shows that if I work my tail off (work dedication of 9) in an organization with little leadership (leadership of 1); the result is poor effectiveness (9 X 1 = 9).  By improving the leadership (increase leadership to 3), you can see a threefold increase in effectiveness.   Organizations spent significant time and money on implementing employee retention and incentive programs while overlooking leadership.  They focus on the effect, low morale, poor retention, and disgruntled employees without focusing on the cause, poor leadership.