Greetings!
When I ask CEOs I work with to describe attributes that they believe evidence good leadership, I typically hear qualities that include bringing out greatness in others. Most good business leaders know that they cannot drive an organization built of average performers to produce much better than average results. Great leaders build great organizations by attracting top performers and by identifying people with great potential that they can help develop. I believe that it is an organization's dedication to developing new leaders that distinguishes world-class organizations. From my point of view - great organizations have many leaders, even teams of leaders -rather than legions of managers. It's the famous Grace Hopper quote, "You cannot manage men into battle. You manage things; you lead people." One of my professional passions is to transform management teams into leadership teams. Organizations grow when all of their people strive to perform to their fullest potential. Leading them to that potential is as important as anything else.
MBA programs, even from our best business schools tend to push out many outstanding managers - but from my experience, not many great leaders. There are a few to be sure - but I question whether the school experience is the reason. I'm not knocking the schools - but suggesting that some people seem to be born with certain qualities that lend themselves to being leaders -and certainly, many leaders are developed inside the organizations they grow to lead. Clearly, some of the greatest leaders are not the best managers -and many of the best mangers are ill equipped to lead. The question is, "how do we develop leaders within our organizations?" There are leadership development programs that teach skills and theory and help to mentor future leaders by giving them both examples to follow - and opportunities to develop and test their leadership abilities. But like the leadership programs and classes offered at business schools, some people will emerge as true leaders - and others will garner some valuable skills and confidence that allow them to manage more effectively - but not develop into leaders within their organizations. I believe the reason for this is that an important quality of leadership is vision. One must have a vision for themselves and whatever it is they are leading. They also need a vision for "who" they are leading, and that means the ability to assess the potential in others and then align them in whatever role they serve, with the vision for the organization. While not everyone has this sense of vision -I believe that can be developed, though in some people more easily than in others. Having a sense of the future and of possibilities requires some degree of courage. The very nature of the future is that it is largely a matter of dealing with the unknown. The greater the vision and the longer the range of one's thinking - the greater the degree of "unknown." It's one thing to imagine the future - it's another to bet your time, money and stake your personal reputation on it. As a leader of an organization, it requires trust as much as courage. You need to trust your instincts and abilities - but more important, you need to trust the people you must rely on to successfully transform that vision into action. And those you lead, must trust you. General Collin Powel once wrote that "soldiers don't follow their leaders into battle because they like them; it's because they trust them." One of the msot fundamental aspects of leadership is trust. This is explained quite well in Patrick Lencioni's book, "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team." ( See below) He clearly demonstrates why trust is the foundation for inquiry, innovation, problem solving, creating accountability and ultimately creating results with any degree of deliberateness and consistency. Lencioni lays out some clear processes for how to develop trust and develop leadership within groups and organizations. I attended a three-day advanced training with about 30 other Vistage Group Chairs in Chicago this past weekend. A common mission among my colleagues is to help our CEOs become better, more effective leaders - and then help them develop the people within their organizations. A Group Chairman from Chicago showed a 5 minute video of Dr. Viktor Frankl speaking to a gathering of university students in 1972 on his acclaimed book Man's Search for Meaning. (Frankl was a Holocaust concentration camp survivor.) In the video he illustrates his ideas with a quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be." In other words (also Goethe)" if I accept you as your are, I will make you worse; however, if I treat you as through you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_bjOeECpjI&feature=related The manger within us yearns to be pragmatic, sensible and realistic. We know that "what gets measured gets done" and we should strive to see things as they really are. But this is the core difference between our need to lead beyond our ability to manage. We need to see people for who they can become - and then commit ourselves to providing the resources to support them in reaching their potential. As leaders, in as much as we should surround ourselves with people smarter and better then ourselves if we want to expand the boundaries of our organizations - we must also be willing to develop people who can exceed our abilities - even at the risk of threatening our position on top. It's by behaving with a sense of greater purpose, unselfishness and generosity of spirit that we transcend the need to protect ourselves: we become the true sum of what we do and who we are. As always, wishing you a great and successful week ahead. 
Philip R. Liebman Managing Director, Strat4 Group Chair, Vistage International | 
As leaders, we have an opportunity to define ourselves publicly in what we do and how we do it. It is said that our actions speak so loudly that people can hardly hear what we say. We have an equally compelling opportunity to examine "why" we do what we do. 
There is no shortage of doom and gloom in the predictions of those who claim to see the future. World economic markets are shaky, China is on the edge of suffering the pain of an unsustainable growth rate and in the US, recent reports confirm that consumers are struggling to save - much less restore their savings.
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