In today’s highly competitive world, there is a lot of pressure on leaders to create highly productive organizations. To be successful with this task, leaders will need all of talent, skills, techniques, and experience they can muster through leadership development. The pressure to succeed can create a real dilemma: whether to “manage” people or to “lead” people. At CMOE, we maintain that in order to achieve high levels of employee engagement and morale, people in authority must learn how to show others way, be a “lighthouse,” rather than to “railroad” people into compliance by telling, commanding, or controlling them. Respected leaders easily gain loyalty and mutual agreement with their followers (loyalty demanded is loyalty denied).

Leaders who earn respect and commitment of their followers demonstrate qualities and characteristics that run deeper than leadership skills, techniques, and knowledge alone. Effective leaders lead by example and exhibit their true character consistently. This in turn causes people to voluntarily support an organization’s mission and purpose. They know that leadership is a privilege. It means you have to consistently do right thing for right reasons. Good leadership is an inner choice. It is character based. Good leaders will give your organization a competitive edge; bogus leadership, on other hand, will cost you in critical times when you need support of followers most.

There are basically three kinds of leaders in organizations today: unsuccessful ones, those who are occasionally successful, and those who consistently maintain commitment of followers on a long term basis. The third type requires an understanding of finer qualities of leadership, character, and values. Character based leadership cannot be achieved by arrogant or power-hungry managers who choose to intimidate others. Sometimes those in authority feel driven to be overly aggressive, take short cuts, and do what is expedient versus doing what is right. Others will make a “Wall Street driven” decision that is not focused on long term well being of stockholders, customers, or employees.