Mark Lefcowitz

I have had so many mentors; it is hard to choose any single individual. All were influential and all taught me important lessons. But the most important lessons have been about leadership:

You can not learn to be a leader by reading about it. You learn by watching others do it; doing it yourself; and doing it better in the future. If you are lucky - as I was - you come under the influence of men and women who understand leadership and actively mentor you.

Mentoring is a key element, and lots of organizations - including the military - give considerable lip-service to it. Few consistently practice it.

Why? Because most organization do not make leadership a specific and important part of the professional assessment process. Those that do, all too often equate leadership with success, with no room for failure. I would submit that success and leadership are not the same, and when we equate the two bad things start to happen.

There is - too -no right way to lead; there are plenty of wrong ways, but there is lots of room for fitting leadership style into everyone's own personality. All too often people who do not understand leadership believe that there is some sort of leadership touchstone out there. There isn't.

A lot about leadership is about attitude.

True leaders want others to be leaders, too. They are always looking for talent; they are always trying to help others pick up skills; they are always helping there superiors become better leaders; they are always open to learning how to be better leaders themselves. They know that leadership is an exercise in life-long learning.

Leadership is not about having to lead all the time. Leaders can and should allow others to lead, when they are better qualified to understand the situation at hand. The leader that doesn't actively seek out the opinions of those being lead is not a leader at all, but a fool pretending to lead. Leaders are often managers. So ultimately the manager must decide to act. But deciding is not leadership.

Last, Leadership is not about having followers. Leadership is all about confidence in your own problem solving ability, and your confidence in your ability to motivate others to join you. The operative word here is: join.

If you are a leader, you have to do more than talk about it....