Leadership must be earned

In every team you will find people who want to be leaders. However, very few people realize that leadership should be earned.

Few months back, I assigned few mini projects across my team members. Each mini project had a leader and a few team members, who will help the leader to complete the mini project. There were few projects, where the leader of one project was also a team member of another.

The results were very interesting:

There were few leaders who did a great job, while there were others who miserably failed. There was this one leader, who wanted to relinquish his leadership, as very few team members cooperated with him. He just couldn't move forward.

The lesson learnt out of this exercise were the following:

1. Leaders who failed, were invariably, poor team members, who did not cooperate in other leader's projects.
2. Leaders who failed were found to have a common trait-arrogance.
3. Leaders who did not make it, were the ones who had relationship issues and were not liked by many of the team members.

Learnings:

Leadership must be earned. Even if you are the appointed leader, you need to build trust for you amongst the team members. You may have all the authority in the world and fail to be a leader, while someone else may have no authority at all but may be the the unspoken, unnamed, and undisputed leader.