Leaders Are Built…Not Born

Leaders Made Here: Building a Leadership Culture – Mark Miller (Berrett-Koehler Publishers)

“___Fill in the blank____ is the only sustainable competitive advantage”

After stringing together millions of them over the course of my career, I have to admit, that I am a sucker for words. So when I read a great line that literally jumps off the page at me, I tend to get fired up.

When I read the opening part of the line above in leadership guru and bestselling author, Mark Miller’s new book, Leaders Made Here: Building a Leadership Culture, I perked up. What was the answer? A quick Google search will yields things like innovation, a business’s ability to learn faster than their competition (?) but it is Miller who truly hits on the answer. “Leadership is the only sustainable competitive advantage.”

While learning at a greater velocity is a competitive advantage and innovation certainly is as well, it is the sustainability piece that make it more difficult. But when it comes to leadership and building a culture of leadership, that all important bench strength, is something that is doable if a business makes the commitment to make it happen.

Miller, a Chick-fil-A executive and co-author of a number of bestselling leadership books with Ken Blanchard, uses the time-tested business parable to impart his story and the leadership culture lessons in Leaders Made Here. While I am not a huge fan of this style of book, I think Miller does a great job of pretty clearly delineating actionable steps that businesses can take to create and grow a leadership culture.

He provides the building blocks that you can put in place to form the cornerstone of your leadership culture; from agreeing on basics of a definition of leader and some of the potential roadblocks that can create within a business if everybody is not on the same page. This would make for a great exercise to gauge what your leadership team is thinking and how to build on a unified platform. It cuts down on wasted time, inconsistent messages and agendas and the lack of focus.