Brian Heys – thinking out loud

I used to think that in order to be a leader in an organisation, you had to be in senior management. My reasoning was: you have to have authority to lead, and that only comes with being a manager.

I was wrong. In fact, it’s perfectly possible to be a leader no matter what your rank is in an organisation. You can even lead from the bottom.

Being a leader has little to do with authority, and everything to do with ideas.

A willingness to lead

First, comes the desire to lead. If you have great ideas, but don’t have the willingness to lead you can’t be a leader, and may as well stop reading. You’re better off joining an existing movement with an established leader, and sharing your ideas there.

Getting your ideas out

Assuming you want to lead, and have big ideas, one of the first steps to becoming a leader is establishing a channel for disseminating your ideas.

You don’t need authority to do this. Thanks to the Internet, the availability of social networks such as Twitter or Facebook, and free blogging tools such as WordPress or TypePad, it is easier to spread a message today than ever before. Within minutes you can set yourself up with a publishing platform that can reach every Internet-connected person in the world.

If you have the ideas, there are very few excuses for not getting them out there if that’s what you really want to do.

Finding followers

In order to be a leader, you need to find followers who will be interested in your movement.

If your ideas are work-related, tell your colleagues about them, and make it easy for them to keep in touch. Start a simple email-based newsletter you can put together quickly, and use it to let people know what you’re thinking about, and solicit feedback. If you can, you should also consider making use of the company intranet.

To go beyond your work colleagues, search for people who share your views on Twitter, and follow them. Make sure they know about your blog by posting status updates whenever you write about your ideas. If your tweets are relevant, and your ideas powerful enough, there’s a good chance they will retweet you, and others will start to follow out of more than politeness.

Start leading

Think you can be a leader? The good news is, nobody is stopping you. If you have the motivation and the ideas, it has never been this easy to start a movement of your own.

What are you waiting for?