Can anyone Lead?

I was introduced to the concept ‘Lead Without A Title’ by Robin Sharma, who has written numerous books including ‘The Monk who sold his Ferrari’; and he has been a mentor for NASA, IBM, Microsoft and Nike among others. Even though I have never got the privilege to read his books but I was fortunate enough to listen to his audio podcast in which he shares his insight on ‘Lead Without A Title’. I have been so excited about the concept from the day I first listened to it. Since excitement is contagious I am sure you also will feel it when you read on!

The concept ‘Lead Without A Title’ is nothing but to take control of our life and lead at every possible opportunity even without any title to hold. Let me be specific; when we consider an executive in an organization as per the concept we need to think and act like a CEO. We need to grow sales as a CEO would, we need to cut cost as a CEO would, we need to take part in reducing power consumption as a CEO would, we need to think about the customer care as a CEO would. This doesn’t mean we need to do the job of a CEO. Rather we should be the chief of our functional area and be ready to take responsibilities.

When we hear the gold plated word ‘leadership’ many of us may say ‘this is not my cup of coffee’ and may avoid it. If we do so, we will never excel in our personal and professional life, because those who have achieved anything in life were always ready to lead. What I am trying to convey is that it is easy to aspire to become the person you admire most. But until we start thinking the way successful people think (may be our role-models), we will never accomplish any of the goals we have set in our life.

Many of us may feel little uncomfortable to hear this. But the fact is this is the way successful people made positive remark in this world. Dare to lead; whenever we get an opportunity to lead, think like the man you aspire to become and respond to the life situation as he would. When we start to do that, we will automatically start to shine!

But for many of us it is not that easy to do as it is being said. We love to be in the comfort zone and never even try such concepts and resist change. The main reason behind this self depreciation is that our brain has been scripted like that for ages from the day we born. The good news is we could re-script our brain and can take charge of our life.

To do so and if we really want to ‘Lead Without A Title’ we need to invest our time to converse ourselves. Every one of us has a great leader sleeping deep inside us. Talk to ourselves and wake him/her up and wake the potential within. You might have been exposed to many self help lines and great leaders who walked upon earth have always said “change your thoughts”. All great concepts and ideas start from good thoughts. So start conjuring good thoughts and think right towards people and eventually we would become better leaders who could even ‘Lead Without A Title’.

In the process, we would also succeed in becoming better human beings.

In ‘your organization’, you may be a young web developer who might have joined a month ago, may be a senior guy in the same discipline, may be a Adobe Flash based game developer, may be a front office executive, may be a trainee, may be an office cleaning staff, who ever you are; any one can ‘Lead Without A Title’. Last week in our organization we won a trophy as part of the Onam celebrations. The team which made it happen was terrific. They did it with passion and each one of them lead their part wonderfully well. You could find such lot of examples in your organization also the people with passion and purpose doing exceptionally well. That means we are born leaders; but we need to realize it and be persistent on it.

My version of ‘Lead Without A Title’ is doing our job with full responsibility and passion. Now that we have got a basic idea about 'Lead Without A Title'. But naturally may feel insecure as I am, to do something exceptional and extraordinary. The interesting fact is, we could define our own ways of 'Lead Without A Title'. There are no hard and fast rules to do this and if we look for it we could find a leader deep inside each one of us.

So, on this day, we each one of us need totake that wonderful decision to ‘Lead Without A Title’ each and every moment. Most importantly when we lead; do it in style and with a smile :-).

Please do remember to

1. Take responsibility

2. Be passionate

3. Appreciate little wins

4. Innovate

Let us lead together!


Always passionate in helping you.
Thank you, Jerin Jacob.