Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful business.
I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille Rapacz: Hey there, podcast listeners. Welcome to another episode of the Belief Shift Podcast. Today we're doing something a little bit different. I'm going to be doing the first in a series of what I'm calling summer shorts. Because I didn't think you would wanna listen to a bunch of long business podcasts over the summer, and I certainly didn't wanna be recording long business episodes over the summer.
But, I really believe in consistency, so I wanted to deliver something every week. So I thought I'd just do a few little short episodes on very specific topics.
So today's topic is going to be what is leadership?
And you might be thinking, I don't need to listen to this. I know what leadership is, and yes, I hear you.
We should all really understand what leadership is. But because it can sometimes just be such a basic definition, we tend to maybe skip over it or we forget, or maybe we just needed a reminder so it would help us be better leaders. So I just wanna have this quick conversation. Well, it's not a conversation because it's just me.
I just want to quickly tell you the definition of leadership to give you some things to think about as you start working on being a better leader. So let's get into it.
Leadership is a process where an individual influences a group of other individuals to achieve a common goal.
Leadership is a process. It is a choice. It involves influence. It occurs in groups and it includes attention to goals.
Now, I wanna emphasize the fact that leadership is a choice because you receiving a title and being told that you are now the leader of a team does not necessarily make you a leader. You have to choose leadership.
So whatever it says on paper, that's not enough to make you a leader. You have to choose leadership.
Leadership is about getting things done through others, and
leaders will do things that others are unwilling to do. That is a differentiating factor. Now, something I think is really important to think about as a leader is the difference between leadership and management.
And this will help to sort of deepen your understanding of leadership. So a leader is responsible for creating and holding a vision. They're the ones creating change. Leadership is people focused, and it's about leading people to do the work. Now, in contrast, a manager is executing on the vision. They are implementing change, they are more structure focused, and they are about managing the work.
Now you might be thinking, okay, so are some people just managers and some people just leaders? And the answer is no. So if you are a leader or a manager, depending on how you define yourself in your business or in the company you work for, regardless of your title, you have both of these tasks to do. You have leader tasks and you have manager tasks.
And your job is to think about what is the right amount of time and the and, and in which instances am I needing to be more of a leader versus more of a manager. One of the challenges that I find a lot of leaders run into is that the more responsibility they get in a company, the higher up they go in the chain of command in becoming a leader.
The more they struggle because they are still trying to own all of the manager tasks. So if you've ever worked for somebody who you thought, wow, they're just very in the weeds of the work all the time, that's them still staying too much into the management space and they're not letting go and moving into the leader space.
And the only way you can let go of the manager work. Which means really delegating it, letting others do that manager work. The only way that can happen is if you get into leader mode and you lead people to do that work.
. So think about for yourself, do you have the right balance of leadership to management going on in your work? And if not, how will you make adjustments? Other point I wanna make about leadership is that leadership does require constant attention to development.
Being a good leader. It takes work, it takes discipline, it takes intention. So as you think about, even though some people might be more natural leaders than others, you still have to choose to be a good one. So do not make the mistake that just naturally having leadership skills means that you will be good at it or that anyone else will be good at it.
You do have to put work into it. It just might be a little easier for some than others, but it's still gonna be work, and there's still a focus and intention that you have to bring to that role, to that work. All right. That's really all I wanted to say about what is leadership. If you have thoughts, questions, maybe you have some, I'd love to hear.
If you have any misconceptions that you've heard about leadership that you would like us to discuss further, I would love to hear it. So please leave us a voicemail at thebeliefshift.com. You'll see a little widget on the side where you can leave us a voice message. You can also reach us at LinkedIn.
George and I will both be posting about the podcast episodes over there. Feel free to,, drop us a comment on one of our posts or, you know, make sure that you're following, me over at LinkedIn so that you can get all the goods there. We're still on Instagram as well, but we're really kind of stepping up our LinkedIn game.
At least that's what we're telling ourselves. Alright, I hope you enjoyed this first of summer short episodes. I will be back in your ears next week.
