To achieve true success and develop your character to its full potential then you cannot do it alone. You can only grow to your full potential by helping and with the help of others. By helping others to grow and achieve success will you grow and achieve success.
Making the transformation from who you are now into a highly effective leader is a life experience that not many people have. But to do it you must be willing to make the transformation of your character. Only when you do this will you make the transformation happen.
1. Making A Transformation
In my book, Influence Is Leadership – Become the highly effective leader that others want to follow, I talk about when I left school at 16 and started my engineering apprenticeship, and that I didn’t really have any character.
In those days I just did as I was told, and I was very much in fear of people, especially my supervisor. I did my best to be good at my job and impress my boss, but I struggled in those days. It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I started thinking about working on myself and becoming a leader.
It was when I was 23 in 2006 and working for Liverpool’s train operator that I built the courage and worked on my character to convince them to fund my mechanical engineering degree at Liverpool John Moores University. This was one of the first major steps in my transformation.
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Although at the time transformation was not on my mind and neither was developing my character. I just thought I was taking the next step in my career so I could get closer to the engineering director level.
Even while going through my mechanical engineering degree and I was passing the exams and getting good grades on the coursework, I still wasn’t thinking about my character or any kind of transformation.
But as I look back, when I completed my degree and became a project manager in 2009, I knew I was on the leadership ladder.
2. Developing Your Character
But I still wasn’t thinking about how important developing my character was to help me make a personal transformation. That didn’t really happen until 2011 when I left Liverpool and moved to Scotland to become a production manager for their train operator.
This is when I started working on myself and learned that I needed to lead myself well before I could lead others, as this would be the first time I would oversee an engineering team. It was when I started leading myself that my transformation started.
I felt that the best way for me to learn how to lead myself was to throw myself into the deep end of engineering production management. By working alongside the engineering production teams, learning about them, how they worked and who they were.
As I was doing this, I was learning a lot about myself, and where my strengths and weaknesses were in my leadership at the time. I knew I was good at empowering people and giving the teams the freedom to come up with and implement new ideas.
Instead of telling them what to do, how to do it and basically micro-manage them which is how the engineering depot worked.
It was during this time that I realised how important working on and developing my character was. I knew I needed a strong character if I was to lead the engineering team on my shift well.
I knew that if I was developing my character then I was leading myself well also. It was during this time that I developed my passion for helping people, and I knew I wanted to help others to develop their character too.
3. Personal Growth
After working in Scotland as a production manager, it was in 2015 when I moved to London that I started to take leadership and personal growth even more seriously. This was when I started reading books on Leadership and personal growth, especially John Maxwell and Simon Sinek.
I was also watching a lot of leadership and personal growth videos on YouTube and trying out new things I was learning. I even joined the John Maxwell leadership certification programme and met lots of great leaders from different parts of the world.
It was during this time in 2015 and onwards that I fully understood how important character was in leadership, and how much I wanted to become a highly effective leader.
As I have discussed before I started creating videos for my Siemens colleagues, and I knew that this work in helping others was my true calling in life. What I am doing right now in writing my books and creating my other materials is my life’s work and will continue to be my life’s work.
My plan is to attend more training courses on leadership and personal growth and continue learning every day. Leaders are lifelong learners, they don’t see any time to stop being educated, and neither do I.
4. Finding Your Calling
By doing this I will continue to work on my character every day because of how important character is in our leadership. Can you start to see it now?
With this website and blog, I have created, highlyeffectiveleader.com, the leadership & personal growth coaching business I have built and the people I have coached so far, the online courses I have created, the free e-book(s) I give away and the books I have published on Amazon.
All of this is a vehicle for me to help people like you. This is all the greatest privilege of my life because I am helping people like you become successful in your life. This in turn makes me successful, and the privilege is going to become greater.
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Who decide to become in our lives determines what we get to do, who we get to do it with, how much we get paid to do it, and when we get to do it. What I’ve described above did not happen to me by accident, it happened to me because I made the decision to go on my personal transformational journey.
What transformation and what transformational journey do you want to take? Where do you want to be in your life? What changes do you want to make in your life? What decisions do you want and need to make in your life?
Remember that making the decision to do something is not doing it, you must take the right action to do it. It is up to you what story you want to write for your life, and what your life’s work will be.
But also remember that you can’t transform without changing, but you can change without transforming. The decision is all yours!
You are what and who you decide to become, you are not what has happened to you in your life so far.
I welcome hearing how this post has influenced the way you think, the way you lead, or the results you have achieved because of what you’ve learned in it. Please feel free to share your thoughts with me by commenting below.
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All the best,
Hi Tom, Thanks for sharing your personal story and your deep personal reflections. I think you are right to draw this distinction between personal change and personal transformation. Especially when we are put in a leadership position for the first time, it is easy to think we need to make small changes to be able to manage more effectively. And it is easy to assume that means more control of those we manage. But to make the change from managing to leadership requires personal transformation. There is a very significant difference between doing an operational job very well and empowering others to grow their professional skills and capabilities. It is a classic dilemma, that people in a workplace who are best at their jobs get promoted to management and leadership positions and then find out they need a whole different set of skills to lead others effectively. Your personal story is very compelling, it reveals how you underwent this transformation. Thanks again for sharing. Best, Andy
Hi Andy,
I appreciate your detailed comment, and your insights on my post.
I couldn’t agree more that there is a significant difference in actually doing a job and empowering another person to do the same job. We need to get this right if we want to continue growing a highly effective team.
Keep empowering your people to be their best, and keep being your best for the sake of your people.
All the best,
Tom
Character is such an important trait as it is the foundation on which we create success in all areas of our lives. It is the trait that inspires us to live an authentic life as that what we thing, feel, say, and do are all in alignment. Then we are able to truly share with others and affect their lives in a positive way. Thanks so much for these important insights. Best, Joseph
Hi Joseph,
Thank you for sharing your insights on my post, means so much.
I like how you say character is the foundation on which we create success in our lives. I’ve never quite heard it described like that before because I believe you are right.
Keep developing your character and growing your success out of the character you have developed.
All the best,
Tom