In order to lead, you need to want to lead. Leadership experience is a dynamic process emerging learning – some positive and some negative – embedding experience into your leadership toolkit. The experience that you gain moulds your leadership style and therefore the culture that you breed within your organisation.
Those who lead the best, are those who understand that they are utterly dependant on their followers. Experience will teach you that the more aware the leader is of who they are leading, the more effective they will be. It is through experience that a business leader understands how to create and work with consensus to achieve a common result.
Experience in leadership is about discovering how to create ripples in a stream by throwing a stone into the right spot. Experience gives you the intuition to know the speed, agility, poise, and timing of when and how to toss that stone. The flow that you initiate produces results and achievements that ignite your followers so that they want to follow you deeper.
Leadership experience is not something that is learnt in a textbook, it is an intuitive process of developing this component of competence with a vision of who you want to be and how you plan to lead.
“Leadership is an active, living process. It is rooted in character, forged by experience, and communicated by example.”
John Baldoni