The collective we of writers and pundits discuss leadership so often you would think the whole country would be filled astonishingly good leadership (You can judge how many great leaders we have). Many of us strive to be good leaders and eat up this vein of self help writing. But alas, this post is not about how to make great leaders or attributes you "must" have to be a great leader.
This post is because some of you are already good leaders. And 100% of you great leaders are all going to do the same thing at some point: die.
Maybe you die as CEO of your company or maybe you get hit by a bus and actually die, not really the point. The point is there is roughly a 100% mortality rate among great leaders which means that there is 100% succession to a new leader at some point.
There are clearly 3 types of leaders when it comes to succession:
1) Salt the earth leaders. The ones who only care about what they do and don't care about who will take over next. To the extreme, they don't want to die a moment too soon so they will go out of their way to kill off any perspective new leaders.
2) Best intent leaders. These leaders are a lot like parents, they want the best for the next leader and the best they can imagine is themselves but better. Life is a graph, and the curve must continuously slope upwards.
3) Lastly there are leaders who bread leaders, not upgraded clones. Think Joshua and Moses. Joshua was not Moses 2.0. Think Joe Montana into Steve Young. They breed the next leader, or more aptly, they help the next leader simply become who they already are.
So what kind of a leader are you? Do different kinds of leaders work better in different situations or should every leader strive to be a level three leader?
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