The Entitled Leader
The Six Steps to Becoming a Leader After Receiving the Title
The Making of a Leader – Part 2
The challenge is that people with leadership titles often believe they have already achieved leader status.
When discussing leadership titles, we often refer to individuals who hold positions such as supervisor, manager, director, president, vice president, CEO, executive, pastor, teacher, team lead, so forth, and so on. These titles were never intended to help individuals develop their leadership skills.
Developing a person into a leader who already has a title is more complicated than developing someone without one. The challenge is that people with leadership titles often believe they have already achieved leader status. A true leader always works to improve and grow; if you stop striving to lead and develop, you are no longer a leader. This unfamiliar idea is a common issue among those who possess titles—many assume that having a title equates to having arrived and continues to qualify them as leaders, which is not the case.
Jesus’ parable of the talents reveals how to transform someone with a leadership title into a leader. We can learn six lessons from it.
1) Be willing to go on a journey of discovery.
In the story of the talents, we learn about a businessman who, before departing for a trip, had to explore his options for handling the business in his absence. Most leaders with titles fail to consider their options as this businessman did. He decided to give the responsibilities he would generally handle to someone else. To become a great leader, one must learn how to make it their mission to discover what’s possible.
This concept can sometimes be confusing because what the business leader did in this story is often called “delegating.” However, I hate the word “delegate” because it implies that someone is simply offloading their work onto others, which can be perceived as laziness. This was not what the businessman did. In reality, he entrusted his workers (his servants) with the responsibilities they were equipped to handle. He wasn’t trying to shirk his duties; instead, he realized that empowering his team was the only option to ensure everyone remained productive and continued working towards their shared mission.
2) Recognize the potential of your people.
That means you have to place value on the people based on the potential that is inside that person. In other words, you need to understand who is most suited for what task. The story highlights how the master entrusted different amounts—one talent, two skills, or three bags of money—to his servants. It was specific about what happened in the scenario.
The master understood the potential of each servant individually. As a leader, you must be able to look at each person individually and determine their unique potential, not assess their potential based on the person next to them. Therefore, focus on the individual, see their potential, and let it define the value you hold for that person.
3) Reward your team’s performance.
It’s said that the two-talent person doubled their efforts, and the three-talent person doubled theirs. Think about that for a moment. Those two should be rewarded for doubling their output. When you reward them, you are rewarding them for a job that they weren’t necessarily going to do until the opportunity of discovery happened in the leader. The leader who had to come up with an option, another option to get his work done, delegated the responsibility to his servants, another team member, someone who reports to you, works for you or works with you. They not only come back with the job done but rather double the output and do a better job with it than you, the leader, would have done on your own. That’s worth rewarding.
4) Stop rewarding poor performance or performers.
When you put in hard work, you get back a better outcome. Weak work produces weak outcomes. [1] You have probably heard this saying before, ” a person who does not work should not eat.” [2] You can not get a paycheck without first rendering a service. In other words, every person must contribute because contributing is the only way to get a return.
Let’s talk about a few effects of rewarding someone who doesn’t contribute, poorly contributes, or contributes less than they take. If you do this, you give a poor performer the same reward as a great performer. You send at least two terrible messages as a leader. One, you will tell the poor performer that it’s okay to be a poor performer. Two, you will tell the person who’s a great performer that they don’t have to be a great performer to get the reward. Therefore, they’re not going to perform as great as they could because there’s no benefit to performing great if everybody gets the same reward.
5) Empower the performers to do what you could never do yourself when doing the job.
Leaders should only empower the performers to do what the leader could never have done on their own.
In the story of the talents, the leader initially held all six responsibilities. What responsibilities are you holding, leader? There was no way on earth that this leader could have given as much attention to the six responsibilities as a person who only had three. Here, the leader was overloaded, and he had servants available to him who were underloaded. An average person operates in overload when there are unloaded resources around who can help ease the load.
So this is where the leader actually gets some kudos and earns credibility. He’s learned that his performance is better when he empowers the performers to do what he never could have done alone.
6) Make the team win your win.
Most leaders, the average persons with a title, look out for themselves and their own success when that’s the wrong focus. Their focus should be on every team member’s ability to be successful. That’s why this good servant, this good businessman, issued out three talents to one, two to another, one to the last because he knew that at the end of the day, that person with three talents was good for doing great things with more talents than any other team member.
When this leader places their focus on one person, and they win, the master wins. He issued out six talents but gave the one guy three talents, which he turned into six. So if no one else did anything, the businessman went from six to nine talents or results or better results based on the action of this one great employee. By focusing on that, this leader becomes a better leader. He now not just has six talents, six skills, or six pieces of money in his possession, but instead, he’s gone to nine just based on this one individual’s performance.
You don’t win until your team wins.
Do these things as a person with a leadership title to ensure that you become a leader who matches and exceeds the Title you have been given.
References:
[1] Galatians 6:7 ESV, Bible.com, accessed September 26, 2023, https://bible.com/bible/59/gal.6.7.ESV
[2] 2 Thessalonians 3:10 NLT, Bible.com, accessed March 27, 2025, https://bible.com/bible/116/2th.3.10.NLT
All Scripture references used by permission, see our Scripture copyrights.
You must be logged in to post a comment.