In the first post in this series Casey Ross’ comment “I’ve been around too many visionary “leaders” who could inspire the heck out of you but could never get one thing accomplished.” got me to thinking.

There may be something else going on along with the “play it safe” mentality engendered by the bean counters (some, not all).

Call it the ‘armchair leader’, who, much like the Monday morning quarterback or armchair philosopher, is a person who knows all about leadership without actually doing it.

These are the people who read leadership books, attend leadership classes and can discuss leadership philosophy and approaches intelligently and convincingly. They can create enormously compelling visions, produce the collateral information to implement them and even inspire those around them—but nothing happens.

As Casey says, they just can’t DO it. Something is missing.

I believe that ‘something’ starts in doing, in stepping forward and saying, “I’ve got an idea.”

Or not saying anything and just taking the initiative to do/fix/create/whatever without a lot of thought about visions and inspiration, but with so much enthusiasm and willingness to listen and include others that they jump on the wagon because it’s where the action is and looks like so much fun.

How many armchair leaders do you know?

Your comments—priceless

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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 at 12:15 am and is filed under About Leadership, Communication, Followers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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