The Quintessential Leader

The Quintessential Leader is the definitive guide to successful leadership, which is what excellent management incorporates. Leadership and management are twin branches on the same tree and are inextricably tied together. So the degree to which management is good or great will be proportional to the degree to which good or great leadership also exists. And the degree to which management is poor will be proportional to the degree to which no or poor management exits. They simply cannot be separated from each other.

So, what’s the difference between management and leadership?

The Quintessential Leader will include discussions on what quintessential leadership is, as well as what it is not. It will also include steps to create legacy quintessential leadership, steps to build highly successful and efficient teams and processes, and how to use performance planning and evaluation as a positive tool, instead of the hammer that hovers over most employees heads because it’s tied to money instead of improvement.

The Quintessential Leader will include real-world examples of management and leadership that succeed as well as real-world examples of poor management and lack of leadership that fail. There will be an in-depth analysis of each of these that will outline what is right (and how to use that as a springboard for greater gains) if it is successful, and what is wrong (and how to correct it) if it is a failure.

Quintessential leaders have traits and personality types, as well as experience (conscious or unconscious) that defines them. Many of these may surprise you because they are not necessarily the things that leap to mind when you think of a leader. I will not use the word “boss” except to point out its difference from a quintessential leader because that’s actually what most people who end up being promoted to leadership positions become and it’s more of a functional title that is synonymous for baby-sitting (supervision) or control (a heavy hand and a short leash). These are the people we all have, at some point, had to endure – or are currently enduring.

If you’re currently a boss and want to transition to a quintessential leader, then this blog is for you because these traits and tools and techniques can be learned, and if practiced and applied correctly, can drastically and positively transform you, your team, your department, your division, your corporation.

If you’ve been promoted to a leadership position as a reward for a particular skill you succeeded in somewhere down the ladder in your company and feel like a fish out of water with all this “people stuff,” this blog is for you. You will learn what you’re leading and what you’re managing and how to do them both effectively, efficiently, and productively.

If you’re an M.B.A. that ended up in a leadership job after you did your post-graduate work and realize there’s a total disconnect between the classes you took and the real world, this blog is also for you. Remember that most of the people who taught where you got your M.B.A. have never actually worked in the real world, instead preferring the safe bastions of tenured professorship, so what you got in your classes was theory – mostly unproven – not practical application. This is the place to get the hands-on education you need to succeed in becoming a quintessential leader.

Thank you for visiting The Quintessential Leader.

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Additionally, please feel free to leave comments (all comments are moderated for approval) or email me with questions or situations you’re dealing with that you’d like guidance on. I’ll use them here to answer you and to provide everyone else with working examples of quintessential leadership in action.

Part of my intent with this blog is to mentor and to provide expertise based on proven experience to anyone who wants or needs it. Your responsibility will be to pay it forward to someone else. Perhaps one day, then, there will only be quintessential leaders.