Leadership, as I understand it, is a process of social influence that maximizes the efforts of others toward the achievement of a goal. If you have a goal that you can’t achieve alone—whatever that goal is—then you are at least potentially a leader. To unlock the leader within, though, you will need leadership capital.
Capital, in any area, is a measure of the resources a person has to make an impact. It operates like a currency, and of course, the most natural analogy is money. When I coach budding entrepreneurs about building and scaling businesses, I talk a lot about accessing and leveraging capital, and the folks I’m coaching naturally tend to think in terms of financial capital.
Financial Capital Is Only One Piece of the Puzzle
Don’t get me wrong—financial capital is crucial to a business. But it must work in concert with other (less often discussed but equally important) forms of capital. Many aspiring leaders, particularly entrepreneurs, fall into the trap of thinking that if they can just get the money they need, they can get done what they want to get done.
However, if I give you money to seed your business, but you don’t know what you’re doing because you’ve never done it before, your odds of success go way down. So you also need experience capital. If you don’t have a network or know any of the right people to help you scale your business, you will struggle mightily. You need relationship capital. Change, growth, and impact require capital in all of these forms.
Leadership Capital: A Measure of Influence
How does leadership capital fit in? Leadership capital is the measure of the resources you have to drive the process of influencing others to achieve your goal. Leadership capital is foundational to the value of the other forms of capital—you need it to be able to attract and leverage others and to maximize the value you get from them.
Leadership capital is the currency of change. It’s what you need in order to be able to drive whatever level of change you hope to achieve. The more change you want to deliver, the more leadership capital that change requires. Attaining your goals, whatever they are, will require experience and relationship capital, not just financial; most importantly, it requires leadership capital’s enabling and driving force.
How Do You Build Leadership Capital?
To build leadership capital, you need to give people a reason to invest their capital in you. You can look here for a discussion of ways to grow your leadership capital in the context of leading others, but first you have to invest in yourself.
My leadership capital framework provides tools and examples for unlocking the leader within.
Whatever context we talk about leadership in, the work of unlocking your own leadership capability involves developing and leveraging leadership capital. As you build leadership capital, the other forms of capital will also begin to come your way as others start to invest more and more in you and your goals.