Very few people can succeed in their careers without having to manage, supervise and lead other people...virtually everyone is part of a team, and at some point in their working lives they must take a leadership role – if only to chair a team meeting or a project in their boss’ absence.

Before You Can Lead Others, You Must Be Able to Lead Yourself.

When you lead, you’re also allowing others to lead too.

You lead by letting others know
what you expect of them
which may exceed what they
themselves expect. Provide them a reputation
that they can step up to.

Being the leader means you hold the highest rank, either by earning it, good fortune or navigating internal politics. Leading, however, means that others willingly follow you — not because they have to, not because they are paid to, but because they want to.

Good leadership is not just a matter of making things happen; it is a matter of making essential things happen, making important and productive things happen, and helping people feel good about what is happening. Leaders need to have a vision, but they also need to know how to convince others that their vision can manifest, and how to empower them to participate in the mission of bringing the vision about.

Being the leader means you hold the highest rank, either by earning it, good fortune or navigating internal politics. Leading, however, means that others willingly follow you—not because they have to, not because they are paid to, but because they want to.

A leader must lead but also be ready to follow. Sometimes, another member of the team — perhaps a subordinate or direct report — might be in a better position to develop a plan, make a decision, or lead through a specific situation.

Leaders are to provide direction and intent and allow others to figure out what to do and how to get there." And this is

Before we are in a position to advise our people on the right course we must also make sure that we have the knowledge and the awareness required to fulfill this duty properly. If we do not have this, we can not lead.

A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be.

Leadership is not about you being a queen or a king, or putting yourself on a pedestal. Leadership is about coming to the ground with the people.

As a leader your first responsibility is to articulate a vision of where your team or organisation is going. What should the organisation look like, and be doing, in one year, two years, five years? What will we be like, and what will clients be saying about us? Having arrived at the vision, you and your people then need to work out an effective, detailed strategy, a roadmap for getting there.

Many leaders are in the first instance executives whose primary duty is to direct some enterprise or one of its departments or sub-units...
It remains true that in every leadership situation the leader has to possess enough grasp of the ways and means, the technology and processes by means of which the purposes are being realized, to give wise guidance to the directive effort as a whole...
In general the principle underlying success at the coordinative task has been found to be that every special and different point of view in the group affected by the major executive decisions should be fully represented by its own exponents when decisions are being reached. These special points of view are inevitably created by the differing outlooks which different jobs or functions inevitably foster. The more the leader can know at first hand about the technique employed by all his group, the wiser will be his grasp of all his problems...
But more and more the key to leadership lies in other directions. It lies in ability to make a team out of a group of individual workers, to foster a team spirit, to bring their efforts together into a unified total result, to make them see the significance of the particular task each one is doing in relation to the whole.