Spark

What would you think if your organization offered leadership training to every single employee – janitors, salespeople and mail clerks included? You’d probably think they were wasting their money, and you wouldn’t be alone.

Most companies tend to save leadership training for moments when someone gets promoted to a managerial position. What these businesses fail to see is that leadership skills aren’t just useful for managers; they’re useful for the true leaders that can exist at any level of an organization.

These true leaders are called sparks because their actions are capable of creating sparks of inspiration. They are the people always prepared to take action in order to make things better. Although we generally imagine leaders to be CEOs, managers or supervisors, a spark can be found anywhere in the organization and at any level.

One of the authors, Angie Morgan, had an amazing colleague when she was working in sales for a pharmaceutical company. This coworker was well educated, had great communication skills and routinely exceeded sales quotas each quarter. Both coworkers and clients loved working with her and new employees would always look up to her as a role model.

When Morgan told her she was a great leader, the colleague tried to correct her, saying she was just an employee. But sparks are more than just their job title – they’re always leaders.

Angie’s colleague is the kind of spark that companies need more of.

With constant, rapid changes in the marketplace and the workplace, businesses need innovative people if they have any hope of staying competitive. Even so, most of them think it’s enough to update procedures, hardware and everything but their personnel.

But if they really want to stay innovative and creative, they need sparks – people at all organizational levels who are motivated and capable of producing amazing results.

Now that you know what a spark is and how important they are, let’s look at how you can become one yourself.