Leverage Your Influence, Not Your Authority
Effective leaders actively cultivate follower-ship.
If you’re the leader, everyone knows you carry authority. The title on your business card, outside your office door, on your website, and in every other instance make it plainly visible and clear to all that you have the authority to get things done. Using your authority - leading with your title - may allow you to move quickly at first, but it will slow you down later.
Good and great leaders understand their effectiveness depends not on the source of their authority but on the depth of their influence. Leaders who consistently and regularly use their authority do so at the peril of depleting their credibility and political capital, while the ones who leverage their influence increase the same.
Effective leaders, by cultivating influence, increase their follower-ship and, in the long run, accelerate their chances of success.