Stature Over Status:
How to build the kind of influence that outlasts any title
Hi there
Hope things are well with you!
I thought we'd start with a leadership insight that often goes unnoticed:
Status and stature aren’t the same thing.
One determines your title. The other determines your impact.
Status is assigned. Stature is developed.
And knowing the difference can radically shift how we grow as leaders.
So wherever you are on your leadership journey, here’s a powerful lens to help you lead with deeper clarity and greater influence.
What’s the Difference Between Status and Stature?
Here’s the breakdown:
Status (External, Appointed)
- Granted by structures—titles, roles, rankings
- Assigned by others (and can be taken away)
- Exists within organisations, teams, clubs, families
Stature (Internal, Developed)
- Built through maturity, integrity, and consistency of character
- Earned over time through how you live and lead
- Independent of any structure—it goes where you go
One Is Always Visible. The Other Is Always Valuable.
Status is about your title. Stature is about your presence.
You can be appointed to status—but you must become a person of stature.
Status depends on the authority of your position.
Stature reflects the authority of your person.
You don’t need a title to lead with stature. And having a title doesn’t mean you have stature.
In fact, some of the most influential people in a room hold no official status—that’s because stature is who you are, not where you sit on an org chart.
Stature Carries an Authority – With or Without A Position
Stature reflects your:
- Internal maturity
- Conviction of purpose
- The integrity to live what you believe
It’s not assigned or inherited. It’s developed. Slowly. Privately. And often, painfully.
By contrast, status is tied to systems.
With status, your authority in a domain comes from your place in the structure—be it a company, a club, or a network. That’s why status is fragile. Remove the structure, and the title and power goes with it.
But stature lives outside of structures. It follows you wherever you go—and can be seen, felt, and respected even in the absence of a title.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
Leadership without stature can be dangerous.
When someone holds high status but low stature, their influence outweighs their maturity. And when that gap exists, the people they are leading can be exposed to a higher level of risk from their actions and decisions.
Why? Because stature hasn’t caught up to status. Maturity isn't matched by the weight of the leadership mantle.
Here’s the hard truth:
If your status grows faster than your stature, your leadership can become a liability.
Which is why the path to true leadership doesn’t begin by pursuing position.
It begins by growing in stature.
Three Keys to Building Stature
If you’re serious about becoming a leader others trust, respect, and want to follow—not just one with a sign on your door people are assigned to—here are three keys to help you build stature from the inside out:
1. Submit Your Leadership to a Mentor
Stature grows best in the soil of accountability. Find someone further along than you—someone you trust to speak truth, challenge your blind spots, and help shape the leader you're becoming.
Unmentored leaders often mistake confidence for character.
Give someone permission to help shape your leadership—not just affirm it.
2. Seek Growth, Not Promotion
The best leaders aren’t focused on status upgrades—they’re focused on inner transformation. They outgrow roles internally before they pursue the next rung externally.
And let’s be honest: the greatest growth often comes through the most uncomfortable situations. Leadership pain isn’t always a punishment—it’s often a critical part of the process.
Pain builds stature if handled well. Don’t waste it. Learn from it.
It’s humility—not pride—that turns challenge into growth.
Meekness of heart is what allows us to:
- let others speak into us,
- say sorry,
- take a personal loss for the sake of the bigger mission,
- relinquish the ambition to win the argument,
- surrender the need to atone for your injustice,
- do what’s right—even when it’s inconvenient, costly, or unseen,
- own mistakes without blame or excuse,
- hold to values under pressure, even when in the minority
- choose internal formation over external validation,
- sacrifice short term wins for long term success
These are the hallmarks of stature
3. Clarify Your Values—and Actually Live Them
If you’re swayed by popularity, pressure, or convenience, your influence will collapse when it’s most needed. You can’t carry the weight of leadership without something solid beneath your feet.
Define your values. Align your decisions. Let your life show the evidence. - that's what builds stature
Let people feel your consistency—that’s what builds trust.
Titles come and go. But the weight of stature stays.
Final Thought: Pursue the Right Kind of Leadership Growth
Leadership isn’t about where you sit. It’s about what you carry.
Its not the title on your badge, it’s the integrity of character that determines your leadership weight.
So here’s a quick leadership audit for today:
- Am I more interested in chasing titles or seeking growth?
- Am I more focused on serving people—or managing my image?
- Is my leadership based on status… or stature? Who would I influence if I didn’t have a title?
Because when the title is gone, only your stature remains.
Grab the PDF download for a one page snapshot of this blog
🔥 Ready to Build Stature, Not Just Status?
If you’re serious about becoming the kind of leader others trust—who serves with purpose, leads with integrity, and creates lasting impact—head to my course:
Mastering Team Leadership: Ignite Success as a Servant Leader.
It’s a practical, principle-driven guide to building a leadership foundation that lasts far beyond any title.
If you're ready to move from surface-level leadership to deeper influence that lasts, this course is for you.
Are You Leading—Or Just Staying Busy?
I get it...you’re in back-to-back meetings.
The team needs answers.
There’s a problem you didn’t expect, and your calendar is packed.
It’s a full week. You’ve been flat out.
But somewhere in the blur, the real question lingers:
“Am I genuinely leading—or just staying busy?”
That’s not a criticism.
It’s a reality for so many of us in leadership roles.
In high-pressure, fast-paced environments, it’s easy to equate activity with impact.
We stay in motion. We get things done.
But the work filling our calendar isn’t always the kind that grows our leadership impact.
When Busyness Replaces Leadership
We don’t always need more time.
What we need is a clearer way to see where our time is going—and whether it’s contributing to the kind of leadership our team, business or organisation actually needs.
Because here’s the truth:
Changing how we use our time can have a dramatic effect on our leadership impact.
The Focus Filter
That’s why I developed this simple visual tool called The Focus Filter...
- A quadrant framework that helps us map out how we’re currently spending our time, and where it’s adding (or costing) value.
Here’s a simplified overview of the four zones we can find ourselves in:
Focus Zone | What it Tells Us |
⏳ Time Drainers | We’re working hard, but the work isn’t strategic or energising. |
⚡ Misplaced Energy | We’re doing valuable things—but over-functioning or staying too hands-on. |
🚫 Cut or Automate | Low-value tasks that seem small, but slowly eat into leadership capacity. |
🪙 Strategic Gold | High-impact, high-leverage leadership activities that takes little time. |
We all move between these zones. That’s not a failure—it’s just the nature of leadership.
But when busyness becomes our default mode, it’s easy to drift from the kind of work that actually shapes culture, builds trust, and sets direction.
Leadership Is Seasonal. But Awareness Is Everything.
Sometimes we find ourselves in a quadrant we’d rather avoid—not because we’ve lost focus, but because that’s what the team or situation requires in the moment.
Leadership is seasonal—there are times to step in, take control, or operate at a pace that isn’t sustainable long-term.
The issue isn’t ending up in a less-than-ideal zone. It’s when we stay there too long without noticing.
That’s why tools like The Focus Filter are so valuable. They help us step back, check in, and ask:
“Is my time and energy going toward the type of leadership my business or team needs right now?”
Want to Try the Focus Filter?
I’ve created a downloadable version of The Focus Filter quadrant—with clear descriptions of each zone and practical prompts for how and when to use them.
It’s a powerful first step to help you spot where your leadership energy is going—and where it may need to shift.
Download the Focus Filter Quadrant Overview
The Focus Filter is just one tool from my Leadership Accelerator Blueprint —
A 6-session coaching package designed to help you build unshakable leadership foundations and empower your team to thrive.
If you’d like access to the full Focus Filter self-assessment, guided coaching questions, and other core leadership tools in the Leadership Accelerator Blueprint, feel free to reach out when you're ready to explore it further.
Best wishes, and Keep Leading!
Leadership Is the Seedbed of Culture
How a Leader’s Beliefs Shape Organisations and Societies
Leadership is the seedbed of culture.
When a leader’s beliefs are translated into values, embedded through systems, and reinforced over time, they begin to conform the identity of a people.
Culture Doesn’t Just Happen
Most people experience culture without realising that its roots trace back to decisions made by a small group of leaders.
We often think of culture as something organic or emergent, but it is, more often than not, constructed.
Norms, language, and policy all flow downstream from leadership decisions shaped by belief.
Whether we’re looking at nations, families, organisations, or communities, leadership plays a critical role in shaping the cultural DNA.
Research shows that as little as 1–3% of the population occupy positions of leadership influence across government, education, business, media, and institutions.
However, these individuals are not merely reacting to culture—they are actively creating it.
The Culture Construction Cascade
To understand how leaders shape culture, we need to trace the progression from personal belief to societal norm.
This progression is what I call the Culture Construction Cascade—a framework that traces how leadership beliefs ultimately shape cultural identity.
Beliefs - are the leader’s deepest convictions about people, power, purpose, and responsibility.
Values - flow from those beliefs and reflect what the leader prioritises.
Philosophy - is the lens through which those values are interpreted and applied.
Institutional Action - is where philosophy becomes policy, law, funding, structures, and systems.
Culture - is the outcome: normalised behaviours, language, expectations, and identity.
The first three levels are unseen (internal), while the final two are seen (external).
Culture may be visible, but its roots are hidden beneath the surface.
The Culture Construction Cascade: Leadership Influence Table
Here’s a side-by-side view of how each level functions—what’s visible, and what it ultimately shapes
Level | Element | Visibility | What It Shapes |
1 | Beliefs | Unseen | Identity and conviction |
2 | Values | Unseen | Priorities and decision-making |
3 | Philosophy | Unseen | Strategic worldview and interpretation |
4 | Institutional Action | Seen | Policy, law, and systems |
5 | Culture | Seen | Norms, traditions, and expectations |
The further upstream the influence, the deeper and more lasting the cultural change.
Who Holds the Leverage?
Some believe cultural change starts with the people—and it can.
Grassroots movements often spark new thinking or challenge established norms. But real, lasting cultural shifts require more than protest or momentum. They require institutional action.
While a movement might gather energy, it’s the 1% in leadership who ultimately decide whether change is adopted, resisted, or embedded.
They have the authority to turn ideas into systems—and systems are what solidify cultural norms.
A movement may raise awareness, but leadership chooses what becomes mandated in laws and policy.
From Compliance to Conformity
Cultural change from leadership directives doesn’t happen overnight—and is often a two-step process:
- First, behaviour is changed through enforcement, incentives, consequences or systems.
- Secondly, identity shifts as those behaviours are repeated, normalised, and passed down.
Sustained compliance, embedded in systems over time, can conform identity—especially across generations.
The Belief That Shapes a People
Leadership is the seedbed of culture.
When a leader’s beliefs are translated into values, embedded through systems, and reinforced over time, they begin to shape the identity of a people.
When a leader’s beliefs are translated into values, embedded through systems, and reinforced over time, they begin to shape the identity of a people.
The question isn’t whether leaders shape culture.
The question is: what culture are their beliefs creating?
Want to Change Culture? Start with Belief.
Many leaders want to create better culture—but can potentially start in the wrong place.
They try to fix behaviour, rewrite policy, or launch new values campaigns. And while those may bring surface improvements, they rarely produce lasting change.
That’s because culture doesn’t start with behaviour. It starts with belief.
Some leaders have never paused to examine their own leadership beliefs—what they truly believe about power, people, purpose, and responsibility. But those beliefs are already shaping how they lead.
They’re influencing systems, shaping team culture, and defining what their community or organisation becomes.
If we want to drive real cultural change, we have to start at the root.
We must remember, culture is built from the inside out.
Take the Next Step
That’s exactly what we explore in Mastering Team Leadership: Ignite Success as a Servant-Leader - a practical course built on the foundational belief that leadership is first and foremost a service.
If you’re ready to lead from belief and build culture that lasts, you can learn more and join here.
Or, if you'd prefer to talk it through first, you can book a free discovery call with me here.
Best wishes, and Keep Leading!
Michael
Beyond the Title - How Great Leaders Build Other Leaders
Great leaders don’t just manage tasks—they create upward movement in people.
When someone remains stagnant in their role year after year, it can indicate that true leadership is absent. The essence of leadership lies in developing others through intentional, progressive growth.
Here’s two powerful frameworks for growing leaders that expands leadership capacity at every level.
The Leaders Ascent Model
Stage 1: Observation – Learning Through Exposure
Before action comes understanding. New leaders first absorb the environment, watching carefully how leadership functions in context.
Example: A leader invites Sarah to observe team meetings with purpose, noting structure, decision-making processes, and conflict resolution. They discuss her observations afterward, turning passive watching into active learning.
Stage 2: Guided Practice – Building Confidence in a Safe Space
Next comes supported participation. Leaders create low-stakes opportunities for practice while providing a safety net.
Example: Sarah takes responsibility for one agenda item in the next meeting. Her leader helps her prepare thoroughly and remains ready to assist, making the experience challenging but not overwhelming.
Stage 3: Supervised Leadership – Taking Ownership While Being Coached
As confidence grows, the developing leader takes primary responsibility while still being supported. Immediate feedback accelerates growth.
Example: Sarah now runs entire meetings while her leader is present. Their post-meeting discussion focuses on specific strengths and improvement areas, refining her approach through targeted feedback.
Stage 4: Independent Execution – Leading with Full Responsibility
Finally, the new leader takes complete ownership. They operate autonomously, making decisions and leading initiatives independently.
Example: Sarah now manages team meetings entirely on her own. Her mentor checks in periodically but trusts her judgment, knowing she has demonstrated progressive competence.
Balancing Risk and Reward in Development
Leadership development isn’t just about giving people opportunities—it’s about knowing when and how to give them. The four-stage model is a way to manage risk, ensuring that a developing leader is given responsibility in alignment with their capacity.
True Leaders vs. Position-Holders
This model reveals a crucial distinction between true leaders and those merely occupying leadership positions:
🔴 Position-Holders:
- Focus primarily on their own performance metrics
- View team members as resources to accomplish tasks
- Measure success through personal achievements
- Fear being outshined by developing talent
🟢 True Leaders:
- Invest time in developing others
- View team success as their primary achievement
- Find fulfillment in watching others grow
- Actively create opportunities for team members to stretch
One key factor your leadership style will be defined by is this: Do you focus on your own success, or do you build others to succeed beyond you?
Beyond Individual Growth: Leadership as an Organisational Strategy
The Leadership Capability Development Roadmap provides a structured, step-by-step framework for expanding leadership capacity within an organisation, ensuring people grow from individual contributors to confident, capable mentors who develop others.
Organisation's that embed leadership development into their DNA experience:
✔ Increased team ownership and accountability
✔ A stronger leadership pipeline for future growth
✔ More adaptability and resilience in changing environments
✔ A stronger leadership pipeline for future growth
✔ More adaptability and resilience in changing environments
By focusing on empowering others, leadership becomes a distributed capability, not just a position held by a few.
Leadership Legacy
This model reflects a fundamental shift in how leaders view their purpose. Rather than measuring success through personal accomplishments, true leaders measure their impact through the growth of those they've developed.
The question changes from "What did I achieve?" to "Who did I help become more capable?" This perspective transforms leadership from a position into a profound responsibility to nurture potential in others—creating not just immediate results, but lasting organisational capacity and human growth.
Take the Next Step: The Leadership Multiplication Blueprint™
Leadership growth isn't accidental—it's intentional and strategic.
Download The Leadership Multiplication Blueprint™—a proven framework for:
✅ Developing high-impact leaders in your team
✅ Expanding leadership capacity across your organisation
✅ Creating a culture where leadership isn't limited to a few—but multiplied at every level
What if leadership wasn’t just about our title, but the people we build?
True leadership is about empowering others, creating a ripple effect of growth that extends beyond you. Step into the kind of leadership that doesn’t just manage—but multiplies.
Best wishes, and keep leading!
What if the key to retaining your best people and unlocking their full potential was as simple as ensuring they felt seen and valued?
More Than Just a Number
In the hustle of daily life, it’s easy for people to feel invisible—just another cog in the machine. Yet, at our core, we all want to be seen and valued—not just for what we do but for who we are. Leaders hold the unique power to impact people in this way through the simple yet transformative act of recognition.
Why Recognition Matters
Recognition is about more than a quick “good job.” It’s about seeing and valuing the person behind the action.
When a leader takes the time to recognise an individual—not just for what they accomplish, but for the thought, effort, and creativity behind it—it communicates something incredibly meaningful: “I see you, and you matter.”
According to a Gallup study, employees who feel recognized are 2.7 times more likely to be highly engaged in their work. By contrast, 79% of employees who quit their jobs cite “lack of appreciation” as a primary reason.
As a leader, your words and actions carry weight. When you make recognition a consistent habit, you’re not just boosting morale; you’re creating a culture where people feel valued, respected, and empowered to do their best work.
5 Practical Steps to Unlock the Power of Appreciation
Step 1: Spot Opportunities for Recognition
Acknowledge not just big wins but everyday efforts like teamwork or creative ideas.
Action Tip: Track small wins weekly—make quick notes to stay consistent.
Action Tip: Track small wins weekly—make quick notes to stay consistent.
Step 2: Make It Personal and Specific
Generic praise lacks impact. Highlight specific actions and their results.
Example: "James, your quick troubleshooting last week saved us a major delay. Thank you!"
Action Tip: Use concrete examples to show you value peoples expertise and effort.
Example: "James, your quick troubleshooting last week saved us a major delay. Thank you!"
Action Tip: Use concrete examples to show you value peoples expertise and effort.
Step 3: Tailor Recognition to Preferences
Everyone values recognition differently. Some prefer public praise, others private.
Ideas:
Ideas:
- Announce wins in meetings.
- Send a thank-you note.
- Give small tokens of appreciation.
Action Tip: Monitor how your team members prefer to be recognised.
Step 4: Make Recognition a Routine
Consistency builds trust and a culture of appreciation.
Sample Routine:
Sample Routine:
- Monday: Identify standout contributions.
- Wednesday: Give one-on-one feedback.
- Friday: Celebrate wins in a meeting or email.
Action Tip: Schedule 10 minutes weekly for recognition planning.
Step 5: Track Results
Recognition improves morale, productivity, and retention. Measure its impact.
- Use quick feedback surveys.
- Monitor team performance.
- Review turnover rates and exit feedback.
Use Your Power of Recognition
Recognition is not a "nice to have" but a core function of effective leadership. By seeing the person beyond the role, you affirm their importance and make them feel connected and engaged. Don’t let the busyness of leadership distract you from this essential responsibility. Take time to recognise—genuinely, meaningfully—and watch the difference it makes for your people and your team culture.
Recognition is not a "nice to have" but a core function of effective leadership. By seeing the person beyond the role, you affirm their importance and make them feel connected and engaged. Don’t let the busyness of leadership distract you from this essential responsibility. Take time to recognise—genuinely, meaningfully—and watch the difference it makes for your people and your team culture.
Ready to deepen your leadership impact?
Start implementing these recognition strategies today, and watch your team’s engagement soar. If you’re ready to go even further, you can pre-register in my soon-to-be released online course, Mastering Team Leadership: Ignite Success as a Servant-Leader and learn how to build a high-performing team that thrives on recognition and trust.
Best Wishes and Keep Leading!
