What is leadership? One may be tempted to say that leadership is about achieving a result through people. Though one can understand the temptation to view leadership in this way it is very important to avoid doing so. This understanding gets things the wrong way round. Actually, leadership is essentially about achieving people through results. Put simply, leadership is a matter producing excellent people. The leadership challenge is primarily concerned with the production and grooming of excellent people. The quality and commitment of a leader’s people is what determines the quality of the leader.
What is clear then is that leadership is about knowing how to make people better, you are a good leader when you empower your subordinates. The leader must be concerned solely with giving what is needed to empower the subordinates. The central challenge of leadership is understanding what needs to be given to the subordinate in order to empower them. This is a complex skill and is to be developed over time and the complexity of this skill makes it clear why good leaders are so valuable. An essential part of this skill is the ability of the leader to develop a relationship with each of his people so as to be able to know what each specific person needs for their continued development.
Now of course part of empowerment involves giving subordinates technical skills. This however is not the whole story. A good leader also cultivates a sense of responsibility/accountability in the subordinate. A good leader enables the subordinate to take charge and own his/her performance. This is exactly what empowerment means, it means stepping back and enabling the subordinate to go it alone; it is to give the subordinate some level of power. More precisely it is to give the subordinate power over the contribution he/she is making to the organisation. This means that the subordinate is accountable for the result and given the space to take charge. We see then that empowerment involves the incremental suspension of control over the subordinate to enable to subordinate to stand on his/her own two feet and develop his/her own capacity and capability.
The increased responsibility that comes with empowerment requires something from the subordinate. What it requires is maturity. When giving someone responsibilities and suspending control over them it is absolutely essential that they are mature enough to look after the responsibility granted to them. When empowering people you have be absolutely attentive to their maturity levels. You only empower someone and suspend control over them if they are mature enough to be empowered. An immature person needs to be controlled. They need to be controlled because they are not responsible and cannot be trusted. So in the case of an immature person control is completely appropriate whereas with a mature person, it would belittle and disable his/her contribution. But what is it that makes a person immature?
Maturity for its part involves a whole number of characteristics. In the workplace we value maturity. Leaders prefer employees who are responsible, able to recognize their own faults, level-headed, able to listen, considerate, helpful, altruistic, and a whole bunch of other things besides this. If we examine all of these things we see a common thread which runs through all of them. What all of these characteristics illustrate is a benevolent intent. Fundamentally, a 
mature person is concerned more about what they are giving then what they are getting. In any situation a mature person is more likely to give attention to what he should be contributing rather than give attention to what he thinks he should be getting out of the situation.
This structure of the mature person’s intent accounts for the diverse characteristics we associate with a mature person.
To say that a person is responsible is to say that they are able to forego their own immediate self-interests and inclinations in order to look after their responsibilities.
To say that a person is considerate is to say that they are able to forego what is most comfortable and familiar for themselves in order to accommodate someone else.
To say that someone is helpful is to say that they are able to concern themselves with another person’s agenda in order to assist that person.
To say that the mature person is able to listen is to say that they are able to suspend their own agenda to give attention to the agenda of the person who is talking to them.
We see then that maturity is the result of a benevolent intent. All of the characteristics of maturity can be accounted for in the above manner. Immaturity then must clearly be the result of the opposite. Fundamentally an immature person is a person who is most often concerned with what life is giving to them, what they are getting out. Another way of saying this is that it is an obsession with one’s own self-interest that makes a person immature.
An immature person will be irresponsible because they will not be able to consistently suspend their own immediate agenda in order to take care of their responsibilities.
A immature person is inconsiderate because they will most often concern themselves with what is most comfortable and convenient for themselves, and not consider what is comfortable and convenient for others.
An immature person is unhelpful because they are generally do not concern themselves with assisting others.
An immature person is also a poor listener because they struggle to forgo their own agenda in order to give attention to the agenda of the person that is talking to them.
It should be clear why we can’t give power over to an immature person. We can’t because they are not responsible and they cannot be trusted. This is because they are self-serving. You cannot trust them because in situations in which their responsibilities and self-interest clash they are going to gun their self-interest. If a person is going to do what is most expedient for themselves in every situation then it is absolutely necessary to place controls on that person. You control that person because you cannot trust them.
It is for this reason that the process of empowerment is impossible with an immature person. When empowering a person you are getting them to stand on their own to feet; getting them to take charge of their own contribution and it is the job of the leader to get the person ready for this. When empowering people then it is necessary to assist them in becoming more mature. This is done by changing the person so they are not consistently gunning their own interest. Assisting them to become givers instead of takers.
This is the essence of leadership and a leader who gets this right is a good one and the leader who fails to get this wrong is a bad leader. A leader who gets this right has a tea of competent contributors and the one gets it wrong has a team of takers. To have a team of immature takers is absolutely unsustainable from an organisational perspective and should be avoided at all costs.
Given that you can only effect the change that you live it is impossible to effect this change in your people if you yourself are a taker instead of a giver. We see then that leadership requires deliberate work on one’s own intent. The leader is to become a giver himself so that he can help others become givers.