Leadership Lessons Every Leader Needs to Have Down Cold

Leaders should be reliable without being predictable. They should be consistent without being anticipated.

– Mike Krzyzewski

If you follow college basketball, you recognize the name, Mike Krzyzewski. And if you do, you’ll know what a greater leader and developer of talent he is. His lessons on leadership come every day on the basketball court and are very effective.

Leadership is a lifelong learning process. Every great leader always looks for ways to improve. Leadership can be especially challenging for entrepreneurs. Balancing the need to run a business and the need to lead company personnel is quite a task. But nonetheless, still very necessary.

Related: 7 Little Known Ways to Improve your Leadership Accountability

I have almost 40 years in both the military (a little) and the business (a lot) environments. In my speaking engagements, I often get asked the most important leadership advice I could offer.

Here is a list of the 10 most important lessons on leadership from my perspective:

Multiplier leadership

Multiplier leaders know that at the apex of the intelligence hierarchy is not the lone genius. Instead, it is the leader who knows the importance of bringing out the smarts and capabilities in everyone around them. My most important lesson. No question.

Foster teamwork

Peter Drucker is a silent mentor for our small agency. We are big fans. He once made an interesting point when he said that leaders don’t train themselves not to say ‘I’ He’s implying that leaders innately work with others and let the team get the credit. They don’t force themselves to say ‘we’. ‘We’ is natural for them, and it’s the way they’ve always thought.

You work as a team when you don’t care who gets the credit.

So the next time you interview someone with a resume that states, ‘I accomplished x’ or ‘I did x’, it should send up a few warning signals.

Staff development

Many companies follow the motto: “hire for character, train for skill.” You hire people that are eager to learn. They don’t have a ton of skills; but as a leader, you teach them, and they become better. They grow with your company and contribute to its success.

You see this with football coaches. In football coaching, it’s almost unheard of for someone with no experience to be hired as the head coach of a team. Most people start at a low-level position and gradually move up.

The same occurs in business. George Bodenheimer is the former president of ESPN. He started out working in the mailroom of ESPN. It would have been very difficult for him to rise to the presidency if he hadn’t had a boss who wanted to help him grow and succeed in the company.

If you’re a leader, a primary objective is to develop your employees. In skills and leadership. You might have a great employee waiting to be a star, but if you don’t help them grow, you’ll never see it. Worse, they might leave the company to go to an employer where they will grow and succeed.

Build confidence

We have written several articles on employee attitude. Employee attitude is so critical that it can’t be overemphasized. It trickles down from employers. Your business can never be what it can be if you don’t focus on employee happiness and engagement in their jobs and the workplace.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ll have dozens of people criticize you. Customers, current and former employees (whether you know it or not), and family and friends may give you constructive criticism. It can be stressful to hear or read, and it can be easy to pass on criticism to employees. It doesn’t help. As a leader, you should ensure employees have high confidence in their abilities.

Leaders should make employees feel good about themselves. Constantly criticizing and pointing out the flaws in an employee is a sure-fire way to decrease morale and engagement.

People first

No matter what the job is, leaders always want to look for the best people and then take care of them. A business is just a group of people working on various creations and inventions. People are your business. It is as simple as that. It’s all about the people. They are the lifeblood of the business.

When you’re leading a business or an organization, you’re leading people. It makes sense that leaders need to take care of their people. Many leaders work to have relationships with their employees. Taking them out for coffee and getting to know them better is common among leaders. Putting people first is an important element in being a leader.

Establish a clear direction

Getting people on board, aligned and pointed in the right direction is vital for an organization. If each person is going in a different direction, it can be like chaos in an organization.

Keeping people coordinated and aimed is a continual process. You’re the luckiest leader in the world if this happens by default. Two ways to ensure people are coordinated and aimed is setting milestones and having multiple coaches and promoters for your employees.

Do what you can to make sure people enjoy what they’re doing. If people aren’t passionate about the business and love what they’re doing, they are more likely to be going in a different direction and susceptible to becoming disengaged. Certainly not a good thing.

Be different

This isn’t an excuse for being a jerk to your people. Often an invention is at first misunderstood before it becomes a revolution. So if you aren’t willing to be different or unique, you may never be a pioneer in your industry.

A perfect example of standing out as being different as business leadership is Netflix. It was a totally unique way to receive movies. In the late 90′s, if you wanted to rent a movie, you’d have to go through your cable or satellite provider or get one at Blockbuster or something similar. Getting rental DVDs via mail was unconventional. No question, very different. Undoubtedly, Netflix needed to be willing to stand out as different. They were pioneering and attempting to change the way people watch movies. Changing the norm is not an easy thing to do.

Have people follow you

Leadership is hard to define and good leadership even harder. But if you can get people to follow you to the ends of the earth, you are a great leader.

– Indra Nooyi

We often forget that we’re not actually anointed with leadership skills. We actually have to earn our stripes and skills. We have to earn the ability to have people trust us and willing to follow. Not many people will mindlessly follow a leader.

This is why leaders need to earn leadership. People won’t blindly follow someone.

It’s important for leaders to know their followers and clearly communicate why they’re doing what they’re doing. This will help gain the trust of followers and thus earn them the position as leader.

Motivate people

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want to be done because he wants to do it.

-Dwight Eisenhower

A quality of great leaders is being able to clearly articulate ideas and get people excited and motivated. It’s not selling people on an idea; it’s motivating them on the concept.

Getting a person to work with a leader when they’re not obligated is more than just motivating them. It’s about ensuring people have fun. Employees at Zappos can work at dozens of other places, but they choose Zappos because of the culture.

Many charities get people to volunteer for them by promoting a noble cause. They say that if you donate, you’ll be spending your time working toward something greater than yourself. This motivates and inspires people to take a few hours to work for a charity promoting a cause they believe in.

One of the most popular stories of a leader inspiring another is when Steve Jobs recruited John Sculley to join Apple. Jobs asked the famous question:

Do you want to sell sugar water all your life, or do you want to change the world?

Learn good listening habits

To be a good leader you have to be a great listener. Brilliant ideas can spring from the most unlikely places, so you should always keep your ears open for some shrewd advice.

–Richard Branson

You don’t gain insights by talking. Nope. Ideas can come from anywhere, so it’s important to keep your ears open to new ideas and insight.

Leaders need to be good listeners of everyone … customers to employees to business colleagues. They need to listen to what other people say and not just hear it. Branson even carries a notepad with him so he can take notes on what people say.

Listening also helps a leader get multiple perspectives. When making a decision, a good leader always listens to a number of different people. They know they own the final decision but always make sure they get input from multiple different perspectives.

Takeaway

Remember this simple fact. Leadership focuses on people. The best definition of a leader? Someone who helps people succeed. Let your leadership success be your difference-maker.

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