Recently, for a magazine article on leadership, I was asked for my top three pieces of advice to future leaders:
The first was to understand that Dale Carnegie totally had it right 80 years ago when he wrote in his classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People, that, “Ultimately, people do things for their reasons, not our reasons.”
So, if you are casting a vision to which you want others to commit, you must first commit to them; not as cogs on the way to you accomplishing your goals, but to helping them to accomplish their goals. Align your vision with their wants, needs, desires, and values. Create an environment for them to grow. Practice giving leadership.
Secondly, to realize that earning trust will always be your most valuable personal asset. And, you do that by the way you commit to others genuinely and authentically. One way to accomplish this is by keeping your word, building others at every opportunity, standing for what is right, and always acting congruently with those values.
As Simon Sinek says in his fantastic book, Leaders Eat Last, “Trust evolves once we have enough evidence to satisfy our brain that a person or an organization is, indeed, an honest {entity}.”
Last, but certainly not least, it’s embracing the fact that leadership is never about the technology—it’s always about the people.
As Geoff Colvin discussed in his terrific book, Humans Are Underrated, the more advanced technology gets and the more that machines can do that humans cannot, the more important elements such as empathy, team-building, collaboration, and interpersonal relationships (you know, those “human things”) will become.
On this same basic topic, my awesome Go-Giver Series coauthor, John David Mann, shared a passage from Rachel’s Diary: http://bit.ly/1MpghdB
Those are our thoughts.
Now, what are YOUR big three (or two, or even just one)? What advice would you give to future leaders in order to help ease their path?
Feel free to share. Looking forward to an enlightening discussion.
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