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April 12 - April 13, 2025
leadership ability is the lid that determines a person’s level of effectiveness. The lower an individual’s ability to lead, the lower the lid on his potential. The higher the individual’s ability to lead, the higher the lid on his potential.
The greater the impact you want to make, the greater your influence needs to be. Whatever you will accomplish is restricted by your ability to lead others.
The relationship between leadership and effectiveness is perhaps most evident in sports where results are immediate and obvious. Within professional sports organizations, the talent on the team is rarely the issue. Just about every team has highly talented players. Leadership is the issue. It starts with a team’s owner and continues with the coaches and some key players. When talented teams don’t win, examine the leadership.
True leadership cannot be awarded, appointed, or assigned. It comes only from influence, and that cannot be mandated. It must be earned. The only thing a title can buy is a little time—either to increase your level of influence with others or to undermine it.
The main difference between the two is that leadership is about influencing people to follow, while management focuses on maintaining systems and processes.
To be a leader, a person has to not only be out front, but also have people intentionally coming behind him, following his lead, and acting on his vision. Being a trendsetter is not the same as being a leader.
Experience doesn’t guarantee credibility, but it encourages people to give you a chance to prove that you are capable.
See what a person is doing every day, day after day, and you’ll know who that person is and what he or she is becoming.
Although it’s true that some people are born with greater natural gifts than others, the ability to lead is really a collection of skills, nearly all of which can be learned and improved.
But there came a moment when I realized that leadership was going to be the key to my professional career. If I didn’t get better at leadership, my career would eventually bog down, and I would never reach the goals I had set for myself.
To become an excellent leader, you need to work on it every day.
Be the Leader You Were Meant to Be, writes, “A leader is one who sees more than others see, who sees farther than others see, and who sees before others do.”
Reflective thinking gives you true perspective, gives emotional integrity to your thought life, increases your confidence in decision making, clarifies the big picture, and takes a good experience and makes it a valuable experience.
Being able to navigate for others requires a leader to possess a positive attitude.
You’ve got to have faith that you can take your people all the way. If you can’t confidently make the trip in your mind, you’re not going to be able to take it in real life.
When you prepare well, you convey confidence and trust to people.
“When you try to be top dog, you don’t create loyalty. If you can’t give credit (and take blame), you will drown in your inability to inspire.”3
I believe the bottom line in leadership isn’t how far we advance ourselves but how far we advance others. That is achieved by serving others and adding value to their lives.
The interaction between every leader and follower is a relationship, and all relationships either add to or subtract from a person’s life. If you are a leader, then trust me, you are having either a positive or a negative impact on the people you lead. How can you tell? There is one critical question: Are you making things better for the people who follow you? That’s it. If you cannot answer with an unhesitant yes, and give some evidence that backs it up, then you may very well be a subtractor. Often subtractors don’t realize they are subtracting from others. I would say that 90 percent of all
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“Seek always to do some good, somewhere. Every man has to seek in his own way to realize his true worth. You must give some time to your fellow man. For remember, you don’t live in a world all your own. Your brothers are here too.”
mature leaders listen, learn, and then lead.
believe that God desires us not only to treat people with respect, but also to actively reach out to them and serve them.
Such a big part of good leadership is having no unresolved relational conflict with other people. Serving others who follow you really purifies your motives and helps you gain perspective.
Trust is the foundation of leadership. How does a leader build trust? By consistently exemplifying competence, connection, and character.
“People will tolerate honest mistakes, but if you violate their trust you will find it very difficult to ever regain their confidence. That is one reason that you need to treat trust as your most precious asset. You may fool your boss but you can never fool your colleagues or subordinates.”
Character makes trust possible. And trust makes leadership possible. That is the Law of Solid Ground.
When people respect you as a person, they admire you. When they respect you as a friend, they love you. When they respect you as a leader, they follow you. If you continually respect others and consistently lead them well, you will continue to have followers.
Most managers are concerned with efficiency and effectiveness. They often possess a broader view than employees, thinking in terms of weeks, months, or even years. But leaders take an even broader view. They look years, even decades ahead.
Reading people is perhaps the most important intuitive skill leaders can possess. After all, if what you are doing doesn’t involve people, it’s not leadership. And if you aren’t persuading people to follow, you aren’t really leading.
Attitude is one of the most contagious qualities a human being possesses. People with good attitudes tend to make people around them feel more positive. Those with a terrible attitude tend to bring others down.
You must know who you are and have confidence in yourself if you desire to connect with others.
You will always connect faster when your focus is not on yourself.
When you give people hope, you give them a future.
people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. As a leader, find times to make yourself available to people. Learn their names. Tell them how much you appreciate them. Find out how they’re doing. And most important, listen. Leaders who relate to their people and really connect with them are leaders that people will follow to the ends of the earth.
To lead yourself, use your head; to lead others, use your heart.
“The leader finds greatness in the group, and he or she helps the members find it in themselves.”
“As iron sharpens iron, friends sharpen the minds of each other.”
To lead others well, we must help them to reach their potential.
Leading well is not about enriching yourself—it’s about empowering others.
dispensable. In other words, if you are able to continually empower others and help them develop so that they become capable of taking over your job, you will become so valuable to the organization that you become indispensable.
If the teams you lead always seem to succeed, people will figure out that you are leading them well.
Change is the price of progress.
“To those who have confidence in themselves, change is a stimulus because they believe one person can make a difference and influence what goes on around them. These people are the doers and motivators.”
great things happen when you don’t care who gets the credit.
If you believe in others, they will believe in themselves.
Enlarging others makes you larger.
leaders are practical enough to know that vision without action achieves nothing.
Good leaders are always conscious of the fact that they are setting the example and others are going to do what they do, for better or worse.
My standards of excellence should be higher for myself than those I set for others.
Every message that people receive is filtered through the messenger who delivers it. If you consider the messenger to be credible, then you believe the message has value.
