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July 22 - November 29, 2022
If you make the effort to identify and attract leaders, then understand, motivate, and equip them, as I’ve described in the previous chapters, that’s a good start. But if you fail to take the next step of empowering them, it would be like searching for a Thoroughbred racehorse, purchasing him, training and preparing him to race, and then never letting him out of the stable and onto the track.
You must have power to give power away. That power comes from credibility. Only after you have achieved success and earned influence do you have credibility.
“You’ve never promised to fill my leadership cup, only to empty yours.
“Only secure leaders give power to others.”
The greatest leaders aren’t necessarily the ones who do the greatest things. They are the ones who empower others to do great things.
Most people are unaware of the possibilities that lie within them. Good leaders introduce the people they lead to those wonderful possibilities.
How do you help them have that freedom? By reducing unneeded rules and bureaucracy.
Leaders need to be willing to bury a “dead” program, procedure, or policy that’s holding people back.
When you empower your leaders to own a job, project, or task, they do everything in their power to bring it to completion.
One of the values we champion in all of my organizations is serving.
Do you know what always gets done? Whatever gets rewarded.
leadership is like swimming. It can’t be learned by reading about it. Leaders become leaders by practicing.
At the beginning of a project, I communicate the essentials so that leaders know what they need to do
The one thing I do not communicate is how the job must be done.
I want my expectations to be clear, but I want others to use creativity to fulfill them.
“What is the potential?”
“What are the potential problems?”
As soon as I believe I’ve set leaders up for success, I release them to complete the objective.
One notable distinction between wrong people and right people is that the former sees themselves as having “jobs,” while the latter see themselves as having responsibilities.
six levels of empowerment, moving from least to most empowering. LEVEL 1: Look into it. Report. I’ll decide what to do. (Least empowering.) LEVEL 2: Look into it. Report alternatives with pros and cons and your recommendation. LEVEL 3: Look into it. Let me know what you intend to do, but don’t do it unless I say yes. LEVEL 4: Look into it. Let me know what you intend to do and do it unless I say no. LEVEL 5: Take action. Let me know what you did. LEVEL 6: Take action. No further contact required. (Most empowered.)
you want to attract and equip leaders who are capable of starting on level 4 and coach them all the way up to level 5 or 6.
Leadership expert Warren Bennis said, “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.”
The best leaders take an idea and add to it. And they encourage the members of their team to add to it.
Psychologist William James said, “The deepest principle of human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”
Too many leaders finish a task and never assess the process they went through. They simply dash off to accomplish the next thing. Maybe that’s because leaders have a bias for action.
“What did you learn?” I want every empowered experience of my leaders to be a learning experience.
what I love is that John walks with me, rather than ahead of me. Most leaders believe they need to walk ahead to show the way. John walks alongside me and lets me discover the way, with his help.
Teams of leaders are powerful. But they are difficult to create. Why? Leaders are hard to gather.
I try to cultivate positive qualities that help me to be a better leader and role model: faith, passion, teachability, growth, work ethic, love for people, servanthood, intentional living, integrity, and consistency.
In talking to the top executive coaches who work for the John Maxwell Company, they’ve told me that poor self-awareness is the number one problem they see in leaders.
The day leaders think they have arrived, they stop actively leading.
If you have a dream and no team—the dream is impossible. If you have a dream and a bad team—the dream is a nightmare. If you have a dream and are building a team—the dream is possible. If you have a dream and a good leadership team—the dream is inevitable.
alignment doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be facilitated by a leader on the team. You must communicate to help your leaders make the connections between the vision, the team, and their own strengths and desires. Clarify their contribution. Help them appreciate other’s contributions.
In the un-bonded team, no one really wanted to upset anyone else, so the discussions were cordial, resulting in compromised decision making. In the team that bonded, the friendship allowed for real arguments on the content to take place, without it spilling over into personal attacks. Thus, out of this healthy debate, BETTER DECISIONS were made.
One of the best ways to bond team members and give them a brighter future is to make sure they experience growth together.
I do this every December with the leaders on my team. I ask them to share two areas in which they desire to grow in the coming year.
And the higher the level of leader, the more individual each leader’s growth plan needs to be.
I believe every experience has something it can teach us. But too many people fail to learn from their experiences because they focus on their losses and not the lessons.
After an experience together, whether positive or negative, I like to spend time assessing it. We ask ourselves, “What went right? What went wrong? What did we learn? How can we improve?”
Polish
Our research indicates that teams with better awareness of their strengths have a significant advantage, perform better and ultimately have a more positive environment that fosters trust amongst the team members.
If you pull a leader out of a role too soon, he can lose confidence and credibility with teammates. If you wait too long, the team suffers and you lose credibility with the other leaders on the team.
As Jane and Amy interviewed the cleaning staff of a major hospital in the Midwest, they discovered that a certain subset of housekeepers didn’t see themselves as part of the janitorial staff at all. They saw themselves as part of the professional staff, as part of the healing team. And that changed everything. These people would get to know patients and families and offer support in small but important ways: A box of Kleenex here or a glass of water there. A word of encouragement. . . .
This is the power of contribution and is the job of the leader to point out. No matter how small and seemingly insignificant the job, they are contributing to the mission of the business. Just like the NASA janitor and the bricklayer.
You can help them position their minds to think differently about their work.
“There is nothing you know that you haven’t learned from someone else.”
It is why you get up every day—to teach and be taught.
Charles Swindoll—“Who luck” is the best luck a person can have.
The underlying purpose of mentoring is not for people to act differently, rather to become different.
The two areas where I mentor people most are leadership and communication, because those are my greatest strengths. And the people I work with not only have ability in one or both of those areas—they typically also have already developed those skills.
How I interact with a particular leader I’m developing—my choice to lean toward coaching or mentoring—depends on where the leader currently is and what he or she needs. But my goal is always the same: to help that leader go to the next level personally and professionally.
No one mentored leaders more effectively than Jesus did.
