Great Leaders Apply These Three Concepts

On a recent podcast, I was asked to share my top three pieces of advice for future leaders.

The following will most likely not surprise you even one little bit:

#1 It’s About Them — Not You. Indeed Dale Carnegie totally nails it in his classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People, when he states that “Ultimately, people do things for *their* reasons, not our reasons.”

So...

Key Point: 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 as human beings you can help in accomplishing *their* goals.

Align your vision with their wants, needs, desires, and values. Create an environment for them to grow. Practice “Giving Leadership.”

#2 Trust is Vital. Realize that earning trust will always be your most valuable personal asset.

You do that by committing yourself to others — genuinely and authentically.

How: One way to accomplish this is by keeping your word, building up 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}.”

I also love his description of trust as “a biological reaction to the belief that someone has our well-being at heart.” WOW!

#3 Technology Is Only Second. Embrace the fact that leadership is never about the technology — it’s always about the people.

While all the gizmos, gadgets, and widgets can certainly be immensely helpful when properly applied, they are always simply a means to an end, not a replacement for the human touch.

So Important: As Geoff Colvin discusses in his excellent book, Humans Are Underrated, the more advanced technology becomes and the more that machines can do what humans cannot, the more important elements such as empathy, team-building, collaboration, and interpersonal relationships (you know, those “human things”) will become.

Today’s Exercise: Consider *your* three big pieces of advice that you would give to future leaders in order to help ease their path.