Quick snippets from my morning read on Monday, 26th October 2020
These snippets are from “30 years, 30 lessons in Leadership” by Dan Greene. These are my favorite bits, in no particular order.
1. Integrity is the fundamental building block of leadership. Without integrity, you simply cannot lead. Do the right thing. Always.
2. Care deeply about your people. To lead your team, you need the trust of your team. To earn that trust you must show you care. So, to lead effectively, you must care. You can’t fake caring. They’ll know it. If they know you don’t care, they won’t trust you.
3. Sweat more in peace, bleed less in war. Practice, prepare and train harder than the real deal. Training hard makes any “real-life” engagement easier. Practice, train, and debrief. Then do it again.
4. Your people need an individual approach. You can’t treat them all the same. You can’t expect the same thing of every person. Figure out what each person’s strengths and weaknesses are.
5. Listen more than you speak. Good leaders often use their ears more than their mouth. Active listening means that you really pay attention to what’s being said before you form your response. Listen to what people are saying (and not saying).
6. Show you care by investing in your people and their development. Remember, you need to earn their trust to lead them and caring is a great start. So, make career development a priority.
7. You rarely hear about the good stuff. As a dedicated and
driven leader, you’re going to pour your heart, soul and everything you’ve got into your role. If you’re a good leader, you’re going to be open to and will receive lots of feedback. But the vast majority of that feedback will be “constructive” i.e. stuff you could be doing better.
8. Learn to lead with data, not just instinct. You need to be good at gathering the right sets of data and using it to make informed decisions. Leaders can’t just operate on instinct. Conversely, don’t be paralyzed by collecting and analyzing data. It’s important to make decisions and often to make them quickly.
9. Leadership takes energy. As a leader, you are always ON. You have to set the pace and fuel the team with your energy and your mood. You have to learn to compartmentalize your bad days and put your game face on every time you walk through the door.
10. Repetition won’t spoil the prayer when communicating with your team. You need to keep everyone going in the same direction. The entire team needs to know and understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.
Read the full article “30 years, 30 lessons in Leadership” by Dan Greene.
And as always, if you enjoyed this, check out the rest of my daily snippets, curated daily, right here on The Red Notebook.
