Turn yourself into a great leader.
Only few believe that they were born to be leaders. And they have great reasons to do so. Now, you may have been a leader since you were in first grade and people just follow your instructions naturally, but do you consider yourself as a leader? The thing is, the difference between leadership and dominance is distinct enough to know that no one is born a leader.
To be a leader, it takes skills that must be enhanced. And it should start from a concrete decision to develop it and get people to follow you.
No need to fret, because these blinks will show you how by laying out the most important of the 21 laws of leadership. Boost your capability to lead through few of these laws.
And you’ll also find out:
- How an employer’s age affects whether he’ll hire you or not
- Why Ray Kroc, and not the McDonald brothers, turned McDonald’s into a global player
- How a woman who escaped slavery became a heroic leader
The biggest factor in business success is quality leadership, which makes the boss the most accountable.
Do you know how McDonald’s came to be so famous? There’s one in just about every corner nowadays, and we can learn a thing or two from the brothers who started the fast-food chain madness.
In 1973, in Pasadena, California, Maurice and Dick McDonald decided to open up a small drive-in restaurant that offers hotdogs. Then they relocated the restaurant to San Bernardino, California, and got reorganized into a fast-moving assembly line and offered hamburgers on the menu.
Then franchise was offered in 1952, which brought some dilemmas to the brothers.
One of the 21 irrefutable laws of leadership states or Law of the Lid says the potential success of your company is limited by one quality: your ability to lead.
The McDonalds brothers were doing great with customer service and coming with unique ideas, but they were not great leaders. As a result, not many franchisees were willing to put the fate of their money in their hands.
And the deal with Ray Kroc for the expansion only made the point even clearer. Kroc is a good leader who was hired to fix the McDonalds’ problems. He recruited other leaders to work on the critical positions despite not being able to afford them. So, Kroc had to sacrifice his own salary for years, take out personal bank loans, and cash out his life insurance policy to make things possible.
As a result, Kroc closed 100 deals in his four years of working for the McDonalds, then another nearly 400 in the next years, which is no math in comparison to the brothers’ 15 franchise deals of their own.
A leader sets the course of a company. And when a company hurts, it is the leader that sacrifices for it. When Global Hospitality Resources’ consultants are summoned to save a struggling hotel, their first solution is to let their boss go, because had the leader been at his best, the hotel would not require help to begin with.
Great leaders are influential and intuitive, and they have a track record of past successes.
Leaders are having their grounds shaky if they do not perform well, and The Law of the Lid agrees to this. This can happen to any leader, so how can you make sure it would not happen to you?
The answer is Law of Influence.
Hiring someone who has previous leadership background requires an important skill from such professional—the ability to influence. Whether a person can or cannot gather followers says a lot about his true leadership.
A great example of leadership is Mother Teresa, who created a personal army of followers to advance her mission assisting the poor. People stop and listen when she spoke due to respect for her leadership. The Missionaries of Charity was then founded by Mother Teresa consisting of her followers when even the Catholic Church was struggling to maintain their members.
How can you learn to influence people?
Display intuition and pay close attention to the factors that affect your followers.
When someone feels unfairly treated, you should be able to spot it through your intuition and paying close attention to the rising tension, so you get to resolve these issues before they affect your people.
You can use your past success and highlight them so you can boost your morale and your people can see your efficiency as a good leader. This way, your people can get motivated and confident knowing they are heading the right direction through the evidence of past successes rather than failures.
Leaders must be trustworthy, and they can lose that trust by breaking the rules they are supposed to enforce.
The Watergate scandal in the early 1970s gives us an example of what going down when leadership hit the ground. President Nixon’s administration were found guilty of illegal activities such as burglary at the offices of the Democratic National Committee, which cost the President the trust of his people and the spot at his presidential table.
The Law of Solid Ground states that leaders should work on a solid foundation of trust. And this holds truth in it because otherwise, people would stop following someone unreliable, dishonest, unfair, and does not impose good judgement.
Taking shortcuts rather than following proper procedures is a good way to lose your people’s trust. If a leader does not follow rules, it can show disrespect to the procedures, which can off his people.
At the end of the day, true leaders enforce the rules and hold others accountable for their follow. Thus, disrespecting rules is a bad idea. And this mistake is what led Nixon’s career down the spiral. He approved illegal activities and showed off his disrespect to rules.
Even the author has a personal example to share when he was working as a senior pastor for the Skyline Church in San Diego. He felt necessary to let go of a staff right in the middle of a hectic holiday season, and he made such action without thinking it through. Despite having good intentions, he lost the trust of the church congregation.
Leaders earn respect by being strong, courageous and loyal.
A great leader possesses two important qualities—trustworthiness and influence. And he must uphold dear his followers’ respect.
Another law of leadership—The Law of Respect.
A leader is someone who displays stronger will, more skills, and overflowing determination. When faced with someone who has these qualities, people tend to give their respect.
Just like Harriet Tubman.
In 1820, a slave was born and eventually escaped to be free in Pennsylvania. Then she began to help rescue other slaves through an effective leadership in the Underground Railroad. She was respected by everyone she worked with, most especially by the slaves she helped freed towards their journeys to the North.
It was not hard for Tubman to earn respect and trust from her followers, especially when she showed great deal of courage and determination whenever she traveled towards South to save more slaves.
Even though failure and death were everywhere when the bounty on her head kept rising and rising after she freed more and more slaves, Tubman did not even think twice as she succeeded 19 missions.
People saw her determination and loyalty to her cause, and as a result, she earned their respect.
Nowadays, CEOs, athletes, coaches, and others who hold leadership would often go where larger paycheck is. And this can lead to loss of respect and trust from their people. But by sticking to their cause and organization when the going gets tough, that is a gold quality that gathers respect.
Leaders attract individuals who are similar to themselves.
Leadership qualities—check.
It is now time to guarantee that your team is a good one.
The first thing to do is to imagine your dream team and the players you have in it. You might be looking at people who have the same qualities or have similarities with you no matter if it is about their background or age, and this explains Law of Magnetism.
This has been established during the dot-com explosion of the 1990s, when thousands of businesses hired entrepreneurial professionals in their twenties or thirties.
This law and the principle that revolves around it encompasses personality as well. Chances are you would want to work with someone who shares the same cleanliness at work or punctuality. And you sure would avoid working with a messy person no matter how attractive his résumé is. You would want to work with someone who reflects your work ethics.
You can take Theodore Roosevelt’s example when it comes to the Law of Magnetism during the Spanish-American War. He was raised in a wealthy aristocratic family from the Northeast before he decided to move to West Dakota and live as a cowboy and hunter.
When the war came, he chose to fight alongside those who came from similar backgrounds, which resulted to Northeast aristocrats versus Western cowboys. After all, a leader’s own traits shape his team and his organization.
At the Skyline Church, the author’s predecessor was Dr. Orval Butcher. He was a great leader and a magnificent musician. When he put together a new staff for the church, Butcher gathered people like himself, and the church went on to be widely known for its terrific music.
A victorious leader is hungry for success and will create winning teams with diverse talents and a shared vision.
To be a leader, you must experience being a terrible loser. Losing and giving up are not valid options, says the Law of Victory. And Winston Churchill is a spot-on example of this leadership when he refused to accept defeat back when the Nazi Germany bombed England and overruled Europe.
He continued searching for ways to actually succeed. And as a strategy, he joined forces with the United States leading the Allies to defeat Hitler.
Another secret to winning is knowing the importance of diverse talents. Imagine a soccer team made up of goalies and no other skill player. Therefore, diverse skill sets that can surpass challenges is what a success leader must come after.
But you ought to guarantee that everybody on your team shares the same vision. Otherwise, diverse talents could get wasted if your people do not focus on overall success.
In the final blink, we will discuss the importance of timing and its role in leadership.
A great leader makes the right decision at the right time.
In successful gardening, planting the seeds at the right time is important. The soil freezes if it is too early while poor harvest awaits if it is too late. Same thing goes with the Law of Timing.
Disaster arises when a head chooses the wrong decision at the wrong time. But the right decision at the wrong time can be worse.
Just like when the hurricane Katrina hurt New Orleans in 2005. Mayor Ray Nagin knew the right call was to seek for an evacuation, but he double-guessed his gut. It took another half day for Nagin to change his order from a voluntary evacuation into a mandatory one, which was already far too late for the people to safely evacuate. And this caused losses.
Successful leaders are decisive, seize an opportunity, and prevent a catastrophe.
Churchill recognized the threat that Hitler caused. And this helped him increase the military awareness of Great Britain just in time to come up with a winning strategy.
Understanding these fundamental laws of leadership can help your team surpass any challenge that could arise.
Final Summary
Leaders are influential people that successfully gained respect and trust from those who choose to follow them. And such response from their followers are maintained through traits and skills.
Be trustworthy, influential, and strong. Be loyal to your people. Focus on victory no matter what.