The Four Guiding Principles that Every Successful Leader Employs
Don’t decide to be a professional basket-ball player if you love basket-ball, but you’re a shrimp. Someone will mention Muggsy Bogues was 5-3.
Hero Sports lists 24 NBA players who stood between 5-3 and 5-8. They overcame a height deficit with remarkable strengths like speed, agility, play-making, and shooting. That won’t happen for you.
Four guiding principles for success:
- Maximize Strengths. Strengths make you feel strong when you do them. Minimize soul-sucking activities. But acknowledge that all leaders do things that drain energy.
- Bring Value. Value is the benefit you bring others. Carving ducks might be a skill that adds value to others, but it’s not a leadership skill that benefits others.
- Follow Enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is the thing you can’t wait to do. You may be great at building furniture, but you don’t love doing it.
- Seize Opportunity. Opportunity is the best current situation where your strengths bring the greatest benefit to others and fuels your enthusiasm.
Clarity:
Every strength isn’t a leadership strength. You might be great at baseball, but that doesn’t make you a leader. Leadership strengths fit into five functions.
- Model the way.
- Inspire shared vision.
- Challenge the process.
- Enable people to act.
- Encourage the heart.
The above list comes from Kouzes and Posner in, “The Leadership Challenge.”
You won’t be well-rounded when it comes to all leadership functions.
Success:
Success is using your strengths in the current opportunity to bring value to others.
Winston Churchill inspired people. But Churchill failed in peacetime. Steve Jobs challenged the process. I’m not sure he encouraged that many hearts.
Use the five functions of leadership as guidance for leadership development. Hone your strengths. Strengthen weaknesses that hinder your strengths and limit opportunity.
Develop your ability to ask penetrating questions if you’re great at challenging the process. Are you weak at encouraging the heart? Develop emotional intelligence. (Emotional Intelligence 2.0)
What has helped you succeed as a leader? Does it fit with the ideas on this post or not?
What is your take on developing weaknesses?
Bonus Material:
Developing Strengths or Weaknesses (Jack Zenger)
Really appreciate the reality of being a leader and that everyone isn’t going to be great or strong in all leadership skills. This can be hard to digest at times, so the reminder is welcomed. Thank you for sharing!
Thanks Jennifer. It’s useful for leaders to get over any sense that they do everything well. BTW, many leaders feel they are better than others at many things. 🙂
Position can make us feel we are better than we actually are.
Thanks for the insight
“Position can make us feel we are better than we actually are”
How do we respond to a person like this?
How important is it for leaders to focus on developing weaknesses versus leveraging strengths? I’m curious if Steve Jobs acknowledged his struggles with encouragement and actively tried to improve on it. It’s a difficult balance because as you mentioned we can’t excel at all facets of leadership. I’m interested in your thoughts on the difference between understanding your deficiencies while focusing on what you do well, as opposed to actively developing your weaknesses.
Thanks!
Thanks Bennett. You as a great question re: strengths vs. weakness. You might enjoy Jack Zenger’s work on this: https://zengerfolkman.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/White-Paper_-Developing-Strengths-or-Weaknesses.pdf
Regarding Steve Jobs. I don’t know, but thanks for asking.
Dan, the Zenger paper is interesting. I’m very surprised that there really are no leaders with both strengths AND flaws!
Mitch, I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or serious. Here’s a quote from the end of the paper.
The answer to our original question becomes clear. If you possess
a profound weakness then work on that. Working on strengths is
relatively futile until that is rectified. Once the serious weakness is
corrected, instantly begin to work on developing strengths. It is
the presence of a handful of strengths that will make you the
strong leader your organization needs.
Strengthening weaknesses is a challenge . It also depends on how you are measuring success. If success is purely financial, sales #s or a winning record, I believe that there are many exceptions of those strong enough in a certain area, under certain circumstances to achieve huge success. For most of us it takes hard work, openness to feedback and bring people onto our team with strengths different from our own along side to undergird those weaker areas and in order to be successful with the people we serve as leaders and those we serve as customers.
Thanks Jim. If we measure leadership success based on the 5 functions OR on financial #s makes all the difference.
Both measures matter. How we achieve financial #s – as leaders – depends on how well we fulfill the 5 functions.
One challenge of leadership is developing others is slower at the beginning.
That has been one of my concerns and frustrations. How to be sure that I am making steps forward in the 5 functions, and how to encourage and advise managers and supervisors under my supervision to move those same directions. I use your postings often.
Thanks
Follow Enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is the thing you can’t wait to do. You may be great at building furniture, but you don’t love doing it. This is the hardest one for me to deal with and comprehend in others. Lack of enthusiasm or passion for the tasks/work boggles my mind in how one just can’t have it regardless of what ones does. Maybe I’m an anomaly in todays’ world but my parents and grandparents drilled into me; work hard, be enthusiastic in what you do and pour passion into your work (regardless of what you do or whether you like it or not). How come I see so few these days with that enthusiasm or passion. Am I missing something?
I think what is happening here is a difference between diligence/effort and passion. You can work extremely hard, but not necessarily passionately, because the work doesn’t engender any genuine passion. Passion can be defined as “strong and barely controlled emotion”. I think that expecting that level of emotional investment, day in, day out, in the field of widget making, is an unreasonable expectation.
I agree Mitch. As a result of Roger’s and your comments, I used the word energy. Bring energy to work. Do your best to do your best, even when it’s boring.
However, follow enthusiasm is a useful principle, if you have the option to do so.
Thanks Roger. I feel like your comment is about having passion for work in and of itself. It doesn’t matter what the work is, do it with energy.
We can bring that to part of our day. And in that case, I agree. Work with energy regardless of what you do.
The other thing that brings energy to work we hate is the desire to support our family, for example. Sometimes we keep jobs we hate because we need them.
Work with energy – vitality – passion, whatever you want to call it regardless of what you do. I’m a believer in the inherent value of work. If you have the choice between doing what you hate to earn a living or doing nothing, do the work.
But, if you can, and many of us can, do work you love. So glad you dropped in.
Your words are very interested it tells a story of success
I am realist. Therefore, I always examine life through a “realistic and practical lens.” Within the realm of reason and reality, anything is possible. Obviously, a person born without legs will never become a professional basketball player. Unless that person receives a pair of bionic legs. But that same person could learn successfully to shoot basketballs into the hoops with practice. Practice makes perfect. Everyone on this planet is human and no human being can predict another man’s future. It’s not about what you can’t do…everything boils down to what your God-given abilities are. Hard Work does pay off. Most successful people never go into great detail about their everyday struggles. People have a tendency to water down their struggles. Everything in life is a struggle, anyone who says otherwise is a liar. People must deal with loss of loved ones, losing a job, living paycheck-to-paycheck, low self-esteem. Everyone is tested by something in life, there are no exceptions to this Universal Law/Law of Nature. It life were really that easy, no one would have any issues to resolve. My philosophy, is shoot beyond the stars and see where you land. I would never tell another person what they cannot achieve in life that is not something the CREATOR allowed me to be privy to. I do my best to keep it REAL.
Time is limited, stop worrying about your weaknesses. As long as you are respectful turbo power your strengths and stop worrying about what you aren’t great at. If you are a great communicator, communicate. If you are bad at organization, know your blind spots, work on them if they are hindering your growth but do not ruminate on being organized. Find what you do best and continue to hone those skills.
Thank you for these points. I started a new charity ten months ago called Dignity Boxes and it has so far flourished rapidly. I am always re assured when I meet someone new who wants to get involved and they say how excited they are by the charity and the vision, and can’t wait to get started. I hope this means I inspire others. I believe my working career as a nurse and teacher of palliative and end of life care included teaching communication skills and developing emotional intelligence but I am very aware you have to work hard at this over time for it to become self aware and part of you. I hope this has helped me become a good leader.
I would offer that when it comes to weaknesses, I agree that there may be a minimum level of performance that is required just to be part of the organizaiton. However, once that minimum level is met, I believe that focusing on improving our strengths will add more value to the team / organization than additional work on weaknesses. Opportunities exist to mitigate the impact of your weaknesses by finding a new way to utilize one of your strenghts or partnering with a team member who is strong in that area and who complements your weakness.