1. The Qualities of Skillful Leadership by Jim Rohn
2. Vitamins for the Mind—Leadership/Management by Jim Rohn
3. Putting the Best with the Best by Dr. John C. Maxwell
1. The Qualities of Skillful Leadership by Jim Rohn
If you want to be a leader who attracts quality people, the key is to become a person of quality yourself. Leadership is the ability to attract someone to the gifts, skills and opportunities you offer as an owner, as a manager, as a parent. I call leadership the great challenge of life.
What’s important in leadership is refining your skills. All great leaders keep working on themselves until they become effective. Here are some specifics:
1) Learn to be strong but not rude. It is an extra step you must take to become a powerful, capable leader with a wide range of reach. Some people mistake rudeness for strength. It’s not even a good substitute.
2) Learn to be kind but not weak. We must not mistake kindness for weakness. Kindness isn’t weak. Kindness is a certain type of strength. We must be kind enough to tell somebody the truth. We must be kind enough and considerate enough to lay it on the line. We must be kind enough to tell it like it is and not deal in delusion.
3) Learn to be bold but not a bully. It takes boldness to win the day. To build your influence, you’ve got to walk in front of your group. You’ve got to be willing to take the first arrow, tackle the first problem, discover the first sign of trouble.
4) You’ve got to learn to be humble, but not timid. You can’t get to the high life by being timid. Some people mistake timidity for humility. Humility is almost a God-like word. A sense of awe. A sense of wonder. An awareness of the human soul and spirit. An understanding that there is something unique about the human drama versus the rest of life. Humility is a grasp of the distance between us and the stars, yet having the feeling that we’re part of the stars. So humility is a virtue; but timidity is a disease. Timidity is an affliction. It can be cured, but it is a problem.
5) Be proud but not arrogant. It takes pride to win the day. It takes pride to build your ambition. It takes pride in community. It takes pride in cause, in accomplishment. But the key to becoming a good leader is being proud without being arrogant. In fact I believe the worst kind of arrogance is arrogance from ignorance. It’s when you don’t know that you don’t know. Now that kind of arrogance is intolerable. If someone is smart and arrogant, we can tolerate that. But if someone is ignorant and arrogant, that’s just too much to take.
6) Develop humor without folly. That’s important for a leader. In leadership, we learn that it’s okay to be witty, but not silly. It’s okay to be fun, but not foolish.
Lastly, deal in realities. Deal in truth. Save yourself the agony. Just accept life like it is. Life is unique. Some people call it tragic, but I’d like to think it’s unique. The whole drama of life is unique. It’s fascinating. And I’ve found that the skills that work well for one leader may not work at all for another. But the fundamental skills of leadership can be adapted to work well for just about everyone: at work, in the community and at home.
To Your Success,
Jim Rohn
2. Vitamins for the Mind by Jim Rohn
Leadership/Management
The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not a bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly.
We must learn to help those who deserve it, not just those who need it. Life responds to deserve, not need.
My mentor said, “Let’s go do it”, not “You go do it”. How powerful when someone says, “Let’s!”
Good people are found not changed. Recently I read a headline that said, “We don’t teach people to be nice. We simply hire nice people.” Wow! What a clever shortcut.
Managers help people see themselves as they are; Leaders help people see themselves better than they are.
Learn to help people with more than just their jobs: help them with their lives.
3. Putting the Best with the Best by Dr. John C. Maxwell
Imagine that you get a call from a nationally respected headhunter. She represents a company that wants to hire you. In fact, she’s offering a signing bonus and a 20 percent pay increase. Your authority would increase, and you would get an ownership stake in the company. It’s a job you know you could handle, with responsibilities you know you would enjoy.
The drawback? You would work on a team with a reputation for mediocre work. It is known in the industry for doing no more than what it takes to get by, and there’s no indication that the leadership at the company plans to change that. Mediocrity is so much the rule at that company, in fact, that you’re a little concerned that they would want you. Do they really think you’d fit into that culture?
Despite the material benefits, many of us would turn down such an opportunity, rightly recognizing that it fails to satisfy one of our most basic needs—the desire to work with people who share our commitment to excellence.
The best want to work with the best. In fact, just one weak link can dramatically influence an otherwise strong team—ultimately leading to turnover among the best producers. So if we want to recruit and keep the best people for our teams, we have to recognize the importance of a strong weakest link.
We can demonstrate the impact of the weakest link with some basic math. If you have a five-person team and all five people are “10s,” then you might add that up and say your team is a “50.” But what if one of those people goes into a funk and becomes a 5. Now your team is a 45, and its effectiveness drops by 10 percent.
That’s a pretty big impact, but it still falls short of reality. In the real world, synergy exists, so our impact on a team is more like multiplication than addition. One and two doesn’t equal three in teamwork; with synergy, one and two can equal ten.
Consider the previous example but with multiplication. 10 times 10 times 10 times 10 times 10 equal 100,000. But 10 times 10 times 10 times 10 times five equal only 50,000. One weak link reduces the team’s effectiveness by a whopping 50 percent.
Clearly, the way to keep good people is to keep them around other good people. When good people find themselves working with people who are not carrying their share of the load, dissatisfaction creeps in. Pretty soon, the productivity of the really good people begins to fall off too. They lose motivation for excellence or they just get worn out from carrying someone else’s share of the work. Eventually, the best leave for greener pastures.
Everyone on a team needs to add excellence, which means leaders first need to place people in roles that make the most of their gifts and talents. But a person with the right skills and the wrong attitude is still like the proverbial bad apple that spoils the whole batch. So if you want a team that experiences low turnover and high success, fill it with people who are both capable and committed to doing great work.
—Dr. John C. Maxwell
“The best motivation is self-motivation. The guy says, ‘I wish someone would come by and turn me on.’ What if they don’t show up? You’ve got to have a better plan for your life.” —Jim Rohn
“Humans have the remarkable ability to get exactly what they must have. But there is a difference between a ‘must’ and a ‘want.’” —Jim Rohn
“When you know what you want, and you want it bad enough, you will find a way to get it.” —Jim Rohn
“Motivation alone is not enough. If you have an idiot and you motivate him, now you have a motivated idiot.” —Jim Rohn
Make it a Great Week!
