Leadership Principles That Can Change the World

There are seven universal principles at work behind every choice, every interaction, every word that is said and every action that is taken. Understanding these underlying principles will help you grow and prosper as a leader and as a person.

1. Fairness

Fairness is a principle that's understood by children everywhere, but as we grow up, we each may develop our own individual concept of what is and isn't fair. On your team, there needs to be a common understanding of fairness, and it needs to be defined, communicated and demonstrated by you as the leader every day.

When you make decisions, be open and honest with your team about how they were made and why. People may be resentful or mistrusting of decisions that have been handed down arbitrarily or without input and explanation.

2. Honesty, Integrity and Trust

The people on your team want and need to trust you. They want to know that you've given them all of the facts and that nothing is being hidden from them. The way to gain that trust is by being honest and living with integrity.

If you meet this need for them, you'll gain their trust, understanding and faith. This can't be accomplished by what you say; it needs to be proven by how you live.

When you do make a mistake or a bad decision, disclose it. Don't blame someone else, lie or pretend it didn't happen. Be honest about it and move forward.

3. Potential

Everyone is capable of being and doing more than they are now. Everyone on your team - whether they're a rookie or a subject matter expert - needs to feel that you see his or her potential to grow, acquire new skills and develop.

People look to a leader to evoke that from them, inspiring and allowing them to grow, evolve and fulfill their potential so they're constantly improving and learning new things. Don't restrict their growth by assuming they'll adhere to your predictions of how they'll act, think or talk.

See each person's potential and not their limitations. Assume they're growing and evolving all the time, and this will empower them to grow into the next phase of their development, instead of stagnating where they are.

4. Growth

When you're tuned in to each individual's potential for growth and change, you can help that along, actively supporting the new skills they have acquired that will fulfill their potential. You can accelerate their growth by offering them concrete opportunities such as training and upgrading of skills or connecting them to a business coach or mentor.

Growth will occur through both positive and negative experiences, so encourage your team members to try new things and to learn and grow even through failure and mistakes.

5. Respect and Dignity

Respect is difficult to earn and easy to lose. Adopt the "golden rule" – treat people how you want to be treated. Treat each team member with respect and dignity for who they are and for the work that they're doing. Recognize and embrace their differences and diversity.

Earn respect by acting with dignity and showing that you have respect for yourself. Be a role model and hold yourself to a higher standard on a daily basis.

Reward people in public and correct them in private. This will protect their dignity and reinforce that they can take risks. They'll know that if they do make a mistake or fail they won't be publicly disgraced for it.

6. Service

"For he that is least among you all, the same shall be great" Luke, 9:48. A good leader not only leads the group, he or she is also a servant to the group - a champion for their cause; someone in their corner that will back them up, support them and mentor them.

It's about not just being a figurehead leader, but being of service, working WITH the team and meeting their needs. Examples include making sure they have the equipment they need to fulfill their roles or helping them to cut through the red tape of bureaucracy.

In his book, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", Stephen Covey advocates that you "seek to understand rather than be understood". Aim to understand the needs of your team members, and to serve them instead of just leading them.

The leader has to create the sense of a team or a family, adopting the mentality that, "We succeed or fail as a team". Leaders who don't understand this are the ones who take the credit when things are good and blame others when things are bad.

In difficult times, teams need to have a leader they can rely on to act as their champion. It is the leader's job to wear the target and shield the team if they come under fire. That may mean taking ultimate responsibility for a failure or mistake, or fighting to keep funds or people. When the outside world is taking shots at the project, or if there are roadblocks to the project, it's the leader's job to shelter the team, take the shots and get through the roadblocks, so the team can focus on getting the job done, and not get distracted by these outside challenges.

7. Quality

"On my Honor I will do my best". Understand that people want to do their best and put out a good product, no one shows up at work to screw up. As a leader, strive to always exemplify that, "quality is job one".

Establish a culture where going above and beyond expectations is the standard; not just for the products or services you create and deliver, but for how you live and work. "Walk the walk", and exemplify this standard in how YOU live and work, and also in how you lead. Don't cut any corners. Always doing your best is a SACRED PLEDGE that you make to your team.

By recognizing and nurturing these seven universal principles, you'll capture the hearts and minds of everyone that you interact with. We are all looking to have the universal principles of Fairness, Honesty, Potential, Growth, Respect, Service and Quality fulfilled in our lives. If you can fulfill them for your team members, you'll connect at a deep level.

You can achieve anything together if you can connect at this basic human level, and your team will work harder for you when they feel that connection. And vice-versa, you'll connect and feel supported by your team if you recognize these needs in them and in yourself.

Steve Farmer is a leader in the field of Coaching. As a skilled professional coach, inspirational speaker and author he brings the power of individual coaching to everyday living. In our frequently over stressed and under involved society, he empowers individuals to follow their dreams, achieve more in their current careers, and maintain a balance between their personal and professional lives.

A busy entrepreneur himself, Steve understands the many demands and challenges facing today's busy adults. He also knows that amidst the chaos, people sometimes need support in maintaining both their sanity and a balanced life. With his innate listening and problem-solving gifts, Steve helps individuals find solutions to their difficult problems. Whether through one-on-one coaching, workshops, courses or keynote addresses, he helps people to better develop their personal talents and skills so that their journey to success and happiness is easier, more rewarding and less frustrating.

Three Pillars Of Leadership

The three pillars on which leadership thrives are actually three areas of personal mastery – focus, feedback, and leadership. They will pay the greatest dividends for the time invested. With them, you'll lead effectively at the highest levels. Without them, your execution excellence potential and consistency is severely limited regardless of your role or station in life.

There are two categories of people in personal and professional development – the ‘green and growing’ and the ‘ripe and rotting’. In other words, the people who need training and performance improvement the most want it the least; and the people who need training the least, want it the most.

Let’s study the three pillars intensively:

Focus:
Everyone knows that focus is absolutely essential for success, but what everyone does not know is that focus is under attack from entropy, which is your constant enemy. It stands for ambiguity, chaos and confusion. The devil everyone is fighting constantly. Entropy is the second law of thermodynamics and essentially states that in nature, everything goes from a state of order to a state of disorder - naturally, by itself. In other words, at this very moment dust is settling everywhere around you. Just as your car is decreasing in value; and mechanically getting worse, naturally, your teams and organizations also slacken naturally. They need constant light to grow and achieve their potential otherwise they quickly become more and more unproductive. So, you have to provide focus in the right manner with the right tools. Without the right skills and tools, leadership is doomed to never realize the full potential of the team. This may be your single greatest calling as a leader.

Feedback:
Leadership thrives on feedback, even if some of it might cause heartburn for some time. Execution is aided by the key competency of displaying meaningful metrics all the way to frontline people. After all, it is the frontline that produces the bottom-line, so allow them the visual depiction of goal progress via a scoreboard. Just as you wouldn’t drive across the continent with black tape across your automobile's dashboard, you cannot lead without getting feedback. You need to know how fast you're traveling and how much gas you have and so on and so forth.

Studies have revealed some astounding facts. A survey conducted by Harris Polling in 2004 revealed that out of 12,000 people in eight industries only 15% knew their organization's top goals and priorities, and only 16% said their organization provided a compelling scoreboard that depicted progress against their goals or organizational objectives.

Thus, this area is not the strength of most executives, managers or some coaches. The obvious reasons are lack of courage and incapability to make an improvement. After all, it is not comfortable to confront poor performance.
Delegation:
It's a well-known fact that delegation is not the strength of most managers. As Michael Gerber has written in his book The Entrepreneurial Myth that most managers, owners and executives are so busy working ‘in’ the business that they fail to work ‘on’ the business. You cannot work on the business when you are constantly in the business reacting to both urgent and important demands and fires to put out, to-do lists that are too long. Inability to delegate work springs from lack of clarity of goals. They can’t let go intelligently because they are not focused on developing people. To be able to delegate work to your employees, you need additional time to work on the business. Delegation is wrought with real risks. It takes real courage to let go. But, the dual benefits of increased personal time on your part and building and developing your key talent outweigh the associated risks.

Developing Creative Thinking

Creative thinking is an ability of an individual to provide ideas and thoughts that are not something the average people would think of. Creative thinking can be defined as thinking outside the box, which means thinking beyond the normal boundary.
There are many techniques for creative thinking, it is usually something people have to develop as it is not usually a second nature. When a person develops their creative thinking abilities, they will find they can come up with ideas quickly. They will likely begin with the not-so-obvious answers to questions instead of jumping right in with the obvious solutions. Individual like that is a great contributor to a problem-solving situation.
The thought process of a creative thinker generally goes through the following four steps...
Step 1: Analysis
It starts by looking over the situation. It involves finding out the who, what, where, when and how of the situation. When analysis is complete, you should be able to completely explain the situation including any obvious problems or issues.
Step 2: Brainstorming
This is the true area of creative thinking. Once the situation is fully understood, a brainstorming process is spawned. Brainstorming can take on many forms. You can write things down, talk things out or even conduct experiments. Since brainstorming is free flowing, you should write them down so no good ideas are lost.
Step 3: Break It Down
Once ideas and possibilities are collected, you can start to link together related ideas and weed out those that are not relevant. Eventually, you will end up with ideas that seem to be the best solutions.
Step 4: Review
The final step involves reviewing several related ideas and come up with a final one or two ideas that seem to stand out and be the best ideas.
Being a creative thinker involves being able to think without a lot of structure, these four steps are the basics of any thinking process. They can help to organize your though processes. Of course these four steps need to be nurtured and developed over time until they become your second nature. That's how you develop your creative thinking ability. Hope you find this article useful.

Leadership

The greatest leaders are those who lead not only with their words and ideas. The greatest leaders are those who lead primarily by their example. The most effective form of leadership is born out of the sincere desire and proven ability to make a positive contribution.

Those who lead best are those for whom leadership itself is not the primary aim. Those who lead best are those who can inspire others to embrace the positive values and priorities by which they themselves live.

True leadership comes not from position but from participation and effectiveness. Those who are willing and able to get things done are best suited to lead. To be a leader, be a shining example. Do that which you would lead others to do, and do it spectacularly. Leadership at its best enlarges and duplicates the efforts of the leader. Make those efforts the best they can be, and they’ll result in true, effective leadership.

BECOMING A STRONG LEADER

A Leader is Not Born. A Leader is Established.
How can you become a strong leader? One who uplifts and motivates others? Pushes individuals in the direction of excellence, holds individuals responsible, all while instilling a sense of trust? Truly understanding exactly what constitutes a excellent leader is the initial step.
Here are a few steps you can take to become the leader you want to be:
1. Restrain Yourself.
Each and every good leader has had to become an expert regarding self-discipline as well as willpower to be able to keep a clear head on the main issue. Without having an objective or even the push to attain it, you cannot lead other people to achieve theirs.
• Follow through regarding all you do. As difficult as it might be, you have to be disciplined enough to be where you have to be, when you really need to be there, regardless of whether you would like to. When you are powerful inside your resolve as well as fighting off enticement to stop, you're setting a good example for other people to live up to.
• Select your psychological response to a scenario very carefully. Occasionally you will need to exercise the skill of silencing your own inner feelings if they are not really suitable to be able to set an optimistic example.
2. Project Your Own Objectives.
In case the individuals you are leading do not totally realize the much deeper meaning within their job, they won't share your own perspective or work ethic. Each and every step of the way, talk with your group to ensure they are on exactly the same wavelength as well as understand what you expect of them.
• Get your group active in the preparing procedure and also the execution of your strategies. This provides everybody a better feeling of ownership towards the outcome.
3. Compliment Remarkably As Well As Criticize Constructively.
How you compliment as well as criticize other people will make a big difference in being in a position to lead successfully.
• Be sure you openly compliment individuals who do superb work for you. You will give the individual a sense of achievement and also the desire to do better still.
• Whenever somebody does anything completely wrong, provide helpful criticism and also get it done privately. Recommend options on what they are able to improve and also take time to respond to any questions. They will acknowledge your own feedback much more willingly when they understand it is implemented to assist and never to damage.
4. Understand Your Men And Women.
You cannot genuinely lead any crowd if you don't genuinely comprehend their own expectations, goals, challenges, discomfort, and aspirations. All of the great intentions on the planet really mean absolutely nothing if you don't possess a genuine feeling of the people you are dealing with.
• Speak to your group and get to know them. Understanding one another on a individual level will certainly reinforce the actual relationship in between you. They will want to do better for you simply because you are not only a "boss."?
• Always be their leader, first, as well as their good friend second. You are their leader which of course means you need to make challenging choices every once in awhile. These types of choices can't be impacted by individual associations.
5. Make The Difficult Call.
Occasionally you need to bite the bullet and make a few distressing choices. Sacking, demoting, as well as holding individuals responsible for their particular activities can be quite difficult sometimes. Being a leader, it is your obligation to take care of these matters.
No matter where your own leadership role takes you, recognize you'll be able to a solid leader. Keep in mind that to be able to lead other people, you have to be disciplined yourself. In the end, your actions will certainly communicate louder compared to whatever you can say.
To be able to acquire the respect of other people, make an effort to lead by example in each and every part of your daily life.
If you adhere to these basic recommendations, you will be well on your way to becoming a genuine leader.

People Management Skills

People management skills are important in all walks of life. Whether you’re rich or poor, employed or unemployed, a corporate CEO or a plumber, strengthening these skills can help you live the life you desire.
Imagine how much easier life would be if people heeded your every wish! Your kids would be willing to do their chores, your spouse would do some of your chores, and your business life would soar to new heights! Surprisingly, strong people management skills can make all this possible.
Even if you feel like you currently have none, you can gain these people skills by becoming familiar with some basic psychology and then putting this knowledge to work for you.
We all share some basic desires. We all have many of the same wants and needs. When you meet these needs of others, people tend to be very easy to get along with. With patience, practice, and a willingness to understand people, you can develop strong people management skills.
Here are some good techniques for strengthening your people management skills:
1. Put yourself in their shoes. If you had their position, would you like yourself as a manager? Great managers know what people are thinking and feeling. They’re quick to pick up on things and work hard to solve problems among their team. Ask yourself if you’re willing to do the same.
2. Show gratitude and appreciation. You might feel appreciative of your team, but without action they’ll never know it. Always be on the lookout for new and exciting ways to show these emotions.
Remember to say “Thank you” when others do something nice for you. People love to be appreciated and a sincere “Thank you” makes them feel good! They tend to want to please you even more when they know you appreciate what they do.
Show your appreciation by doing special things for others that you know they’ll appreciate.
3. Give sincere compliments. Think about what you really like about your team and point these things out as regular compliments. If you’re sincere, chances are that the recipient will sense your genuine appreciation.
4. Treat others with respect. Strive to always treat people with respect, no matter what their stance in life. Treat them the way you’d like to be treated. This shows character and strength, both of which are characteristics of someone with superior people skills.
5. Delegate appropriately. When you delegate the right tasks to the right people, everyone gets a chance to excel and the team works together at its best. This raises the morale of the people around you and motivates them to do a good job.
6. Be honest. Honesty is always the best policy. If you’ve ever been caught in a lie, you know how quickly you can lose someone’s trust. Earning and maintaining trust is an important people management skill. When others trust you, they believe in you, and your opinions mean more to them.
7. Listen attentively. Listening is fifty percent of communication. Truly listen to what it is that people are telling you. Make an effort to understand their point of view, even if you don’t agree with it. When they know you consider their feelings as important, you’ve already won half the battle.
Practice these strategies each day in your communications with others, and one day soon you’ll find that more and more people agree with you!