Leadership Excellence by Pat Williams - OutofThisWorldLeadership.com

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Bobby Bowden, who coached the Florida State Seminoles football team from 1976 through 2009 and ended his career second in career Division I wins with 389, reminisced, “What I’ll miss most about coaching is the daily influence I had on the lives of young leaders. Teaching them the game of football was in reality training them for life and leadership. In this book, Pat shows you how to become the complete, seven-sided leader that people admire and follow. What are the seven sides of leadership? Pat Williams lists vision, communication, people skills, character, competence, boldness, and a serving heart.”

Retired U.S. Army General Tommy Franks served as Commander-in-Chief, United States Central Command, leading U.S. and Coalition forces in Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq). He explained that in war, you don’t manage soldiers up a hill under fire. You lead them. You must inspire and motivate the troops, display exemplary character and rock-solid competence under fire, and be tactically aggressive. And you must love your troops.

America desperately needs leadership. Franks points out that we need people of vision. We need people who can communicate and implement that vision. Above all, we need people who are committed to serving others, not just their own egos and selfish interests.

Soldiers are human beings, and human beings will do almost anything you ask of them if they know you care about them.

To introduce his book, Williams explained, “My parents never talked about leadership. (I doubt I heard the word leadership even once when I was growing up.) They didn’t teach leadership. They didn’t preach leadership. They just led—and they changed a bit of the world for the better. By simply living a leadership lifestyle, they became role models of what a leader looks, sounds, and acts like. That’s how I first learned about leadership excellence.”

Everybody needs to be a leader. We live in momentous, dangerous times. There’s a vacuum of leadership in our government, our business community, our local communities, and our families. We hunger for leaders to match the challenges of these critical times. We need people to step up and accept the leadership challenge. Everybody’s a leader—or should be.

Williams explains that leadership is like a three-legged stool. The first leg is viewing yourself as a leader. The second leg is preparing yourself as a leader. The third leg is stepping up and taking a leadership role when the opportunity presents itself.

A leader goes out and makes opportunities happen.

Williams continues: My leadership library at home now contains more than seven hundred leadership books, and I’ve read them all. I’ve extracted all the great insights, stories, and practical advice those books contain. In the course of my intensive leadership research, I’ve become convinced that the fundamental principles of leadership excellence can be distilled into seven basic ingredients, seven profoundly practical insights into what it takes to be an outstanding leader:

Vision
Communication
People skills
Character
Competence
Boldness
A serving heart

These seven sides of leadership are truly timeless. It doesn’t matter whether you are a biblical king like Solomon, a Revolutionary War general like Washington, a Civil War president like Lincoln, a legendary coach like John Wooden, an inspirational religious leader like Billy Graham, a corporate strategist like Jack Welch, or a successful entrepreneur like Steve Jobs—the essential principles of leadership are always the same. They are true in every era, in every field of endeavor, and in every successful leader.

The First Side of Leadership: Vision

Leadership is about the future, so all true leadership begins with vision. Men and women of vision are people who have trained themselves to look over the horizon, to see what doesn’t yet exist, to see things others can’t see. Visionary leaders see earlier than others, farther than others, and more than others. Then they assemble teams of followers who catch that vision and hammer those dreams into reality.

General Colin Powell put it this way: “I don’t know that leadership in the twenty-first century will be essentially different from the leadership shown by Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and their colleagues two hundred years ago. Leadership will always require people who have a vision of where they wish to take ‘the led.’ Leadership will always require people who are able to organize the effort of others to accomplish the objectives that flow from the vision.”

Vision produces three vital effects in the life of a leader:

Vision keeps you focused. Leadership guru John Maxwell puts it this way: “Vision leads the leader. It paints the target. It sparks and fuels the fire within, and draws [the leader] forward.” Novelist E. L. Doctorow puts it this way: “It’s like driving a car at night. You never see farther than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Vision keeps you fueled. Andy Stanley, founding pastor of Atlanta’s North Point Community Church and author of Visioneering, explains it this way: “Vision evokes emotion. There is no such thing as an emotionless vision. Vision is always accompanied by strong emotion. And the clearer the vision, the stronger the emotion.” Marcus Buckingham interviewed thousands of employees who excelled at their jobs during his seventeen years at the Gallup organization. After interviewing thousands of peak performers, he arrived at what he considers the single best definition of leadership: “Great leaders rally people to a better future.”
Vision helps you finish. Every great leader, from Washington to Lincoln to Churchill to Disney to Jobs, has experienced discouraging failures and setbacks. Every one of these leaders would certainly have quit somewhere along the line if not for a vision. While Ronald Reagan had the visionary mind-set of a great leader, George H. W. Bush had the mind-set of a manager. There’s nothing wrong with being a manager—but managers do not make great presidents. Management is about the present. Leadership is about the future. Vision means having a clear, inspiring, challenging sense of where you want to take your team, your organization, or your nation. Mr. Bush is a good man and was a good president, but he was not a great president. The gap between being good and great was something he was never able to grasp—this concept he called “the vision thing.”

How to Become a Visionary

A vision should make the people around you question your sanity. It should make your heart race and your palms sweat. It should seem well-nigh impossible. If your organization’s goal can be achieved with relative ease, if it can be achieved without risk, without courage, without persistence, then what does the organization need you for? Why would your organization need a leader?

Vision Skill No. 1: Uncork Your Imagination.

Walt Disney once said, “I reset the limitations of my own imagination.” So should we! Discard your assumptions. Toss out the rules. Don’t just “think outside the box”; tell yourself, “There is no box!” Force yourself to dream up the wildest, most impossible ideas—then sit down with your team and brainstorm ways to turn those impossibilities into realities.

Vision Skill No. 2: Silence Your Inner Critic.

Vision Skill No. 3: Consider Every Possible Solution.

Vision Skill No. 4: Ask Yourself, “What If—?”

Visionary leaders are never satisfied with the status quo. They don’t say, “Do it the way we’ve always done it.” They are constantly asking, “What if we could find a better way?”

Jack Welch is a “What if—?” thinker. He refused to allow GE’s “heritage” to limit his thinking. For Welch, all options were on the table. That’s why he became one of the most visionary leaders in the history of American business.

Vision Skill No. 5: Train Yourself to Notice What Others Miss.

In their book Launching a Leadership Revolution, Chris Brady and Orrin Woodward write, “Leaders have watchful eyes. They scan their world for emerging opportunities all the time.”

Vision Skill No. 6: Think “Tomorrow.”

Vision Skill No. 7: Make Your Vision Clear and Simple.

Former GE head Jack Welch put it this way: “Every idea you present must be something you could get across easily at a cocktail party with strangers.”

Vision Skill No. 8: Learn to Think Backwards.

If you plan your journey from where you stand right now, you’ll feel hemmed in by circumstances and limitations. But if you start with your destination in view and work backwards, you replace limitations with possibilities.

Vision Skill No. 9: Tap into the Imagination of the Entire Team.

Vision Skill No. 10: Get Your Entire Team to Buy In.

“My vision” must become “our vision,” and not just in name only. The entire team or organization must share the vision and take ownership of it. If your team thinks of your vision as “the boss’s vision,” it will never come to pass.

How, then, do you persuade people to buy into your vision?

Share credit.
Make sure that the vision pays big benefits for everyone in the organization, not just the leader.
Build relationships with the team. Leadership guru John C. Maxwell puts it this way: “One of the laws of leadership is the law of buy-in. People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision. All visions begin with relationships. My relationship with God is where I receive the vision; my relationship with my people is where I give the vision.”
Keep the vision constantly before your team.

Vision Skill No. 11: Give People an Elevated Vision of Themselves.

Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, once said, “If you treat people to a vision of themselves, if you apparently overrate them, you make them become what they are capable of becoming. If you take them as they should be, you help them become what they can be.”

Vision Skill No. 12: Prepare People for a Celebration.

The Second Side of Leadership: Communication

Great leaders are great communicators. That’s why the second side of leadership is communication.

In How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie writes, “Leadership gravitates to the man who can talk.”

Daniel Harkavy, CEO and head coach of Building Champions, said, “As a leader, it is your duty (and your pleasure!) to keep a clear vision in front of your team at all times. Continued focus on the vision makes the difference between excellence and mediocrity. It promotes discipline in the trenches, where battles are won and lost.”

Here are six keys to effective leadership communication:

Packers defensive end Willie Davis once told Williams, “Coach Lombardi’s emotion became our emotion. You could be exhausted, spent, unable to move—but then Coach Lombardi would start talking, and he’d get your blood pumping, and soon you were ready to go out and run your heart out for him. Emotion—he had it, and he communicated it to us.” Ken Bowman played center for the Green Bay Packers from 1964 to 1973 and told Williams, “Vince Lombardi understood that what motivated one player might demoralize another. He was good at analyzing players, and he knew which players he could chew out and which players couldn’t take it. He individualized his coaching techniques. He figured out that some players actually worked harder when they were mad at him—‘I’ll show that old so-and-so!’ Other players played better because they wanted to please their beloved coach. Coach Lombardi inspired some players to love him, some to fear him, some to be mad—but whatever it took, he got each player to do his best. He had incredible skills as a motivator.” You can’t get to know people as individuals without taking the time to talk to them one-on-one. Leaders are often so focused on leading the group that they fail to see their people as individuals.

1. Believe in the power of communication. You must believe in the power of communication—and you must become a talker. On April 9, 1963, President Kennedy welcomed Churchill to the White House for a ceremony conferring honorary US citizenship on him. In his remarks, Kennedy said of Sir Winston, “In the dark days and darker nights when Britain stood alone—and most men save Englishmen despaired of England’s life—he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle. The incandescent quality of his words illuminated the courage of his countrymen.”

2. Communicate so that people understand. Legendary Bob Sheppard, longtime public address announcer for the New York Yankees from 1951 until 2007, was interviewed about the keys to being an effective public speaker. In his rich, resonant voice, he replied, “Pat, the keys to being a great public speaker are the same three keys I have lived by throughout my years at Yankee Stadium: be clear, be concise, be correct.” Peggy Noonan, the Great Communicator’s speechwriter, delivered a talk to leaders, which had one line that truly said it all: “Speak clearly, simply, and sparingly, and it should stick.” Avoid big words, jargon, and bureaucratese, which are intended merely to give you an air of expertise. Don’t say “diminutive” when you mean “small,” “procure” when you mean “get,” or “substantiate” when you mean “prove.”

3. Communicate optimism. Every day as a leader, you must make a decision: “Am I going to be a leader of optimism or a leader of pessimism to my people?” Optimism trumps pessimism every time.

A person’s level of optimism is one of the most potent predictors of future achievement. Optimism is a choice. It’s a learnable skill, a habit of thought that we build over a lifetime. Read books of positive, motivational, optimistic quotations and principles. Study the lives of great optimistic leaders. Memorize positive sayings by posting them near your bathroom mirror, your refrigerator, or on your car’s dashboard. Carry optimistic quotations in your wallet.

4. Communicate hope. When everything seems hopeless, great leaders communicate hope. Philip Yancey wrote, “Hope gives us the power to look beyond circumstances that otherwise appear hopeless. Hope keeps hostages alive when they have no rational proof that anyone cares about their plight; it entices farmers to plant seeds in spring after three straight years of drought.” Hope, he adds, is “the fuel that keeps a person going.”

5. Communicate to motivate and inspire. The key to being a motivational leader is seen in the root word: motive. You must understand people’s motives—you must understand what moves them—in order to motivate and inspire them. People are motivated and inspired by six major drives.

The drive for financial security.
The drive for acceptance and emotional security.
The drive for recognition and affirmation.
The drive for self-respect.
The drive for self-expression.
The drive to identify with a cause greater than ourselves.

6. Become a storyteller. Jesus taught the masses and mentored his disciples through stories with a purpose, called parables. Abraham Lincoln called his stories “yarns” or “tall tales.” Why are stories so powerful? Because they reach the emotions. Information and statistics are aimed at the logic centers of the brain, but stories go right to the human heart.

Williams notes a few tips on storytelling he learned over the years:

Be brief. Long stories can cause attention to wander, and people may miss important details—and miss your point.
Be vivid. Use descriptive language, gestures, and facial expressions, and vary your tone of voice to make the story come alive.
Use action. Move around the stage or platform as you tell your story.
Talk—never read. Reading a story is deadly. Instead, become your story.
Personalize your stories.
Get to the point.
Identify with your audience. Tell stories about “Everyman”—stories that resonate with the lives of your listeners.

Here’s Williams’ quick-start guide to effective communicating:

Get rid of your notes.
Study the art of public speaking.
Organize and prepare your speech with care. Craft a speech that is well-structured and clearly organized so that your audience can take good notes. Ask yourself, “What is my reason for speaking? What is my message? Why should people want to hear my talk?” Create a message that expresses your core values and your passion. Always start your speech with a “grand opening,” an attention getter. From the moment you open your mouth to speak, you have about fifteen seconds to capture your audience.
Learn to communicate with passion and emotion. Every time you speak, you should speak to convince, to excite, to motivate, to persuade—and that means you must communicate with both passion and emotion. Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computers and the youngest person ever to lead a Fortune 500 company, once told Entrepreneur magazine that, even after a company has a good business strategy in place, “the real challenge is to get people excited about what you’re doing. A lot of businesses get off track because they don’t communicate an excitement about being part of a winning team that can achieve big goals.”
Remember that the greatest impact we make as communicators comes from our nonverbal communication. Landmark studies conducted by UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian found that 38 percent of the impact and impression a speaker makes on an audience comes from tone of voice, 55 percent comes from nonverbal communication (facial expression, gestures, body language), and only 7 percent from the words that are spoken. Mehrabian refers to these findings as the “7–38–55 Rule.”
Speak with authority. To speak with authority is to speak with boldness and conviction. To speak with timidity or uncertainty is to undermine your own leadership position. As the Bible tells us, “If the trumpet does not sound a clear call, who will get ready for battle?” General George S. Patton was one of America’s great military leaders during World Wars I and II. As commander of the US Third Army in 1944, Patton led his troops farther, liberated more territory in less time, and captured more enemy prisoners than any other military leader in history. His advice to leaders: “Speak with authority. No one cares what your opinion is! Never use the words, ‘In my opinion, I believe, I think, or I guess,’ and never say, ‘I don’t think!’ Every man who hears you speak must know what you want. You can be wrong, but never be in doubt when you speak! Any doubt or fear in your voice and the troops can feel it. Another thing: Never give a command in a sitting position unless you are on a horse or on top of a tank!”
Practice active listening.
Connect with listeners through stories and humor.
Finish strong! A weak ending can ruin an otherwise great speech. Your speech should motivate your audience to action, so always make it clear what action you expect from your audience. Always ask for a response—and be specific.
Be original.

11. Promote the free flow of information. If there’s bad news, make sure your people hear it from you first—not through an e-mail or a “tweet” or the office grapevine, but from your own lips. Bad news does not improve with age.

12. Practice, practice, practice. Great leaders change the world through the power of their words.

The Third Side of Leadership: People Skills

Statuesque, six-foot-four-inch Ms. Peck (who played center for Vanderbilt during her college career) said, “Pat Summitt taught me that you’ve got to love your team.” It’s true. Excellent leaders have a heart for people. They care about people. They have empathy and compassion for the ones they lead. To be a great leader, you have to love people.

Summit once said, “If you care about your players as human beings, if they know you really care, believe me, they’ll play hard for you. In fact, they’ll run through walls for you.” If you want to achieve your vision, you have to love your people. Love is the number one people skill every leader should have.

This kind of love doesn’t necessarily come from the emotions, though feelings are often involved. This love comes essentially from the will—from the decision-making side.

Ancient Greeks had four different words for four different kinds of love. This particular form of love is a voluntary and deliberate choice—a love the ancient Greeks called agape (pronounced ah-GAH-pay).

James Kouzes and Barry Posner, authors of The Leadership Challenge, state it well: “Love is the soul of leadership. Love is what sustains people along the arduous journey to the summit of any mountain. Love is the source of the leader’s courage. Leaders are in love: in love with leading, in love with their organizations’ products and services, and in love with people.”

When Lee Iacocca asked Lombardi his formula for success, Lombardi replied: “If you’re going to play together as a team, you’ve got to care for one another. You’ve got to love each other. Each player has to be thinking about the next guy and saying to himself: ‘If I don’t block that man, Paul is going to get his legs broken. I have to do my job well in order that he can do his.’ … Most people call it team spirit. When the players are imbued with that special feeling, you know you’ve got yourself a winning team.”

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s disability produced in him the ability to understand and love the common people. It was the source of his most important people skills. The polio that paralyzed his legs also gave him a compassionate and caring heart. By leading from his heart and employing his people skills, Roosevelt became a great leader. Love is a people skill—one of the most vital skills a leader can have.

You can’t run a Starbucks store unless you’re steeped in the Starbucks culture. So how do you spot leadership talent in your organization? How do you know if someone is ready to lead?

“People skills” is the answer. In order to be a leader at Starbucks, you’ve got to have people skills. Some people think Starbucks is in the coffee business, but that’s not true. They’re in the people business—that’s what Starbucks is all about.

People skills are the social skills that enable you to get along with people, to negotiate with people, to avoid and resolve conflict with people, and to interact with people in a way that is mutually beneficial. A leader with excellent people skills learns not to see crowds, but faces.

A leader with excellent people skills is quick to praise, slow to criticize, and eager to serve. There’s a huge difference between a leader and a boss, and the biggest difference is people skills. Bosses intimidate; leaders motivate. Bosses give orders; leaders offer guidance. Bosses seek power; leaders seek to empower others. Bosses throw their weight around; leaders delegate responsibility. Bosses are good at fault-finding; leaders catch people in the act of doing good.

Love must be genuine, and love must be sincere. Love for your players is not an act, not a facade, not a technique for manipulating people into working harder for your cause. Your love for people is either real or it’s nothing at all. Boston Celtics coaching legend Red Auerbach put it this way: “Players are people, not horses. You don’t handle them. You work with them, you coach them, you teach them, and, maybe most important, you listen to them.”

Some practical principles to help you acquire, sharpen, and improve your people skills as a leader:

Be Visible and Available. That’s why Tom Peters urges leaders to “manage by walking around”—a concept so important it is known by its initials, MBWA.
Be a Good Listener. Don’t just kinda listen. Really listen. And let that person know you are really listening. Give eye contact, nod empathetically, respond in such a way that you show you are tracking and really hearing what the person is saying. That’s the rarest and most meaningful of all compliments. What often happens to the leader at the top is that underlings are reluctant to talk to the boss—and no one wants to be the bearer of bad tidings. That’s why people in leadership need to make a special effort to listen, to draw people out, to encourage people to speak. Here are two questions that you, as a listening leader, should ask your people on a regular basis: First question: “What do you think?” Second question: “How would you make the call on this one?”
Empower Your People. Empowerment is the act of uplifting and encouraging people. Our leadership roles give us a powerful megaphone. It amplifies the reach and effect of our words, for good or ill. We need to be aware of the power of our words whenever we speak to our children, spouses, employees, members of our team, clients and customers, neighbors, and people in our community. Every time we speak, we leave an imprint that can’t be erased. Simple words like “good job” and “attaboy,” and giving credit where credit is due—these are acts of empowerment that can lift people to heights of confidence and achievement you can scarcely imagine.
Delegate. Steven Sample was the tenth president of the University of Southern California, from 1991 to 2010. Williams interviewed Dr. Sample for his book Coaching Your Kids to Be Leaders, and Sample told him, “If you want to raise leaders, then delegate real authority to your people. You can’t expect people to learn to lead unless you give them the opportunity to make real decisions with real consequences.” To delegate is to create an environment where people are free to make mistakes—and free to succeed.
Take Care of Your Troops. Pat Williams describes a phone call he initiated with Colin Powell, “General Powell, I’m Pat Williams of the Orlando Magic. My son Bobby has just become a manager in the Washington Nationals farm system, and he’s eager to do whatever it takes to succeed in that role. Would you have any advice for him?” Without hesitating, the general said, “Tell your son, ‘Take care of your troops.’ And tell him, ‘Keep your mouth shut and do your job.’ ” As he turned to leave the table, he added over his shoulder, “And tell him, ‘Stay focused on this job—don’t worry about your next job.’”
Don’t Avoid Conflict—Manage It. Great leaders don’t fear conflict. They face it and resolve it. Management consultant Peter Drucker expressed a parallel view when he formulated what has come to be known as Drucker’s First Law of Decision-Making: “One does not make a decision without disagreements.” Disney CEO Michael Eisner quickly revitalized the company. At one meeting with his top managers, he said, “Why is there no conflict at this meeting? Something’s wrong when there’s no conflict.” Don’t fear conflict. Embrace those times when the people on your team express strong opinions and contend for their points of view. Contention means that everyone is committed to winning. Let your people voice their opinions. Then, as the leader, make sure you have the final say and that everyone on your team buys into your decision, whether they agree or not. Police officers are trained to maintain a calm, professional demeanor in confrontational situations. They de-escalate conflict by showing that they are in total control. So, in times of conflict, be the traffic cop. Lower your voice, lower your emotions, and maintain control.
Level with Your People. One of Sparky Anderson’s unbreakable rules throughout his career was be honest with your players. “The first rule,” Sparky once said, “and thank God I learned it in my very first year, is you have to have the players to win. The most important thing is to be honest with them. If you do that, they’ll be yours. But if a player finds you’ve lied to him, you’ll not only lose him but ten others in the clubhouse.” One of Williams’ favorite Sam Walton quotations comes from Rule 4 of what he called “Sam’s Rules for Building a Business.” He said, “Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners [that is, your employees]. The more they know, the more they’ll understand. The more they understand, the more they’ll care. Once they care, there’s no stopping them.” Love is the first and most foundational people skill of all. If you truly show agape love to the people you lead—a love that is rooted in your will, not your feelings—then every other people skill will come naturally.

The Fourth Side of Leadership: Character

Norman Schwarzkopf give a speech in which he said that leadership consists of two vital ingredients: strategy and character.

As John Maxwell reminds us, “You can only go as high on the leadership ladder as your character will allow you.”

Every team, every company, every military unit, and every religious organization needs some character people—especially at the leadership level.

A leader is someone who takes charge and does the right thing. It’s not enough to make a decision; it needs to be the right decision resulting from strong character. It’s not enough to take action; it needs to be the right action, prompted by strong character.

English statesman Thomas Babington Macauley observed, “The measure of a man’s character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.”

The life and death of Ken Lay— founder, chief executive officer and chairman of Enron— serves as a sobering lesson to you and me: Never let go of your integrity. Guard it with your life.

Optimize magazine (Information Week’s magazine for corporate investment officers, which ceased publication in 2007) published a ten-point description of integrity in its May 2005 issue entitled “The Ten Universal Characteristics of Integrity”:

You know that little things count.
You find the white when others see gray.
You mess up, you fess up.
You create a culture of trust.
You keep your word.
You care about the greater good.
You’re honest but modest.
You act like you’re being watched.
You hire integrity.
You stay the course.

Peter Drucker said, “No leader is worth his salt who won’t set up the chairs.”

Less than forty-eight hours after his selection in the draft, Len Bias lay dead in a dorm room on the Maryland campus. After apparently consuming large quantities of cocaine, he was sitting on a sofa when he suffered a massive seizure and a fatal cardiac arrhythmia. This tragedy impressed NBA recruiters with the need to examine a player’s character as well as his talent. Specifically, we needed to examine whether a given player possessed the character trait of self-control.

If you want to achieve great things, if you want to turn your leadership vision into reality, you must be a person of self-control. The trait of self-control is also known as self-discipline or the ability to lead oneself. Thomas J. Watson, the longtime chairman of IBM, said, “Nothing so conclusively proves a man’s ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself.”

Vince Lombardi put it this way: “A good leader must be harder on himself than anyone else. He must first discipline himself before he can discipline others. A man should not ask others to do things he would not have asked himself to do at one time or another in his life.”

Making yourself accountable to others is a great way to speed your own character growth—especially in the realm of self-control and self-discipline.

Perseverance is a more important indicator of potential success than intelligence, skill, education, talent, or luck. It’s hard to defeat a person who simply won’t give up. If you refuse to quit, no matter how many setbacks life throws at you, there’s no limit to how far you can go or what dreams you may achieve.

In 1943, at the height of World War II, British prime minister Winston Churchill came to the United States and delivered a speech at Harvard University—a speech about the shared values that linked the American and British peoples in friendship. In the course of that speech, one especially memorable and quotable line stands out: “The price of greatness is responsibility.” It’s true. If you want to be a great leader, if you aspire to leadership excellence, then the price you must pay is the price of responsibility.

The arrogance that so often comes with promotion and success inevitably begins their downfall. It has ruined more leaders than anything else. The antidote to this syndrome is a commitment to humility, to maintaining a humble spirit.

In every encounter Williams had with Coach John Wooden, he always came away amazed by his absolute humility—the humility of the number one ranked coach of all time, in all sports, both collegiate and professional. Coach Wooden was a world-class leader—and a world-class, humble servant.

Great leaders are people of character, exemplifying such virtues as integrity, diligence, self-control, courage, perseverance, responsibility, and humility. Of all of these virtues, perhaps the most paradoxical is humility. The greater the leader, the deeper the humility. As leaders, we set the tone for our teams, our organizations, our military units, our churches, and our families.

The Fifth Side of Leadership: Competence

Competence is “the ability to perform the leadership role in a highly effective way.” A leader of competence displays the attitudes, skills, abilities, and behaviors needed to function at a very high level and to take the organization to increasingly higher levels of success. Competence is not a static condition. It’s a state of one’s continual dynamic growth, both as a person and a leader.

Leadership is a learnable skill. No matter how our personalities have been shaped by DNA, parentage, education, and life experiences, we can all acquire and improve the skills of a leader—and great leadership experts agree.

Leaders aren’t born. Leaders are made—and each of us can choose to be leaders-in-the-making—constantly learning and improving our leadership skills throughout our lives.

Here are fifteen leadership competencies:

Problem Solving. General Colin Powell put it this way: “Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.” We need leaders who are problem solvers, not finger pointers. Instead, all we get from our elected leaders, from our business leaders, and yes, from ourselves, is more finger pointing.
Selling. What are you selling? A message? An idea? A candidate? A product? My friend, it all starts with you. To be a leader, you must sell you.
Continuous Learning. Coach John Wooden once quoted an adage he had lived by throughout his life: “Live as though you’ll die tomorrow. Learn as though you’ll live forever.” Leaders must fall in love with learning. Author Andy Stanley observes, “Great leaders are great learners.” And President John F. Kennedy reminded us, “Learning and leadership are indispensable to each other. If we stop learning today, we will stop leading tomorrow.” President Harry Truman once wrote, “Readers of good books, particularly books of biography and history, are preparing themselves for leadership. Not all readers become leaders, but all leaders must be readers.”
Teaching. Every leader in every field of endeavor should develop the perspective that leadership is teaching. Presidents, governors, CEOs, coaches, military leaders, opinion leaders—all should see themselves as teachers. Our job is to take the complex and make it simple, take the arcane and make it understandable. As Noel Tichy and Eli Cohen observe: “Teaching is at the heart of leading. In fact, it is through teaching that leaders lead others. Leading is not dictating specific behavior. It is not issuing orders and commanding compliance. Leading is getting others to see a situation as it really is and to understand what responses need to be taken.… Simply put, if you aren’t teaching you aren’t leading.”
Team-Building. Human beings are social beings. We’re designed to achieve our goals through teamwork. Mike Krzyzewski put it this way: “People want to be on a team. They want to be part of something bigger than themselves. They want to be in a situation where they feel that they are doing something for the greater good.” When the US team returned home with only a bronze medal, a sports reporter asked retired UCLA coach John Wooden why the United States lost. Coach Wooden replied, “We send great players; they send great teams.” Talent is important, but as Coach Wooden reminds us, it’s teamwork that brings home the gold. In Pat Williams’ 2009 book Extreme Dreams Depend on Teams, he shares what he believes to be the eight essential keys to building great teams:
1. Acquire top talent.
2. Be a great leader.
3. Be committed (you must persuade your team to commit to each other, to commit to your leadership, and to commit to the team vision).
4. Be passionate (you and your people need to have an intense passion for the game, whether your “game” is a sport, a business, a nonprofit organization, a church, or a military unit).
5. Think teamwork (everyone must be in it for the team, not the ego).
6. Empower individuals (cheer them on and entrust them with real decision-making power).
7. Build trust and respect.
8. Focus on character.
Organization & Planning. Archie W. Dunham was CEO of Conoco, Inc., from 1996 to 2002, and chairman of ConocoPhillips until 2004. He said, “My four years of service in the United States Marine Corps were years of tremendous personal growth. I was privileged to lead at an early age and consequently learned much about leadership. I have never forgotten the five P’s … Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance…” Organization, preparation, and planning are crucial competencies for every leader of excellence.
Managing Change. We prefer sameness—though we prefer to call it stability. A leader proves his or her mettle not in calm, stable circumstances, but in times of uncertainty and rapid change when the ground is shifting underfoot. Great leaders are flexible in the face of change. James Kouzes and Barry Posner write about change as a challenge the leader must rise to. “Challenge is the crucible for greatness,” they observe. “Exemplary leaders—the kind of leaders people want to follow—are always associated with changing the status quo. Your job as a leader is to make change happen. In times of catastrophe and great change, competent leadership will shine—and incompetent leadership will be exposed.”
Balance. Leaders have to balance competing, paradoxical demands on their lives—action versus reflection, risk versus prudence, logic versus intuition, managing today versus envisioning tomorrow, work versus play, exercise versus rest, family demands versus leadership demands—and leaders have to maintain this balancing act on the fly. As Albert Einstein once told his adult son, life is like a bicycle, and you can only keep your balance if you keep moving forward. One middle path all leaders need to find is the path of balance between career and family. All great leaders must weigh the demands of a strong work ethic against the need for rest, relaxation, and family time. The leadership role is hard on marriages and families, so learn the competency of finding the right balance—then guard that balance with your life.
Charisma. In short, practice good people skills. Charisma is nothing more than an array of learnable skills.
Poise. Poise is the ability to remain cool, calm, and collected in emotional or stressful situations. A poised leader keeps such emotions as anger, frustration, impatience, and panic under control. Poise gives you the power to think, focus, and find solutions. Walt Frazier’s Coach would tell him, “Frazier, don’t lose your head, son. Your brains are in it.” While that was funny advice, those words of wisdom ring true. People look to you, the leader, to see how you respond in a crisis, and they take their cues from you. If you want your organization to weather any storm, then commit yourself to remaining cool in heated situations.
Historical Awareness. Dr. Kurt Senske is chairman of Thrivent Financial for Lutherans and CEO of Lutheran Social Services of the South, Inc. In Executive Values, he writes, “Leaders today sometimes tend to ignore the history of their organization, as they look to the future. In order to devise a forward-looking plan, it is vital to understand where you have come from. Including such a ‘history lesson’ in the planning process is time well spent.” To be a leader of vision, remember your past. Nurture the competency of historical awareness.
Authority. If you don’t use your authority when authority is demanded, you’ll appear weak and indecisive—and you’ll lose that authority. The misuse of authority to serve a leader’s ego ultimately destroys people, organizations, and visions.
Good Judgment. The competency of good judgment is rooted in strong character, knowledge and wisdom, common sense, courage, and experience. The single most important thing that leaders do is make good judgment calls.
Authenticity. What does it mean to be authentic? Very simply, it means be yourself. BusinessWeek once asked baseball manager Sparky Anderson, “What one piece of advice would you give to a CEO about to take over a company for the first time?” Sparky replied: “You are who you are.… Always be yourself.… You can’t learn to manage by copying [other leaders]. Learn from other leaders, but don’t imitate them. Know your own strengths and abilities, and lead from within your own unique personality.”
Patience. Every leader needs the competency of patience. Coach John Wooden used to tell his players, “Be quick, but don’t hurry.” He understood the importance of patience in leadership. Good things always take time, and that requires patience. Competitive greatness requires patience. Excellence requires patience. Most of all, success requires patience.

“Competence goes beyond words,” writes leadership guru John C. Maxwell. “It’s the leader’s ability to say it, plan it, and do it in such a way that others know that you know how—and know that they want to follow you.”

Mastery, absolute competence, is mandatory for a leader.

The Sixth Side of Leadership: Boldness

Bold leaders make bold decisions. On every team, in every organization, somebody has to make the decisions. That’s what leadership is all about. The role of a leader is to gather as much information as practicable, consult with key people, reflect on all the options, upsides, downsides, risks, and rewards … Then decide.

Historian David McCullough wrote that President Harry Truman learned through experience that:

Even though Harry Truman appeared to make decisions quickly and firmly, historian Alan Axelrod points out that Truman was never hasty or arbitrary in his approach to decision making.

Great leaders don’t waste time and don’t get bogged down by “the paralysis of analysis.” Though thoughtful analysis is a necessary component of decision making, too much study can quickly become a substitute for decision making.

John F. Kennedy understood that delaying a decision is itself a decision; a decision with risks as well. “There are risks and costs to a program of action,” he once said, “but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”

Schwarzkopf once explained what he calls “the secret to modern leadership” in an interview for the online Academy of Achievement: “Leadership is not managing an organization.… Leadership is motivating people.… So I tell people that the secret to modern leadership is two rules. Rule 13: When placed in command, take charge. But many ask, ‘OK, then what do I do?’ The answer is Rule 14: Do what’s right.”

The true modern leader of today is the one that’s, number one, willing to take charge, and [number two] willing to do what’s right. That’s the secret of leadership.

The ability to take charge boldly is a learned skill. It doesn’t come naturally to everyone. But if you aspire to a leadership role at any level, you must acquire the skill of boldly taking charge.

General Colin Powell, in My American Journey, expresses this truth very succinctly: “Command is lonely.”

Someone once observed, “Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”

Legendary advertising man David Ogilvy expressed it accurately: “In my experience, committees can criticize, but they cannot create. Search the parks in all your cities. You’ll find no statues of committees. Committees have their place, but decision making is the leader’s job.”

Lee Iacocca put it this way: “I have always found that if I move with 75 percent or more of the facts, I usually never regret it. It’s the guys who wait to have everything perfect that drive you crazy.” Leaders decide, initiate, take risks—and live with the consequences of their decisions.”

A great truth for every leader to understand and internalize: Don’t dwell on the past. Above all, don’t dwell on past mistakes. And once a decision is made, don’t be too quick to reverse it.

Face it—unlike golf, there are no mulligans in leadership. Once you make a decision, you can’t get it back.

Do you have the heart of a leader? To answer yes, you must have courage in all its different forms. You must have boldness, the courage to make risky decisions when all the chips are down. You must have bravery, the physical courage to confront danger, pain, privation, hardship, and even death in order to achieve a great goal. You must have uprightness, the moral courage to make right choices and take right actions even in the face of opposition, temptation, ridicule, or extreme cost.

One of the books in General Patton’s collection is a textbook from his cadet days at West Point. It’s called Elements of Strategy. Turning to the final page, you find this revealing note inscribed in Patton’s own hand:

QUALITIES OF A GREAT GENERAL

Tactically aggressive (loves a fight)
Strength of character
Steadiness of purpose
Acceptance of responsibility
Energy
Good health and strength

//signed// George Patton Cadet USMA April 29, 1909

Note that each of these six qualities is a form of boldness or courage.

Hall of Fame NBA coach Phil Jackson wrote his own commentary on this concept in his book Sacred Hoops: “Above all, trust your gut.”

Noel Tichy observed that Andy Grove displays “a leadership quality that I have come to call ‘edge’: the ability to make tough decisions and the willingness to sacrifice the security of today for the sake of a better future.… The people who succeed, the winners, are the ones who have edge.”

Lady Margaret Thatcher said, “There are four steps to becoming a great leader. First, know what matters to you. Have a set of principles and follow them. Your principles serve as the foundation of your leadership. Second, speak up! Be bold and fearless about asserting your principles. Third, anticipate problems. Use information, instinct, and intuition to foresee problems and crises before anyone else does. Fourth, make bold decisions. Base your decisions on your principles and on the information and insight you have. Meet problems and opportunities head-on; then take bold action.”

The Seventh Side of Leadership: A Serving Heart

The seventh side of leadership is serving—and that is the hardest dimension of leadership for many people to grasp. There are many five- and six-sided leaders in the world. They’re good at what they do—but they fall just one or two notches short of true leadership excellence. What are they missing? They lack a serving heart. The other six sides of leadership are nouns: vision, communication, people skills, character, competence, and boldness. But the seventh side of leadership is a verb—an action word serving.

In Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why People Demand It, James Kouzes and Barry Posner define leadership as serving others. “Leadership is service,” they write. “Leaders exist to serve a purpose for the people who have made it possible for them to lead—their constituents. They are servant leaders. Not self-serving leaders, but other-serving leaders. The relationship of leader and constituent has been turned upside down.”

Robert Greenleaf concluded, “The servant-leader is servant first.… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions.… The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types.”

The “new” leadership model for the twenty-first century—the model of servant leadership—is as old as Lao-tzu in ancient China (more than five hundred years before Christ), Chanakya of ancient India (more than three hundred years BC), and Jesus of Nazareth.

Another great servant leader in the sports world is Coach Mike Krzyzewski of Duke University. In a profile of Coach K, Investor’s Business Daily tells the story of a time during a basketball practice when a student assistant handed a cup of water to the coach. To borrow a football metaphor, Coach K fumbled the exchange. The cup fell and splashed water on the hardwood floor. The student assistant ran to the towel cart and returned, towel in hand, ready to wipe up the spill. “Here, I’ll take that,” Coach K said. Then he turned and addressed his players, “When you are the CEO of your own company, I want you to remember that you should still clean up your own mess.” Then he got down on his knees and mopped up the floor.

Dr. King once said (and the congregation responded): “Everybody can be great, (Everybody) because everybody can serve. (Amen) You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. (All right) You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. (Amen) You only need a heart full of grace, (Yes, sir. Amen) a soul generated by love. (Yes) And you can be that servant. Everybody can be that servant. I can be that servant—and so can you. And by serving, you can be a great leader.”

As Oren Harari notes in The Leadership Secrets of Colin Powell, “Through his words—and also through his deeds—Powell makes a strong case that ‘the only way to accomplish your mission is through those troops entrusted to your care.… At the end of the day … it’s some soldier who will go up a hill and correct your mistakes and take that hill.’”

Max De Pree explains in Leadership Jazz: “Leadership is a job, not a position. The people who work with you are not your people; you are theirs. Leadership is good work because leaders feel a strong need to express their potential and because they wish to serve the needs of others.” This is the essence of becoming a “servant leader.”

HOW TO BECOME A SERVANT

Servant-Leadership Tip No. 1: Relinquish the Right to Control.

You’ll get much more out of people if you give them the freedom to use their own initiative, their own imagination, their own creativity to solve problems and advance the organization to its goals. Yes, people will make mistakes—and they will learn from those mistakes and become even more valuable to your organization.

As a servant leader, your goal is to surrender control and empower people to do great things for you and your organization.

When you give people a vision to reach for, and you empower them to use their own initiative and creativity along the way, you tap into a reservoir of energy and resources you can scarcely imagine.

Servant-Leadership Tip No. 2: Learn to See Servanthood as an End, Not a Means to an End.

Servant-Leadership Tip No. 3: Let People See You Serve.

Servant-Leadership Tip No. 4: Get Your Shoulders Dirty.

You can tell a guy with a serving attitude by looking at his shoulders. If his shoulders are dirty, he’s a real servant. Why dirty shoulders? Because servants get their shoulders dirty when they lift others up and let them stand tall on their shoulders.

In the old hierarchical leadership model, the boss says, “My people serve me to make me successful.” But the servant leader says, “I serve my people to make them successful. I lift people up on my shoulders. When they succeed, their success becomes our success.”

Servant-Leadership Tip No. 5: Focus on Influence.

Servant-Leadership Tip No. 6: When People Fail You, Dispense Forgiveness and Grace.

Forgiveness is the key to getting the best performance from the people in your organization.

Consider the power of forgiveness as it operates in an atmosphere of servant leadership. We all have weaknesses, and when we forgive those weaknesses in each other—when I forgive bits of you and you forgive bits of me—we are able to mesh our personalities into a team that can achieve far more than we are able to imagine.

Leadership is servanthood. Great leadership is—first, last, and always—service to others. And one of the most powerful ways great leaders serve is by forgiving.