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Leadership is an interesting concept. At one level, it’s massively complex. There are entire sections of the publishing industry devoted to it, and we fly people all over the world to discuss it. It’s probably a billion-dollar industry onto itself.
At another level, it’s deceptively simple. You work for an organization. “It” (the org) has goals. You work with, and manage, other people. They have goals. How do you align “A” (org goals) and “B” (individual goals) in such a way that tangible, measurable results are driven?
There are a lot of different ways to think about and conceptualize leadership. Here are a few.
Leadership is about building something great together: This idea comes from Mark Leslie, who took a company with 12 employees and $95K in revenue and made it a company with 6,000 employees and $1.5 billion in revenue. In short, he’s someone to listen to. His basic advice is simple: invest others in your process. If everything is coming from a top-down vacuum, there will never be any real buy-in. In short: if you want to build trust, you need to demonstrate trust.
Leadership is really just about managing negative thoughts: According to research from the Cleveland Clinic, humans experience about 60,000 thoughts per day. 95 percent of those thoughts are habituated, and 80 percent of the habituated…
