The 4 Essential Roles of Leadership (2024)

“Effective people lead their lives and manage their relationships around principles; ineffective people attempt to manage their time around priorities and their tasks around goals. Think effectiveness with people; efficiency with things.”

“You see your competition as a learning source, as friends who can keep you sharp and teach you where your weaknesses are.”

“Trust at the interpersonal level. Trustworthiness is the foundation of trust. Trust is the emotional bank account between two people that enables them to have a win-win performance agreement. If two people trust each other, based on the trustworthiness of each other, they can then enjoy clear communication, empathy, synergy, and productive interdependency. Trust—or the lack of it—is at the root of success or failure in relationships and in the bottom-line results of business, industry, education, and government.”

“I recommend is to do two things daily: 1) gain perspective, and 2) make some decisions and commitments in light of that perspective. People have the capability to transcend themselves, to rise above the moment and see what’s happening and what should be happening. We need to take time to plan and make some decisions in light of this understanding. As Goethe put it, “Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” Careful planning helps us maintain a sense of perspective, purpose, and ordered priorities.”

“Without understanding the principles of a given task, people become incapacitated when the situation changes and different practices are required to be successful. When training people, we often teach skills and practices, the specific how to of a given task. But when we teach practices without principles, we tend to make people dependent on us or others for further instruction and direction. Principle-centered leaders are men and women of character who work with competence “on farms” with “seed and soil” on the basis of natural principles and build those principles into the center of their lives, into the center of their relationships with others, into the center of their agreements and contracts, into their management processes, and into their mission statements. The challenge is to be a light, not a judge; to be a model, not a critic.”