Learn these 7 traits to Become a Better Leader

Discover the essential advice for anyone aspiring to be a great leader. Many individuals make common mistakes by overcomplicating leadership, focusing on numerous traits instead of understanding why people choose to follow others. At its core, effective leadership revolves around sharing a compelling vision that resonates with followers and aligns with their aspirations—whether financial or altruistic.

We’ll explore how true leaders engage others through authentic visions and maintain credibility by educating themselves and their teams. By simplifying leadership into seven key principles, we can unlock our potential as influential leaders who inspire genuine commitment.

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Transcript

Jim Johnson: 0:00

My best advice for anybody wanting to be a good leader. I think people make a lot of mistakes, but whenever they chase leadership, they, they consume a lot of information. They find 37 different things they're supposed to do instead of really simplifying it down to why do people actually follow other people? The reason that most people follow somebody else is because they aspire to be like them and they have. An alignment with whatever vision it is that they're chasing, something there benefits them could be financial, it could change their lives financially, it could be altruistic, they're solving a problem. Uh, the concept of the vision is really important because it needs to be aligned with that leader first, like it needs to be their core comes from the heart what they're chasing and they're chasing it for a really strong reason. And then when they share that vision, it engages others to get involved with it. Now, that's kind of step one of getting people to follow you, and I want to kind of take one step back because I think a lot of people make this mistake when it comes to leadership as well. They think of leadership as being good or evil, or good or bad, right? As a good leader, he's a good person, or he's a bad leader because he's a bad person. That's not really the definition of leadership. The definition of leadership is an individual who can get other people to follow them in a shared vision. And there's been a lot of nefarious folks along the way that you can think about that got a lot of people to follow them. They knew what it took and that first one was engaging people in a vision that was shared amongst them that there was something to achieve together that would benefit everybody. But if they would have came on board for just that and the guy didn't follow through. Well, his leadership's not going to last very long. He's not a good leader. And so that leader, his next step would be the fact that he's going to educate people. He's going to get them educated. He's going to continue to educate himself. And he's literally putting proof in the pudding to what it was that he said we were going to do. And that gets this belief, this buy in like, Hey, okay. So he said it was going to be this way and it is that way. So there's continuity there. So those were the first two pieces of being a great leader. And we've distilled them down. Like if you look at all the different ones that are out there, like I said, it's somewhere in the thirties, all these different characteristics and traits and things that leaders should be or shouldn't be. If you boiled them all down. They really come down to seven very key things that we need to start with. Think of it as like the core or foundation of being a great leader, because ultimately what we want is if we're going to lead, we want a group of people to follow us and get them to follow us. We talked about having this engaging vision that we're aligned with. You're going to attract people to. Uh, or you're going to repel them and that's good. It's going to repel the ones that don't want to be on board. It's going to attract all the ones that do want to be on board. We're going to educate them. We're going to follow through with what we said. And then the next thing up is we're going to set the example. So if I say, Hey, part of who we are is hardworking, high performing, extra effort, uh, being 1 percent better every day. And I didn't set that example every single day, then my vision isn't real. And my leadership is fake and false. And so I have to lead by example because ultimately the people that are being followed are usually being followed by people that want to be more like them. And so if we say, Hey, it's going to be this way, and it's not that way, we're setting a poor example, especially when it comes to our core values. I think that's something that is a common characteristic among great leaders. That they have these core beliefs that are not questionable, like they have them and if you are in line with them, great. If you're not, you need to leave. And by having that, it gives you a grounding rock. That it's your character of who you are. And this character aspect is what people tend to be attracted to as much as your vision. Because they're looking at, hey, I want to be able to achieve things like this guy. Thanks But he's also doing it in a way that's aligned with them. And so, again, this right or wrong, I wouldn't get caught up too much and then I would get more in alignment. Like, hey, this alignment of this example that somebody's setting. So this is key. Like whatever you say your company is going to be or how you're going to lead and how you're going to execute your vision and the core values that you have. You got to be the example of those. You can't tell everybody they got to do it one way and you do it a different way. Everybody go work hard and you got your feet kicked up on the desk. That's never a good, good approach. Now, if we want to be a little more laid back and easy, that's cool. That's setting a bit of your character and your culture and your environment that people are going to be in when they're around you. Just know that if you do that, that's going to be the temperature and environment of the entire company. I prefer high performance. I prefer exceptional. I prefer those types of things because. That tends to drive the whole machine a little bit faster. The fourth thing is one that we as beings aren't usually very good at. Empathy. You know, we, we tend to be kind. Funny enough, you know, a lot of leaders seem to be gruff and all that other good stuff. The reality is, When you get them in one on one situations, they're a big softy just like everybody else and nobody wants to fire anybody. Nobody wants to reprimand anybody. Nobody wants to have conflict with anybody and this idea of empathy where we understand what somebody's going through, but we don't have sympathy where we make excuses and enable and entitle people to take advantage of a situation because they're not executing or performing. So we have to have empathy. We understand where you're coming from, but then we have an action plan or example to get them out of that mindset and way of thinking of something, holding them back. There's obstacles for everybody. It's time to jump over them. And so you, it's a big thing about remembering. I think that's a big part of it is just remembering where we were one day, like back in the beginning when we started, whatever it was that we were involved with, we were uncomfortable. We weren't good at it. We fell over a bunch of riding our bicycle. Yeah. There were all these things that we just kept failing and not, not doing it well, struggling. We didn't have a lot of competence, so we didn't know it, which helped, which hurt our confidence. And so we were kind of in this bad place until somebody had a little empathy, said, Hey, I understand. Do X, Y, and Z and you'll get a little better at it. You'll become more competent, that education that we were giving them. And then this confidence because we're empowering people, which we're going to talk about in just a minute. But, but this idea of understanding. But not allowing that's, that's a big part of it. So I have this empathy. I care enough that I'm going to be hard on you. I'm going to challenge you. I'm going to push you. I know that you have potential that you don't even know you have yet. I want to see you do well. And once they kind of do that, we start to get some activity and then I start to do some things, whatever it is that we're trying to get them to do, whether you're in technology or you're a home service contractor. Whatever it is that you're doing out there in the world, in your business, you're going to start to get activity from them and they're learning. They're getting more and more competent, allowing them to become more and more confident. And as they get better and better, we want to encourage them every time we see something good. So that's the fifth thing is encouragement. And so you see them do an activity. Well, high fives, but this idea of Encouraging somebody because they've done something well, what ends up happening is that's reinforcement and they want to do more of it and get more of that from you because they're looking at you as the leader, the person they want to be. So look for every opportunity you can to encourage people whenever it's Something to encourage them or recognize them for their success. Do it in front of everybody when they're struggling and having a difficult time, this is where you're going to go and have a one on one. You don't want to put negativity into your environment or cause other people to have to deal with one person's particular situation. So we get that encouragement going. We start to get now some results. We have activity, some results start happening. There's some fruition to this effort and work that we've put in bringing this new person into our vision and what we're chasing. And now is the time for the fun stuff. This is the part where we start to grow leaders and we've been feeding and watering and selling with them so far. Now we're going to start to get to reap a little bit of the benefit of that by empowering them. This is the part where you start to give them little things that isn't the whole thing. You have something in mind for them. You want them to be your CTO. You want them to be a CEO. You want them to be a sales manager. You want them to be a production coordinator, whatever it is. It's the next level up. You don't want to just go, Hey, guess what? Your next level up. Here's this little thing. Let's see how you do with that thing in teaching other people or showing other people or executing in the way that we're looking for. And we empower them and they do provide whatever it was you empower them with. They executed as well as they could. And then we give feedback as soon as possible as coaching. We give strength to those things that they're learning. They're learning new skills now, usually in the individual role type situation. We've got a skill, we execute that skill, but when it takes Now, empowering and teaching somebody else, there's teaching, coaching, retaining, all these other things that have to be considered. We got to coach people up to be able to do that because if we empower them to do that and they get good at it, it starts to take some of the load off of us, allowing us more time to work on our business instead of in it. And allows them to step up into those leadership roles that we're looking for, which finally brings us to the last one. The most difficult one of these seven things that we got to do to be what we call a magnetic leader around here, which is to expect. We set this criteria of who it was that we were, what we were doing, why we were doing it. We have standards, we have examples, we have education that's provided, we've encouraged and empowered. Sometimes people tend to put themselves up on a pedestal and think that the rules don't apply to them anymore because they are exceptional. And, uh, the reality is the rules apply to everybody, including you as the leader to the lowest person on the totem pole. And so if they're not doing what's expected of them, these standards, so performance standards, core value behaviors. Alignment with vision, customer service, these things that you've set as the boundaries, the guardrails of how it is to act appropriately in your business. If they're not doing that, that's when you need to. Set down the law, have a one on one, set up an action plan to get them back on board. But when they are doing what you expect to celebrate, I mean celebrate hard because that's what we're looking for. We want people that see that celebration to want to be a part of that celebration for doing what was expected. It's the part where the leader actually finally gets what he's been chasing the entire time as a leader. I don't think most leaders are chasing money, fame, fortune, or any of these other things that I think people tend to believe is why a leader's doing what a leader's doing. I think a leader's doing what they're doing because they want people to believe in them. And if we hold to our expectations, we hold to these standards, we're consistent with these seven things over and over with everybody that we meet, we start to get some belief in us as a leader. Uh, so much belief that if you do it right, People will run through hell and high water and crawl in their belly through a swamp to do whatever it is that you're after together. They'll go through the hard times. They'll take on the obstacles because they actually believe in you because you are a man of your word. You have a great reputation, which means that your character is high and people want to be associated with people of high character.