Leadership, effective leadership, is a series of easy to understand, but difficult to actually execute, steps.
1. You have to want to be or accept being the leader. That is actually much harder than it seems because you are suddenly and irrevocably responsible for everything that happens or fails to happen with your organization. This is a wildly unpopular notion in politics today wherein everything is Trump's fault.
2. You have to have a plan worthy of your followers executing. The leader has to have a Vision that can be expressed as a Mission, Strategy (the view from 30,000'), Tactics (the view from 10,000'), and Objectives (boots on the ground) driven by Values that create a consistently winning Culture (like an elite military unit like the Rangers).
The Values are the ones you live, not the ones you speak or pontificate. This is where authenticity begins to appear. You will lead more by example than by words.
Your people can smell a poseur a mile away.
3. You have to develop a leadership style built on communication, tasking, performance appraisal, discipline, and rewards. You have to know the difference between inspiration and motivation.
You have to hold people accountable, get rid of the duds, and advance the doers.
The world is 98% bullshitters and 2% doers and the successful leader has to advance the doers at all costs.
4. You have to speak with a genuine, easy to understand leadership voice that is consistent with your leadership style.
When I was a company commander in the combat engineers I could order things to happen with military precision and fierceness, but when I was a CEO of a public company I could not.
Leadership style and leadership voice have to be sensistive to changing conditions.
5. You have to be toughest on yourself and grade yourself harshly. You have to come to work early, work late, and spend an hour a day studying your profession. Nobody ever drowned in their own sweat.
If you do all those things and stop to pray from time to time, you will have a Chinaman's chance of getting to the paywindow. It is not hard to understand, but it is hard AF to do well.
Yep, never ask a subordinate to do ANYTHING you won't do yourself. I learned so much about leadership as an NCO in the Army, but that sentence is all you really have to know. I learned it as a cook at Bakers Square well before I joined the Army.
As someone who recruits for startups, many of my client Founder/CEOs are not yet great leaders but their authenticity is a big part of what wins people over and keeps them on board during the rollercoaster ride. Reading this post helped to bring this together for me.
Same thing with Trump, Musk, and others who are not always touted for their people management skills but have the ability to win and keep a following. Two of the Dems that always got my attention are now on Team Trump. I'm now realizing that their authenticity is one of the things that made them stick out like sore thumbs on their prior team.
Would agree with that. Politicians that might have been inauthentic (Bill Clinton) had a way of being authentic. It's a winning strategy and Trump can do that, Kamala can't.
I love everything about this post but especially Mrs. Sinwar's Birken Bag. Good eye. These people are beyond inauthentic. You could have taken this story in many directions. I appreciated the randomness of the examples!
Great post, Jeff. And I agree, the post-Boomer generations crave authenticity. My teenagers, in particular, can spot 'fake' a mile away. Similarly, there's a podcaster/musician/producer named Rick Beato---he has a video where he's listening to AI-generated music, and his kids ask "How can you listen to that crap? It's sounds fake!" Likewise, Oliver Anthony's authenticity launched his viral reach. I believe this Search for Authenticity will motivate that generation to remake all the artifices that our culture currently stands on, and the inauthentic ones will not survive.
I'm curious... why ironically? Isn't authenticity (specifically, the distributed publicly verifiable ledger) one of the big draws of crypto? Or is it the possible loss of anonymity, if there is only a *single* hash address per person? (or maybe I'm missing something else?)
Leadership, effective leadership, is a series of easy to understand, but difficult to actually execute, steps.
1. You have to want to be or accept being the leader. That is actually much harder than it seems because you are suddenly and irrevocably responsible for everything that happens or fails to happen with your organization. This is a wildly unpopular notion in politics today wherein everything is Trump's fault.
2. You have to have a plan worthy of your followers executing. The leader has to have a Vision that can be expressed as a Mission, Strategy (the view from 30,000'), Tactics (the view from 10,000'), and Objectives (boots on the ground) driven by Values that create a consistently winning Culture (like an elite military unit like the Rangers).
The Values are the ones you live, not the ones you speak or pontificate. This is where authenticity begins to appear. You will lead more by example than by words.
Your people can smell a poseur a mile away.
3. You have to develop a leadership style built on communication, tasking, performance appraisal, discipline, and rewards. You have to know the difference between inspiration and motivation.
You have to hold people accountable, get rid of the duds, and advance the doers.
The world is 98% bullshitters and 2% doers and the successful leader has to advance the doers at all costs.
4. You have to speak with a genuine, easy to understand leadership voice that is consistent with your leadership style.
When I was a company commander in the combat engineers I could order things to happen with military precision and fierceness, but when I was a CEO of a public company I could not.
Leadership style and leadership voice have to be sensistive to changing conditions.
5. You have to be toughest on yourself and grade yourself harshly. You have to come to work early, work late, and spend an hour a day studying your profession. Nobody ever drowned in their own sweat.
If you do all those things and stop to pray from time to time, you will have a Chinaman's chance of getting to the paywindow. It is not hard to understand, but it is hard AF to do well.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
Wow, that was outstanding. Thank you for writing that!
Paraphrasing George Burns:
The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you've got it made.
Yep, never ask a subordinate to do ANYTHING you won't do yourself. I learned so much about leadership as an NCO in the Army, but that sentence is all you really have to know. I learned it as a cook at Bakers Square well before I joined the Army.
Good read, and everything u say is true.
Great clarifying post, Jeff!
As someone who recruits for startups, many of my client Founder/CEOs are not yet great leaders but their authenticity is a big part of what wins people over and keeps them on board during the rollercoaster ride. Reading this post helped to bring this together for me.
Same thing with Trump, Musk, and others who are not always touted for their people management skills but have the ability to win and keep a following. Two of the Dems that always got my attention are now on Team Trump. I'm now realizing that their authenticity is one of the things that made them stick out like sore thumbs on their prior team.
Would agree with that. Politicians that might have been inauthentic (Bill Clinton) had a way of being authentic. It's a winning strategy and Trump can do that, Kamala can't.
I love everything about this post but especially Mrs. Sinwar's Birken Bag. Good eye. These people are beyond inauthentic. You could have taken this story in many directions. I appreciated the randomness of the examples!
I like Hermes. Love her Birkin. Doesn't match the outfit though.
You’ve really nailed it, Jeff.
Great post, Jeff. And I agree, the post-Boomer generations crave authenticity. My teenagers, in particular, can spot 'fake' a mile away. Similarly, there's a podcaster/musician/producer named Rick Beato---he has a video where he's listening to AI-generated music, and his kids ask "How can you listen to that crap? It's sounds fake!" Likewise, Oliver Anthony's authenticity launched his viral reach. I believe this Search for Authenticity will motivate that generation to remake all the artifices that our culture currently stands on, and the inauthentic ones will not survive.
Ironically, it will feed into crypto too since you will have a token that represents you one day
I'm curious... why ironically? Isn't authenticity (specifically, the distributed publicly verifiable ledger) one of the big draws of crypto? Or is it the possible loss of anonymity, if there is only a *single* hash address per person? (or maybe I'm missing something else?)
for a post-script, our gracious host is not the only one to recognize the winning strategy of authenticity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpJtcsg8rg8&t=483s
"Mr Trump goes to McDonald's" -- Bill Whittle
He gets going on the theme of authenticity at around the 8:43 mark.
Damn skippy you come to Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill if you want some of the finest college basketball our country has ever produced.
Authentically great post Mr Carter!