The One Thing You Need to Know

Everyone is fascinated by leadership. An organization may possess great products, great processes, great customers, and great employees, but apparently without great leaders their future is bleak.

Leadership is the secret sauce that, when ladled liberally over the whole organization, will lead to innovation, initiative, "entrepreneurship," and creativity.

Leaders are not born, but rather are made by their training and their diligence.

When you hire someone, you are hiring a human being blessed with certain predictable patterns of emotion, learning, memory, and behavior. If these patterns are not to your liking, you are going to have to expend tremendous effort to eradicate them and forge entirely new ones. Since this effort would be more usefully deployed elsewhere, it will serve you well to take extreme care when inviting a new person onto your team.

Strengths and weakness, triggers, and unique style of learning—these are the three things you must know about a person in order to manage him effectively.

The great manager spends a good deal of time outside his office, walking around, watching each person's reactions, listening, and taking mental notes about what each person is drawn to and what each person struggles with.

Your strengths—your love of problem solving, your intuition, your assertiveness, your altruism, your analytical mind—are your natural appetites, and are, in this sense, irrepressible.

Your strengths are not only activities for which you have some natural talent; they are also activities that strengthen you. When using them, you feel powerful, authentic, confident, and, in the best sense, challenged. As such, they are self-reinforcing. Left to their own devices, they will, they must, be expressed.

To sustain success in life, you must recognize these weaknesses for what they are and ruthlessly eradicate them from your life. In this sense, success is less about accumulating and more about editing. The metaphor here is not building, but sculpting, in that sustained success is caused not by what you add on, but by what you have the discipline to cut away.

Sustained success depends on your ability to reflect on events such as these, to use them, to identify those things that weaken you, and, then, as efficiently as possible, to cut these out of your life.

Freed from the friction of these things that weaken you, you will then be able to unleash fully the power of your strengths.

To excel as a manager you must never forget that each of your direct reports is unique and that your chief responsibility is not to eradicate this uniqueness, but rather to arrange roles, responsibilities, and expectations so that you can capitalize upon it.

It will always be your responsibility to make the small but significant course corrections that allow you to sustain your highest and best contribution to this team, and to the better future it is charged with creating.