This is a wet and sunny Monday morning. I'm still reading John C. Maxwell book I have some articles to share with you once again.
6) Law of Solid Ground - Trust is the foundation of leadership
When it comes to leadership, you just can't take shortcuts, no matter how long you've been leading your people. There's no way you can break trust, not even once. You have to keep on working on it and people expect you to keep influencing them. John says that you can fool your boss, but you can never fool your subordinates. Programs that spread over 3 long days are effectively the best examples to talk about trust. I remembered a St. John's Island camp where we took charge of 60 student leaders. These students were put through rough and tough situation. We created opportunities for them to suffer together as a team. They had troubles among themselves back at school. They have an inspirational leader among themselves. Everyone of them trust him. His words are more powerful then us all. Having said that, he didn't like it b'coz no one wants to take on leadership role when everyone is supposed to be a leader. Therefore, we managed to tea-up some other potential leaders and they took lead. The others began to trust them. It was through real time that true leaders are emerged. Be it for your families or friends, build that solid ground with them and they will stay with you forever. Remember - Once broken consider sold!
7) Law of Respect - People naturally follow Leaders Stronger than themselves
This is an interesting law whereby John quantify leadership. John says in a team, leaders go their own way when a group first comes together. Soon people change directions to follow the strongest leader. People naturally align themselves and follow leaders stronger than themselves. Therefore, a leader with a 1-2 will follow leaders who are 3-4, 7-8 will follow 9-10 etc. People who are 9-10 don't follow a 7. This sounds pretty true for me in my situation. In army context, those warrant officers don't really pay respect to those newly commissioned officers as they believe that they have more experienced in army due to the long services they have. But after these officers proved their worth that they can command and lead, they begin to gain respect from these warrant officers. Soon these warrant officers begin to follow them not b'coz they don't have a choice, but they begin to respect them. On the contrary for those officers who are weaker in leadership, you will see warrant officers don't really give a damn about them. These officers have to improve themselves. If not, they will be actually following what the warrant officers do or say. By the way, have you seen how warrant officers scold officers on the parade square?
8) Law of Intuition - Leaders evaluate everything with a leadership bias
This is probably of one the few laws I love. A leader lead with an instinct b'coz you don't depend only just the facts. Cite you an example - a basketball coach reads the game well enough to deploy the best tactics to play against opponents. When the side is losing, this coach is able to turn the table around and not the players b'coz he can read the game well based on his intuition. When the team wins the game, the audiences congratulate the players while the players thank their coach. This is leading with intuition.John says that leaders are readers of their situation, trends, resources, people and themselves. There are people who naturally see it and people who needs to nurtured to see it. There are also people who will never see it and we call them followers. It's important that we improve on this intuition of ours b'coz somehow, everyone of us has it. Those who never be able to see it are people who choose not to.
9) Law of Magnetism - Who you are is who are attract
During interviews, the company will set certain criteria as to what kind of person they for the company for the interviewees. But even these kind of person gets the job, they may not stay long b'coz of who you are. People love to stick around with people who can give them values. After some time when they realise that they cannot gain anything from you, they will automatically fall out. If your people are negative, then you better check your attitude. There are some common grounds that matches who kind of person attracts what kind of people - attitude, generation, background, values, life experiences and of coz, leadership ability. If you think the people you attract could be better, then it's time for you to improve yourself.
10) Law of Connection - Leaders touch a Heart before they ask for a Hand
The best communicators focus emotionally compared to any other thing when they first met a person. John says you can't move people to action unless you first move them with emotion. The heart comes before the head. I remember my handover ceremony in my poly days when the previous batch of exco members have to give way for the new batch. No words can express the gratitude of my juniors when they wanted to convey their thanks to us, they sang a Chinese song "Zhu Ni E Lu Soon Feng" to us. We all started to cry after only a few lines into the song. To me, they are the greatest in my life at that moment. It may sound corny, but it's really true: People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. How to achieve this? John says, "One at a time."
Cheers,
Justin
