Five Levers of Leadership

Leaders have tough jobs. Why? Because in most cases they bear 100 percent of the responsibility for the performance of their team yet receive little glory for their efforts. The best leaders work longer hours, endure more stress, and have greater responsibility than the people they manage.

Each day leaders must deal with emotional, and often irrational, people who demand attention. Leaders are called upon to be coaches, mentors, mothers, fathers, and amateur psychologists in order to keep their troops motivated, focused, and delivering on goals. If this isn’t hard enough, leaders are often put in the position of shielding their people from corporate policy wonks, Peter Principle executives, and bureaucrats who erect roadblocks and cause chaos in the workplace.

Today’s leaders are placed under unyielding pressure to perform. In the twenty-first-century business environment there is little patience for managers who miss their numbers. It is no longer about what you have done; it is about what you have done today.

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For Leaders, Trust is Fragile...

Trust in the workplace is fragile. Companies and their leaders have added to the inherent suspicion people carry for their bosses by using the terms trust, teamwork, and transparency as buzz words. They hire consultants, hold special meetings, or do team-building and trust-building exercises. Then everyone goes right back to what they were doing before the feel-good exercise, nothing changes, and skepticism and distrust prevail. What is missing in these often empty exercises is that trust is personal. It is emotional. It is earned. It is a foundation that is built—one brick at a time.

In leadership building, maintaining trust in relationships with your people means providing consistent evidence that you can be trusted. Evidence—not empty buzzwords and slogans. Steven R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, likens building trust to making deposits in an “Emotional Bank Account.” Using this metaphor, Covey explains that you build trust by making regular deposits (consistent evidence that you are trustworthy) in another person’s emotional bank account. As you make deposits, like keeping commitments and delivering on promises, the balance of trust in the account grows. When you fail to honor commitments, renege on promises, make the other person feel unimportant or unappreciated, behave in an unlikeable or inconsistent way, you make withdrawals. The theory is, by making regular deposits, trust will be maintained, and there will be greater tolerance for your future indiscretions and mistakes—which you will make, because no matter how hard you try you’ll never be perfect. However, like any bank account, when you make too many withdrawals and allow your account balance to get low or become overdrawn, you lose trust and place the relationship in jeopardy.

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You Need Your People More Than They Need You

In leadership one principle stands above all: You need your people more than they need you. Another way of saying this is that you get paid for what your people do, not for what you do.

If you only internalize one lesson about leadership, make this the one. A basic understanding that you need your people more than they need you is the single most important leadership lesson you will ever learn. In our leadership seminars, we spend more time on this principle than any other concept. Why? Because until you get this—and I mean really make this principle part of your heart and soul—you cannot be a great leader. No exceptions.

I ran head on into this principle as a young manager. I’d just been promoted to district manager in charge of the company’s Augusta, Georgia, location. On my team were an assistant manager and five route service drivers. Our route service drivers did just that; they drove delivery trucks around the area and delivered our products and services to customers. Prior to my promotion, the regional office had conducted a sales contest, the reward for which was a cruise to the Bahamas for all qualifiers. All of the men on my team qualified for the trip except my assistant manager.

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