John Maxwell - The 360° Leader

“He who mistrusts most should be trusted least.” ~ Greek proverb

It takes nine months to produce a baby — no matter how many people you put on the job.

You cannot give what you do not have. In order to develop your staff, you must keep growing yourself.

Max DePree said that it is the first responsibility of a leader to define reality.

When you don’t want to have a difficult conversation, you need to ask yourself: Is it because it will hurt them or hurt me? If it is because it will hurt you, then you’re being selfish. Good leaders get past the discomfort of having difficult conversations for the sake of the people they lead and the organization. The thing you need to remember is that people will work through difficult things if they believe you want to work with them.

p240
Re: The Law of the Niche: All players have a place where they add the most value.

When I was in high school, I was fortunate to have a coach who understood this. During one of our varsity basketball practices, our coach, Dan Neff, decided he wanted to teach us a very important lesson about basketball. He got the first- and second-string teams out on the floors to scrimmage. That wasn’t unusual—we scrimmaged all the time. Our second team had some good players, but clearly the first team was much better. This time he had us do something very different from the norm. He let the second-string players take their normal positions, but he assigned each of us starters to a different role from our usual one. I was normally a shooting guard, but for this scrimmage, I was asked to play center. And as I recall, our center was put in the point-guard position.

We were instructed to play to twenty, but the game didn’t take long. The second team trounced us in no time. When the scrimmage was over, Coach Neff called us over to the bench and said, “Having the best players on the floor isn’t enough. You have to have the best players in the right positions.”

What’s worse than training your people and losing them? Not training them and keeping them.
p268
If your people aren’t following, you need to listen more. You don’t need to be more forceful. You don’t need to find more leverage. You don’t need to come down on them. If you listen, they will be much more inclined to follow.
p275
I’ve never known a person focused on yesterday to have a better tomorrow.
p276
St. Francis of Assisi said, “Start doing what is necessary; then do what is possible; and suddenly you are doing what is impossible.”
p286
Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.
p287
There’s an old saying that a smart person believes only half of what he hears, but a really smart person knows which half to believe.
p288
Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The biggest job in getting any movement off the ground is to keep together the people who form it. This task requires more than a common aim; it demands a philosophy that wins and holds the people’s allegiance; and it depends upon open channels of communication between the people and their leaders.”

No comments:

Post a Comment