Hey guys, welcome. This is Val Campbell.
Thanks so much for joining me for this edition of my Saturday Morning Leadership. Today I'm going to share my observations on eight qualities of an effective leader.
I want to ask a question: why is it important for a leader to be effective?
Okay, well, I'll give you two reasons here. One's kind of a 30,000-foot view, you know? Effective leaders are important because they create confidence among their team or their organization, and that in turn also encourages a professional and positive environment. So I think that's kind of a nice, maybe sanitary, definition there.
But John Maxwell says this, and again I'm a big fan of John Maxwell, I like him, he says: "Being a great leader is all about having a genuine willingness and a true commitment to lead others and to achieve a common vision and goals through positive influence." And he said, "No leader can ever achieve anything great or long-lasting all alone." And we've got to keep that in mind as I go forward today. So teamwork really goes hand in hand with leadership. Leadership is about people and for people, so let's never forget that. That's a really important point.
Okay, so with that, let's briefly look at the eight qualities of an effective leader that I put together. I'm just going to kind of share some of my thoughts, my insight from my experience. But first and foremost, I did this specifically. I said an effective leader demonstrates integrity.
Okay, why is that? Well, integrity is the linchpin of leadership qualities. I've said this before: leaders who demonstrate integrity kind of really garner trust among their colleagues, right? They aren't afraid of the truth, and they stand up for what they believe. You know, Dwight Eisenhower, late president, said it this way. He said, "The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionable integrity. And without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office." And I think he's spot on with that, guys.
Everything kind of is an outflow, I believe, of integrity. If you lack integrity, these other qualities are going to be lacking, right? Or they're going to be secondary in nature; they're going to be phony, right? So integrity is really where it all starts for a leader.
Okay, then secondly, they share their vision. You know, a leader with vision has a clear idea of where they want to go, you know, how they want to get there, and what success looks like, right? When we were going to Boise, we had a map; we knew what route, freeways, and that we were going to go on to get there, right? We weren't just out driving around hoping we got there.
But in one of my last Monday Morning Leaderships, I talked about the success formula. Okay, and I noted from Michael Hyatt's book, "The Vision Driven Leader," he states: "Vision is an essential ingredient for successful leadership. There's no substitute. Vision is a clear, inspiring, practical, and attractive picture of your team or your organization's future. It's an act of seeing the future." But it's also important to note, again, a vision is not a guarantee, right? Plenty of visions fail, right? But having no vision is a certain guarantee of failure. So you've got to have a vision.
Next is lead by example. Again, this kind of, I think, maybe builds on what I've said. Lead by example. I want to follow somebody that has integrity, right? So you lead by example. I could probably just say this; I'll say this a couple times is: be the leader that you want to follow. Leaders lead by example, right? You set the example; you're a person of integrity, of character, of wisdom, a vision, somebody people can trust.
So if leaders lead by example, they set the example in all the things that I'm going to talk about here, right? But again, if you don't have integrity, I don't think these other qualities are necessarily going to come forth; they're going to be really true or honest. But first, you've got to lead by example. Again, probably the best thing, we've all heard this proverb, you know, and you don't want to do this: "Do what I say, not what I do," right? That's not leading by example, right? That's poor, that's bad leadership.
So lead by example is: a leader won't do something, or tell somebody to do something, they haven't done before. They will help somebody do it. They set the example again with their integrity, their honesty, their work ethic, all these things I'm talking about. But if you're going to lead, lead by example. Be careful what example you set.
And then we're going to talk about they communicate effectively. If you're going to be an effective leader or have effective leadership, you've got to communicate effectively. And this gets back into our the servant leadership, which I'm a firm believer of. Some people blow it off or it's overblown or hyped; I don't think it is, guys. You can have that attitude; I don't.
But effective communication really, again, is going to require listening and empathy, right? You got to be able to listen to what somebody says, and I think to really do that, you have to have empathy for them. Otherwise, it can get into kind of the proverbial, "Yeah, I'm talking to you," or you're talking to me and it's going in one ear and it's coming out the other, right? You don't want to do that. So listening requires empathy, and I think that's the start of being able to communicate effectively. I'm not doing a deep dive on these; there's a lot more that could be said.
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