Leadership

By Mike Hyatt

The most difficult person you will ever lead is yourself. If you get yourself to do what you preach everyone else to do - then suddenly you develop the most compelling reason for anybody to follow you. People are desperate for heroes, for models. You have to realize that people, whether you like it or not are going to emulate you!  They are going to follow you, in your faults and in your strengths.

And so I'm constantly working on the prototype of my own life, knowing that people are going to emulate me and mimic me.  The good news is that it makes all of this inside your control, because you are the one person you can change - you may not be able to change that person downline from you, but you can change your own behavior, and have an enormous impact on that same person downline from you.

Working on yourself, leading yourself, is job number one for every leader!

Parenting and leadership are very parallel. My kids didn't pay very much attention to what I told them. Now I could just beat myself up, or I could make their lives miserable by being sort of a jail warden, by just "telling them" and catching them doing wrong things. Or I could just start doing the right things, trusting that they're going to emulate that eventually.

Gandhi said:  "Be the change you want to see in the world."  And the same is true in creating the culture in a organization.

Culture is defined by the behavior of its leaders.

If you want to change the culture of the corporation, be what it is you want people to become. If you want them to be out working the business, networking and meeting new people, YOU gotta to get out there and work the business!