Episode Transcript

Hey what’s up? What’s up? What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to five minute rants guys, welcome back to THE a.m. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome to the show predicated on the journey of life and business. I hope life is treating you well, guys, I really do. It’s been treating me really well, I have no complaints. Well, anyways, guys, let’s go ahead and get straight on into this. I want to talk about leadership today.

Over this weekend, and over the past couple of days, a good friend of mine, we’ve talked a lot about leadership. And it was interesting, because one of the things that really came up are two core principles that I believe are at the heart of leadership. And we talked about, really What makes up a good leader, and What makes up a poor leader, and really, who is a leader and who isn’t. And so first, let me just talk about leadership in general, just over a few things.

First, leadership is not a title, right? It’s not a degree, it’s not an education. But a lot of people think it is. So like, my wife’s an attorney. Okay. And she gets asked a lot of leadership questions, but how do they know she’s a leader? They don’t, they see a title or they see an education degree. And they think, Oh, yes, you must be very smart. And you must know What you’re talking about. And so thus, you should be a leader. And that’s not actually What a leader should be. I’m not saying that you should have uneducated leadership. But I think it’s a very poor assessment of What leadership is just basing it off education, and often knowledge set in a certification that goes with that set of knowledge. And so that is What leadership is not.

The next thing is leadership is something that you decide to do, no matter What position you’re in, it doesn’t matter What position you’re in leadership is a choice, because you influence every single individual and person around you, including those above you, beside you, and below you, in all three positions, you influence all of them. Sometimes you need to lead your boss, or the person in charge or you into making a decision or through a certain set of decisions within work, right? Other times, you’ve got to lead your peers into understanding what’s going on, and then making decisions and there’s leadership involved and all that, and so on and so forth. Okay. That being said, leadership is a choice. The other thing that leadership is, is it is choosing to become a person of discipline and principles and follow through. Okay. And those are so important. And I’ll talk about those in a little bit, because I think I want to talk about the principles now, because it’ll just make a little more sense.

The two principles behind great leadership, and these aren’t the only ones but these are really What I would think are the biggest ones behind great leadership. They are selflessness, and humility. If you have ever worked for a bad boss, they are normally either very selfish or arrogant, okay? And the selfishness is when I’m leading for my sake, doing things for my sake, utilizing the team or people around me for my selfish gain for my selfish motivations, right? They’re not predicated on a greater good, and it’s not selfless. Right. The second one is the humility. Right, so the opposite of that would be arrogance. And so when you’re working for a very arrogant boss, or very arrogant person, it is very hard to work with him. It’s very painful, because arrogance and selflessness, I mean, excuse me, arrogance and selfishness do not have room for other people. They are all very self centered principles and ideologies that people will live by. Okay. And I will call them negative principles, right? Arrogance and selfishness. If you are going to be a good leader, leading selflessly is so required because you have to build for your team and other people. And then you have to lead for other people, not for yourself, not for power, not for accolades, not for all these things, but a lot of people lead from that place. And if you’re in a position of leadership, I would suggest pausing and reflecting to see What you do that is really selfish. And to see What you do that’s really arrogant because every one of us does this.

And it’s really important to find where we do it, and then make decisions otherwise. And normally What will happen is if you’re in leadership, the friction points in your team are normally associated with leadership being selfish or arrogant in those ways. The other thing that I mentioned earlier was discipline and I’ll briefly touch on this before we end discipline is so important because as a leader, you need people to trust you the people around you need to trust you above you need to trust you and below you. And discipline produces follow through and follow through will produce expectations and bridges of trust. And if you don’t have that people will not follow you because you’ll have negative expectations.

Well anyways guys, I’m out of time so I’ll catch you later peace