Leadership is inherently viewed as positive and good. The reality, of course, is something quite different. There are good leaders and there are bad leaders, male and female. There are those who believe that any action by leaders is better than no action at all. This is wishful thinking and absolute nonsense.

If leaders make bad decisions, those actions paralyze the organization, its members, and damage the public and society in many cases. If bad leaders are not told by their followers that they are bad, they will continue to be bad leaders. In the absence of genuine visionary leadership, people are willing to listen to anyone who is willing to step up to the microphone. It’s time we pulled the plug on bad leaders.

Bad leadership will not, cannot, be stopped or slowed unless followers take responsibility for rewarding the good leaders and penalizing the bad ones.

So, what are the personal characteristics of future leaders? Here are thirty personality traits that have been identified as being effective for good leadership:

1. Are enthusiastic, positive, and passionate: good cheerleaders. They are positive about followers power to “envision and create their future” – which is not defined by the past and present of the leader.
2. Are highly competent, seek continuous improvement, and embrace opportunities that no-one else wants to latch on to.
3. They want to be in the hot seat! People in positions of leadership who don’t want to be there and embrace the opportunities and challenges will lead the organization to that infamous place known as mediocrity.
4. Are visible examples and role models to everyone around them… willing to do anything that they ask others to do. They understand “you never have a second chance to make a first impression.”
5. Leaders have and demonstrate integrity… personal and professional.
6. Leaders recognize astutely that their power is only strengthened by reciprocal empowerment of those they lead and influence.
7. Are willing to be seen as colleagues in meetings, letting go of some of the “trappings of power.”
8. Make a habit of reflection and systematically review personal and unit performance; they develop reflection as a personal habit.
9. Pay attention to their organization and watch for changes and retrenchments.
10. Establish social functions and traditions, such as, retreats, informal gatherings, lunches, banquets, and other social symbols that provide social cohesion and common unit experiences – and even a sense of fun.
11. Appreciate, value, and have faith in the collaborative process – trusting that the group will find a solution that works for everyone.
12. Scan the environment (internal, external, and macro) looking for patterns that may impact the organization and distribute those ideas to others; keep reconstituting relevant ideas and concepts, looking for common threads; create and recreate visions and scenarios in her or his mind, and shares ideas with others.
13. Have a tolerance for ambiguity and are prepared to leap the gap rather than tiptoe from stone to stone.
14. Focus organizational attention on areas where collective agreement exists.
15. Are persistent: Don’t give up.
16. Demonstrate patience – wait for group process to coalesce knowing that group processes take time and often come together and get things done at the last minute.
17. Do not take themselves too seriously.
18. Know their personal strengths, weaknesses, tendencies, and perspectives.
19. Value service.
20. Are receptive to views that counter their own. Aggressively seek out individuals with perspectives and strengths that counter their worldview. 
21. Tomorrow’s leaders will need to be able to see the world from multiple perspectives  – and respect differences
22. Leaders must have an international/global view of society.
23. Leaders will need skills in problem-solving, power-sharing and creativity. An ability to achieve results, communication and interpersonal skills, resilience, and ethics and values.
24. Education is essential to remain competitive and on the “cutting-edge.”
25. Future leaders need to learn to listen respectfully, consult with others, work as part of a team, and take responsibility for their actions.
26. Leaders will need to be able to optimize today’s only constant: change. They will need to thrive on chaos.
27. Leaders MUST have mentors and role models who can teach them how to manage the political nature of an organization.
28. In the agricultural and industrial revolutions, units of power used to be land, labor, and capital. Today, in the technological revolution, units of power are information and knowledge.
29. Leaders will need to be politically savvy and willing to make hard decisions.
30. Being in the right place at the right time will still be critical for leaders. Leaders must create time to make themselves available for opportunities.

The original story first appeared in “Leadership Choices for the Future” by Don Olcott Jr., Darcy Hardy, and Theresa Madden of The Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany.

Effective leadership strategies can be found in unlikely places, far from any business school or boardroom. In a disrupted world, could the instinctive nature of animals remind us of the basics of real leadership and help us get back on track?

There is an abundance of brilliant leadership coaches around, such as Marshall Goldsmith, Tony Robbins, or Brendon Burchard, who can transform leaders and organizations. While their leadership strategies work well, many people struggle to implement these lessons and often give up too early in the process.

Meet your new leadership coach, who comes trotting into the arena: a horse! CEOs and managers look on in awe. “Surely this can’t be serious?” they think. Each leader is introduced to a group of horses, and I observe their interactions. Some have heated discussions among themselves, while others challenge their teammates to a short race. There is always a bully or troublemaker in the group — just like in real life. The gathered CEOs can relate: “This looks just like one of our meetings.”

I then encourage them to describe each horse’s unique character and often point out the ones that show similar behaviors to themselves. When we work in teams and lead others, it’s essential to understand what drives individuals — their motivations and actions in different situations. Some horses love to be together in groups, engaging in “conversations,” while others are driven by food. A few of them run around looking for new challenges. In business, we observe similar traits. Leaders who understand these dynamics and adapt their strategies to match a specific personality type or team get better results. Much of this has to do with emotional intelligence. Dr. Travis Bradberry, an expert in emotional intelligence, found that 90 percent of top performers in a company have high emotional intelligence (EQ), while average-performing managers have lower EQs.

So, what makes a horse such a great leadership coach? Horses are very sociable and sensitive animals. In nature, they live in herds, and each has an exact role in their hierarchy. They communicate through body language, energy, and warn each other of danger, which is essential since a horse is a flight/prey animal. Horses follow their intuition to survive and can scan the environment very quickly. A horse can be the perfect teacher for leadership — how to work together and foster effective communication.

Nicholas Small, vice president of global operations at CISCO, was one leader who discovered that “soft” leadership skills could become an effective strategy for his corporation. “A horse’s ability to sense and respond to a person’s intentions, emotions, and thoughts has helped team members learn how to communicate more effectively, face potential fears of the unknown, and manage their emotions to drive better actions,” he says. 

A few minutes into the workshop, the CEOs get handed the reins. Their task is to lead their horse through a course of obstacles. This is the moment when things become real. The exercise is called Lead by Example, a term used so frequently that it borders on becoming stale — but not for horses. A horse can weigh up to 1,500 pounds, and its sheer size can be intimidating — even for a well-accomplished CEO used to being in control. While leading their horse through the obstacles, some leaders will strike up a conversation with their new four-legged partner. These gentle animals are great listeners and respond to the energy and emotion in a human voice. Everyone takes a different approach. Some leaders just shorten the reins and motivate the horse with a pat on the neck. Others have a small talk with their new partner before setting out. Successful leaders all have something in common: a tremendous amount of empathy and a confident and energizing way of communicating.

Research conducted by Harvard University, the Carnegie Foundation, and Stanford Research Center have all concluded that 85 percent of career success comes from having well-developed soft skills and people skills. Only 15 percent of job success comes from technical skills and knowledge (hard skills).

After a few hours of interaction, when participants have built their confidence with these large animals, the CEOs move on to the next level: riding the horse, but with a twist.

While one CEO rides the horse, another CEO leads the horse on the ground and receives instructions from the rider. This arrangement reflects how a CEO might interact with their managers. Atop the horse, the CEO has an overview of the situation and is recognized by everyone as such. But when it comes to the direction, agility, and speed of the operation, he or she depends on the manager to lead the horse. The horse symbolizes the employees; it responds to motivation from a leader and the environment around it. Success lies in the leaders’ hands and their ability to understand and appropriately adapt their communication to their horse.

Working with horses is a fresh approach to leadership success that can have profound results. “Leaders must know where they are headed, just like horses,” says Aditya Krishna, chairman of the Saksoft Group. “It’s very obvious with horses: If you don’t know where you’re going, the horse will not follow you. Horses keep you humble, as leaders must remain humble, too. They can bring you down to earth fast.”

CEOs who work with horses develop a new perspective on how to motivate and drive their projects successfully. Even leaders who usually focus on numbers and balance sheets go home with a new understanding — that empathy can change everything.

These CEOs have learned from a coach that does not talk: a horse. They realize that leadership can go beyond words. Rather, it’s about the actions you take and how you bring out the strength in the people around you. 

All organizations are at risk for unforeseeable challenges, threats, and crises. You can’t control everything, but here are 10 ways a leader should act to mitigate the damage and start the healing process.

Gather your rapid response team. Appoint people to this team before a crisis happens and make sure they know their respective roles. It should include all senior leaders and leaders of key functions such as operations/logistics, security, finance, HR, communications/PR, facilities, etc.

Allow the leader in charge to delegate. You need a central commander to manage response activities such as assigning personnel, deploying equipment, obtaining additional resources, etc. This leader must be fully present, visible, and available in the heat of crisis.

Have the team report to the command center. This is a predetermined location (physical and/or virtual) for monitoring and reacting to events. You should also select a code word that puts the rapid response process into action.

Gather relevant information. In a crisis, it’s critical to centralize information, facts, and data. What’s known? What isn’t known? The goal is to organize and coordinate response activities, ensuring that the most pressing needs are met and that resources are properly allocated.

Promote a unifying message. It is vital to deliberately shape and disseminate a message of unity. Make sure your message is one of “we are all in it together.” This helps people transcend the impulse to split into factions.

Stay visible. Leaders must be highly visible and take the lead in communication. Don’t hide behind a spokesperson. Communicate quickly and clearly to reduce ambiguity.

Become “in it together.” Double down on messages connected to team building, camaraderie, purpose. Acknowledge fears and worries as normal. Let people know what to expect.

Be transparent. Align leadership in how they see the external environment and make sure everyone agrees on what “success” looks like so messages are cascaded consistently. Don’t create voids by waiting to communicate. Tackle rumors head on. Share bad news the minute you have it.

Stay accessible. Use all modalities (video, email, intranet, text, town halls, etc.) to convey messages from the senior leader. Have a central repository/FAQ where people can get info and ask questions between regular communication sessions.

Keep listening. Ask questions and leave room for inquiry. When listening, stop talking. Resist the temptation to just listen for what you want to hear (your job is to hear and deal with the hard stuff too).

Stop building urgency around the nature of a proposed change. Instead, create the right amount of urgency around how that change can occur. By doing this, you will quickly become familiar with how change is initiated, communicated, and executed within your organization.

If we wind back the clock a few decades, significant change within a business most often came in the shape of disparate one-off events. They followed a process of unfreezing whatever was the status quo — carrying out the change event (for example, a merger) — and then refreezing the organization in its new shape or form. It would then remain like this until the next event came along. 

The disruptive nature of digitalization has brought an entirely new paradigm around change that many in the business world simply weren’t — and still aren’t — fully prepared for. Existing markets and incumbent organizations are being forced to continually adapt and evolve to survive. Digital transformation journeys are now continuous, fast, and constant. Companies can no longer be neatly thawed, reshaped, and then put back on ice for another decade. 

With the dynamics of business transformation vastly different than they once were, the leadership skills needed to navigate change must evolve to meet the moment. 

As a leader that has had significant exposure to change characteristics of the last two decades — and as a former head of business development at Google, a company that manages to combine size with extreme rates of change — I believe that there are some keys to navigating continuous change that I hope will help others. 

In the last 30 years, if you’ve taken a change management course, pursued an MBA, or just tried to educate yourself in this area, you are likely to have come across one of the most famous and widely used change management assets: Kotter’s eight steps from 1995. 

The model presents eight reasons why change efforts most commonly fail. It offers eight steps that organizations should follow if they’re to succeed with large-scale transformation. This framework, together with the majority of the others out there, risk triggering change fatigue in organizations, as many of the modern models still assume change comes from a series of singular, unlinked events rather than one continuous, everlasting process. 

Making Change Matter

For any leader relying on these frameworks, a first crucial step preceding any change event is their ability to create enough urgency in the organization for it to act. This is mainly built on the assumption that if employees don’t understand or grasp the urgency of a change, they will be unlikely to go along with it and even actively resist it. 

Some leaders successfully fabricate urgency and make a situation look worse than it is. The primary purpose has been to whip the organization into enough panic to ensure that no one is left uncertain in understanding what needs to be done. 

This way of managing urgency assumes at least two things. First, that management has a level of certainty that the change being proposed will have a positive outcome, and is indeed the right one. Second, there will be an opportunity for the organization to recover from this induced state of panic once the change is complete. In a world where the outcome of any large-scale change effort is so highly unpredictable, it is improbable that both of those assumptions will turn out to be true. 

On several occasions, I have seen leaders’ credibility undermined by overselling the potential impacts of individual change events. Often, the positioning of a ‘Silver Bullet’ project ends up doing more harm than good as it becomes evident to employees that management could not predict the future with any real accuracy and that the change that was supposed to set them on a robust new footing had become obsolete before it was fully implemented. 

As a result, when the project comes to an end — and the organization finds its new normal and people snap out of their panic state — new change is already needed as the environment has evolved beyond the original expectation.

The result of this cycle? Burnt out staff that are even less likely to positively engage in the next round of change and a senior leadership team that has lost credibility and might have to push the panic button harder for the next round
of changes. 

Choosing an Alternate Method

To rethink how change is managed, it’s best to start by rethinking these fundamental assumptions. While leaders might have a good idea of what needs to be done to evolve their organization, they can’t predict the future. Based on that understanding, the idea of the singular silver-bullet solution providing a competitive advantage for any amount of time becomes far more unrealistic and untenable. 

Creating transparent communication within an organization is critical. Leaders can acknowledge that the future is unknown but that the organization is rebuilding itself to handle whatever might be thrown at it. The urgency created around that effort rather than promoting an individual change event invariably leads to broader acceptance of change and is a stronger position from which to take action. Creating urgency around rebuilding processes for continuous learning and constant adaptation will ensure that a leader’s credibility is not bound to one transformational event’s success. Leaders can then create a sense of continuity, regardless of how many changes there might have to be in the decades to come.

Now is the time for true champion leaders to lean in and shine. This is how great leaders build back after defeat.

There is no question that over the past year, we have faced unique challenges. For the first time, the playing fields became even. We all experienced something we had never dealt with before — a pandemic that shut us down. We were asked to walk into the unknown (together) and were tasked with keeping ourselves and our families safe while at the same time keeping our teams healthy, connected, and employed.

“Rise too the Occasion.”

As leaders, we were asked to do all the above while keeping a positive outlook on a future we couldn’t guarantee for ourselves or others. But, that is what leaders do. Like great athletes, they rise to the occasion. Champion leaders recreate their vision in real-time while letting everybody around them know: “I’m here for you, no matter what.”
As leaders, we are also tasked with rebuilding. Like a sports team, we must regroup and retool after a tough season. We must be open to change and be excited about what lies ahead. Today, we start that rebuilding process — our companies, our corporate culture, and our mental health. Now is the time for true champion leaders to lean in and shine. This is how great leaders build back after defeat:

“The Past, Embrace What Is Ahead.”

As leaders, many of us may want to go back to business as usual. Yet, business as usual may not have been ideal. The pandemic shook things up — some things for the good, some things for the bad. Winners focus on the good and adapt. Was working from the office every day the best solution? The only way? Maybe not. What if you took things that worked from the pandemic and put them into your new business playbook? What if you studied your people’s work output and preferences and adopted the practices that had the highest productivity yields? This is how we recognize the past and embrace the future — by changing to what works best.

“The Great Ones Always Adjust.”

Early in my Major League Baseball coaching career, a great manager told me, “Kid, remember, the great ones always adjust. Baseball and life are nothing more than games of adjustment.” That thought stuck with me and couldn’t have proven more right this past year. After all, what plan ever goes exactly to plan? Not many. Because our plans don’t go according to plan, the results can sometimes be better than expected. How many times does your plan fail, yet you still end up in a better place?

“Redefine the Unknown.”

The unknown is usually associated with the negative. Yet, some of our greatest moments and victories happen in the unknown. We seek knowledge, learn new skills, and make those ever-so-critical decisions and pivots because of the unknown. This past season, we were all faced with the unknown (a pandemic), and as a result, many of us revamped processes, operating procedures, and trimmed areas that were running fat. It was the unknown that made many companies and leaders stronger and better.

“Breathe Belief Into Your People.”

Although some people thrived over the last year, enjoying the freedoms of working from home, many felt alone and lost a degree of hope and personal bearing around the question: “Why?” As we rebuild, we must not just rebuild companies, but more importantly, people. As champion leaders, we must breathe belief, optimism, and a can-do attitude into our people. Like a ballplayer in a slump, a great coach realizes the importance of instilling belief into a player and reminding them of their capabilities.

“Individuals Make Up Teams.”

Working under the great Yankees manager Joe Torre in my early coaching days, I quickly realized how important it is to understand that individuals make up a team. A team is a group of people with unique needs, goals, and ways of doing things. Each team member also has personal struggles, strengths, and weaknesses — that all need to be addressed one-on-one. If a leader hopes for a prosperous future, it begins with spending time with your people and prioritizing these one-on-one interactions. Your time and attention can accelerate an individual’s performance.

“Identifying The Real Issues.”

With more than a year to examine virtually every aspect of their business, many leaders realized that the pandemic exposed their company’s weakest links — from too little cash reserves to identifying overlapping jobs among employees to having too much office space. The pandemic can be credited for creating greater economic efficiencies. The best solutions often present themselves when leaders are forced to look at things they rarely make time to look at. The most precious resource the pandemic gave us was more time: time to improve ourselves, our people, and companies.

“Real Leadership.”

A real leader is precisely that — real. They wear their hearts on their sleeves, and everyone around them is thankful for this. In a time when leaders appear to be a dime a dozen based on their LinkedIn profiles, the leader that rises above is the one who meets their people where they are. Real leaders run toward conflict and pain, toward the team members filled with fear, doubt, and insecurity. A burning desire to lift people will demonstrate to others that you possess outstanding leadership — and the greatest gift you could give another is a gift that will transcend any crisis, pandemic, or virus. Real leaders always step up and step in.

When a threat seems clear to you, it’s hard to believe others will deny it. Yet intelligent people deny serious risks surprisingly often.

A case in point example comes from my experience helping a mid-size regional insurance company conduct a strategic pivot to thrive in the post-COVID world in January 2021. While doing a pivoting audit, I observed the underwriting department failing to address severe long-term risks for a number of industries resulting from the shifts in habits and norms due to the pandemic.

For example, many companies committed to having many employees work from home permanently, ranging from innovative tech companies like Dropbox to traditional ones such as the insurance giant Nationwide. This growing trend makes it riskier to insure providers of commercial real estate and office-based products and services. Likewise, the rise of virtual fitness spells trouble for the future prospects of everything from yoga studios to gyms. Similar dynamics pose trouble for restaurants and other industries.

Unfortunately, the company’s underwriting department proved resistant to clear evidence of such trends. With the department’s performance evaluation based on how many policies they approved, the Chief Underwriting Officer (CUO) did not want to adjust the company’s underwriting strategy according to wh0at he termed “theoretical problems.”

Research shows that professionals at all levels suffer from the tendency to deny uncomfortable facts. Scholars term this thinking error the ostrich effect after the (mythical) notion that ostriches stick their heads into the sand when encountering threats.

The ostrich effect is one of over 100 dangerous judgment errors that result from how our brains are wired, what scholars in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics call cognitive biases. These mental blindspots impact all areas of our life, from relationships and health to politics and even shopping. Fortunately, recent research has shown effective strategies to defeat these dangerous judgment errors.  

To Deal With Risk Denial, Use EGRIP (Emotions, Goals, Rapport, Information, Positive Reinforcement)

Our intuitive action to overcome risk denial involves confronting people with the facts and arguing with them, but research suggests that’s usually exactly the wrong thing to do. Instead, when we talk to someone who believes something we are confident is false, we need to suspect some emotional block is at play. 

Rather than leading with facts or arguing, you can use a much more effective, research-based, and easy-to-remember strategy called EGRIP. This acronym stands for Emotions, Goals, Rapport, Information, and Positive Reinforcement.

Step 1: Model Their Emotions

Your goal should be to show emotionally intelligent leadership and figure out the emotional blocks inhibiting others from seeing risks clearly. Then, focus on deploying the skill of empathetic listening to determine what emotional blocks might cause them to deny reality.

A key clue for helping me understand the emotional factors for the CUO stemmed from the CUO’s skepticism toward altering underwriting policy based on climate change risks. He’s not alone among insurance leaders. Less than half of all insurance firms in a 2018 National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) survey reported having a climate change risk plan. 

For this company, it was only in late 2019 that its claims department, especially its Chief Claims Officer (CCO), successfully led the charge to overcome the CUO’s reluctance to integrate climate change risks into underwriting policy and develop a climate change risk plan. 

Such tensions between claims and underwriting occur frequently. The performance evaluation of the claims department stems from its ability to minimize claims payouts; the less risk, the fewer payouts. Thus, claims departments show strong and sometimes excessive risk aversion.

In discussions around the COVID strategic pivot audit, the CUO kept stressing how bad it would be for a business to adjust underwriting policy based on risks he felt overblown. He even brought up the recent changes in the company’s climate change risk underwriting policy, about which he still felt bitter. By contrast, the CCO firmly pushed for more heavily weighing the risks of industries negatively impacted in the long term by the pandemic. So, we can safely assume that worries about the performance of his department played a decisive role in the CUO’s risk denial.

Step 2: Figure Out Their Goals 

Next, you’ll want to figure out the goals motivating their emotions. As part of doing so, try to understand your broader shared goals that the false beliefs might block.

While talking to the CUO about his goals and aspirations, he expressed a strong desire to grow the company as a whole and his department in particular. He resented what he felt like the unnecessary increases in threat assessment for climate change and saw the COVID-related industry trends in a similar light.

Step 3: Put Yourself on the Same Side By Building Rapport

Next, you’ll want to communicate that you have shared goals and are on the same side. Build rapport without necessarily agreeing with the accuracy of their assessment of the situation by mirroring, or echoing in your own words, the points made by the other person, which helps build trust. 

With the CUO, I empathized with his desire to grow the company and especially the underwriting department as a praiseworthy aspiration. I echoed, without saying he was correct, his frustration with the claims department, which led the charge on reducing underwriting risks for climate change and COVID-related trends alike.

Step 4: Lead Them Away From False Beliefs Through Sharing Information

After placing yourself on the same side, move to the problem at hand — their emotional block. Without arousing a defensive response, show them how their risk denialism will lead to them undermining their own long-term goals.

I pointed to the positive flip side of addressing the threat of long-term industry adjustments after COVID. Indeed, permanent remote work for many employees threatened commercial real estate and products and services for the office. Yet, it promised a brighter future for private real estate construction and products and services targeted at work and entertainment at home. The pandemic spurred trends that had as many long-term winners as losers.

The CUO told me he didn’t think of it from this perspective before. He focused on the loss to underwriting from incorporating pandemic-related future developments, not the gains. In doing so, he fell for a cognitive bias called loss aversion, our brain’s tendency to weigh losses much more heavily than gains. Loss aversion poses a particular challenge for risk-oriented industries such as insurance.

I also reminded him that celebrating the winners also meant acknowledging the losers as part of a broader shift in underwriting. Doing so would strengthen his department in the future by building up its competency to adjust its underwriting flexibly as various forces created new winners and losers. After much discussion, he agreed this was the way to go and even felt excited about applying the same approach to looking for climate change risk winners.

Step 5: Help Them Associate Good Feelings With Changing Their Minds Via Positive Reinforcement

Conclude your conversations with positive reinforcement for those accepting the facts about risks, an effective research-based tactic. The more positive emotions the person associates with the ability to accept hard truths as an invaluable skill, the less likely anyone will need to have the same conversation with them in the future.

In the case of the CUO, I applauded him for changing his mind. But then, I told him how research shows that strong leaders welcome learning negative information and updating their beliefs toward reality to fix the problem effectively; in turn, failing to identify negative facts is a sign of a weak leader.

Conclusion

When dealing with smart people who deny risks, focus on their emotions above all. Use the 5-step research-based strategy called EGRIP to:

1. Discover their emotions.
2. Then their goals.
3. Build up a rapport.
4. Provide information to change their mind.
5. Finally, offer positive reinforcement for them updating their beliefs to match reality.  

At its essence, communication is storytelling. And when the goal of communication is to persuade, the simple matter is that the person who tells the best story wins.

In 1949, Professor Joseph Campbell outlined the basics of story throughout history. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he laid out patterns that recur in mythology throughout time and across cultures. He referred to the summation of these patterns as the “monomyth.”

The monomyth is a basic and widely applicable story model. A hero is called to go on an adventure, meets helpers, surmounts obstacles, solves a crisis or wins a contest, and usually comes home transformed. We see this basic structure again and again, in everything from Homer’s Odyssey to The Wizard of Oz to Black Panther. These are stories that keep us rapt, fully engage us, and satisfy us in the end.

And you can apply their structure to your communication needs.

The Call to Adventure

What is the adventure of the story you want to communicate? Before you can craft a message, you need to know what you hope to accomplish. You need a SOCO—a Single Overarching Communications Outcome, or an intention for your communication.

The Colorado Education Association (CEA) needed to get the message out that education was vastly underfunded in the state. Teachers could not afford to live in the communities where they teach. In 2020, teachers in Colorado, who make significantly less than the national average, could go to any other state in America and have a better standard of living. There were stories of teachers having to live in their cars. The goal of our messaging was, of course, more funding.

The Hero

In the story we decided to tell for the CEA, the hero would not be the teacher. To get your audience invested in your story, you need the right hero, someone they can relate to and unabashedly root for.

You might think that in a political campaign, for example, the hero would be the candidate, but it’s not. In fact, the hero is the voter. When people pull the lever for an issue or a candidate, they should view themselves as the questing hero and the candidate as the ship who will sail them safely across turbulent waters.

So it was with the students in Colorado and the lack of funding for education. In crafting our message, we made the hero the students—voters’ sons and daughters, corporations’ future employees—who were embarking on their own adventure of education and successful lives. We focused on how underfunded schools (with leaky roofs, outdated textbooks, etc.) were impacting the classroom and causing real harm to students. And through the students, we could come to teachers’ aid, pointing out that teachers who earn more are likely to stay in the profession longer, meaning better student outcomes.

The Helpers

 In advertising campaigns, the brand might be the hero, although it’s more likely (perhaps more effectively) the helper. In an advertising campaign for a facial cream, for example, the hero would be the person questing for dewy skin and the helper would be the cream. For a muscle car, the hero would be the driver questing for image while the car provides the horsepower.

In the CEA campaign, we needed the help of educators and the public to pressure the legislature. We needed to bring them into our story. The media was also a helper. As attention to the issue increased, we placed 150 stories and were included in national coverage of education funding, drawing eyes from around the country.

The obstacle or contest: While the regularly hosted CEA lobby days in January 2018 drew a lackluster response (obstacle—did people really care?), something else was happening out in the rest of the country: Educators were talking about striking. This stirred Colorado’s teachers to consider the same. Over the next few months, the monthly lobby days snowballed as more and more people showed up. The “Days of Action” became major rallies, with all the logistics and headaches that entails. We were suddenly riding the wave of a full-scale social movement. All told, over several months, about 17,000 Colorado educators had rallied.

The Transformation

We accomplished a lot in this campaign. In the following legislative session, the School Finance Act increased average per-pupil investment by $475, including $150 million in the K-12 budget. This was a significant long-term funding achievement. We had moved education to the top of the public agenda to get the crucial attention it needed amidst the other issues competing for funding — such as transportation, prisons, parks, and agriculture — addressed in over 500 bills per legislative session.

Telling a story that your audience can relate to, sympathize with and participate in can help ensure that your message gets across, leading to some version of happily ever after.

Let’s start with two important leadership principles: 1) There is a good service person inside almost every front-line server; and 2) just as customers can stand on the outside and see the absurdity of stupid rules, we need to sometimes help a service person navigate the bureaucracy that can govern their service.

Practice these two principles, and poor service will be a rarity. They are also two rules for great leadership!

I was visiting a friend in the hospital. When the nurse announced to my friend she would be shortly bringing him breakfast, I saw it as an opportunity to go down to the hospital café and get breakfast-to-go to eat when my friend got his breakfast. The café was set up as a self-service buffet with powdered eggs, bacon, sausage, grits, hashbrowns, toast, and biscuits.

Two cooks were in the back of the open hospital kitchen in conversation. When one saw me not serving myself, she asked, “May I help you?”

“Good morning!” I warmly said to her and waited for a response. When she echoed my greeting, I asked, “I’ll bet you have a grill?” I had noticed one behind her. “Yes, we do,” she replied.

“Wonderful,” I said, with all the optimism and sunshine I could muster. “I’d like two eggs cooked over easy, please, for my friend who is a patient.”

“Sorry,” she said in a very robotic voice, “We are not allowed to cook eggs over easy.”

Now, pause for a second. What would the typical customer do next? And, what would the typical customer conclude? This is where the two important leadership principles come into play.

“I am so sorry,” I said. “But, I’m confused. I thought I heard you mention that you had a grill?”

“Yes, but we have a rule that uncracked eggs cannot be served to a patient or a guest,” she said with the first sign of “wish-I-could-help” coming from her voice. “You’ll have to have the scrambled eggs on the serve-yourself buffet.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” I amiably said. “I just know your gourmet eggs would be so much better than these powdered eggs. And, I bet you could crack the eggs and cook them fried on your special grill!” There was a pause. “Coming right up!” she told me and began her work. At this point, two nurses came in to serve themselves and saw me waiting.

“Can we help you?” one nurse asked.

“Thanks,” I answered. “I am waiting on the chef to finish cooking my eggs.”

Then, the punch line that was worth the price of admission! “You got her to cook you eggs?” the other nurse asked in disbelief. At that point, I could not resist. I called back to my egg expert and commented, “They surely do smell great!” She turned and grinned.

Once the eggs were cooked, instead of just handing them to me over the counter to put on my plate, she brought them around the buffet counter and presented them to me!

Now, here is the moral of this story… in story form. Spotting the biscuit on my plate from the buffet, she enthusiastically asked, “Would you like me to heat up that biscuit in my microwave back there?” The two nurses looked stunned. She was now no longer the hospital’s cook; she was my chef! “Where do I leave your large tip?” I asked as I was heading to the cashier, knowing tips were not allowed. Again, she giggled and called back, “You just come back to see me again!”

Leading Great Service as a Customer

Leadership is not just about getting employees to achieve important goals. It is about influencing anyone to direct their personal pride and energy toward an achievement. Let’s examine a few rules of engagement that netted me great service and could net you great results from those you lead.

1. Check Your Pessimism at the Door

Enter the encounter with a server or an employee with the expectation that greatness is about to happen and should happen. Visualize an awesome outcome. Then, let your positive attitude and confident expectation come from that terrific mental picture. Avoid making demands. Instead, put your energy into creating a lighthearted connection. Directing must start with connecting; caring must bolster guiding.

2. Carefully Manage the First Ten Seconds

The first ten seconds are vital to shaping the reception you get. Aim your eyes and best Steinway smile at the server (or employee). Deliver a greeting that loudly proclaims, “We are about to have some unbelievable festivity here. And you’re invited!” Optimism and joy are generally infectious. Always use your best manners—“please,” “sirs” and “thank you’s.” A chilly initial reception will generally thaw if you are persistent in your cheerfulness; don’t assume success will come from your opening line.

3. Help Others Deliver Greatness

Most service people and employees are really eager to deliver excellence. Sometimes barriers make it difficult. Be a willing helper in clearing barriers away. If the barrier is a foul mood, try a quick tease or sincere compliment to turn sour into sunny. If the barrier is a silly policy, offer a creative suggestion that helps bolster confidence without putting the service person or employee at risk. “What if you…” can more easily be heard without resistance than “Why don’t you…” Show your best curiosity and focus on empowerment, not insurrection.

4. Be Generous and Thoughtful

Never view any encounter to be influenced as a single transaction but rather the start of an important relationship. Affirm excellence, not just results. Praise service people to their superiors; employees to their colleagues. Express your compliments to great service providers or employees with a follow-up note or call. The next time you return,
you’ll get their red carpet best!

Don’t wait for great service or outstanding employee performance to just happen. Take charge of elevating the encounter from “okay” to “awesome.” Servers like great customers just as much as customers like great servers. Leadership is about serving others, not getting your way. Serve others from your heart, and you will be served in the same fashion.

The pandemic has had a significant impact on the way we all operate. For sport, events have been postponed or canceled; athletes have been unable to compete, and revenue has been lost. Sport usually brings people, cultures, and businesses together, but our industry has been put on hold for much of the past year.

Yet, in many ways, Covid-19 has helped us embrace new ways of working and give us time to reflect and re-evaluate our own practices. We all need alternative perspectives in life to help us look at challenges differently and reassess how we can overcome them.

Innovation is key for any business that wants to thrive and improve, especially during such extraordinary circumstances. Over the past year, the sports industry has benefited from the innovative ways it has been able to maintain athlete participation levels at both elite and grassroots levels and engagement with fans and sponsors.

At USA Weightlifting (USAW), the ramifications of the pandemic have been felt across our entire organization. Athletes have been forced to adapt to lockdown rules, traveling restrictions, and social distancing laws in order to prepare for the biggest event in our calendar, the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

The pandemic and its consequences have taught us some lessons about our sports governance as well. We have become more transparent and agile. In these times of uncertainty, our staff and athletes and their entourage have rightly looked to their leadership teams for support, guidance, and to take decisive action. Being transparent has built even greater levels of trust.

Our success results from effective management and teamwork, which has taken on even greater significance over the past year.

A key learning from the pandemic has been that empathic leadership and effective communication are essential to achieving success for any business. I am extremely proud of the creative and collective approach that weightlifters from across the world, including those from across my own federation, have shown during this period.

In times of crisis, we, as leaders, must put the needs of the business above our own personal priorities. It is my responsibility to support these athletes to the best of my ability.

As CEO of USAW, I immediately cut my salary by 100% when the pandemic struck last year and launched a Covid-19 relief fund to help our members.

We have had to be prepared to take calculated risks to protect our organization’s long-term future. We have encouraged our athletes, for instance, to train in home gyms and garages, and created a program of remote sessions to replace long-distance training camps.

Despite the uncertainty, the launch of these online competitions for weightlifters at all levels has helped our sport reach new audiences and ensure that athletes can continue to participate.

Boosted by the continued support of our existing sponsors, we have been able to use our wider network to find creative ways to generate much-needed revenue. We have also been able to reduce costs by moving our live events and coaching sessions online.

We have also found ways of generating revenue with new sponsors, such as a highly successful fundraising campaign in partnership with Snap! Raise, the nation’s leading provider of fundraising to high school youth groups and teams. The campaign helped to provide money to the myriad of local clubs that are the lifeblood of our sport. These funds ensured that they are able to keep their facilities open and keep the sport of weightlifting thriving around the nation.

Despite the financial challenges presented by the pandemic for many organizations, USAW delivered a record surplus of almost $1 million in 2020, and we are now in a fantastic position to achieve our goals in Tokyo as a result.

We have become more inclusive and diverse, bringing more individuals from black and ethnic minority backgrounds into weightlifting, with our female representation extending to more than 50% of USAW membership.

Tokyo will be unlike many previous editions of the Olympic Games, with limitations on fans, family, and friends, and the wider entourage that we would normally expect to support athletes during the biggest competition of their lives.

It is up to my team and me to ensure our athletes receive the best possible support as they prepare. We want to do everything we can to give them the best experience possible while representing their country.

That’s why we have recently announced an innovative training hub in Hawaii for our athletes to train before they fly to Tokyo, where they will be supported in the best possible way as they prepare. Friends and family, medical and coaching experts, our own team, and future athletes will attend to create the closest possible experience to the Games as we can create. We believe that that will give our team the best conditions to compete at their optimum for what will certainly be a very different Olympic Games.

Ultimately, a person’s mental wellness, whether they are an athlete, leader, or an employee, is an exceptionally significant indicator of how well they will function in their role.

Throughout this period, sport has overcome many challenges and given communities hope in times of uncertainty. We need more innovation in sport to drive better solutions for crisis management and improvements in leadership.