Maxwell Leadership Podcast: 10 Traits Successful Leaders Possess

Mark Cole:
Hey, welcome to the Maxwell Leadership podcast. Our podcast is all about adding value to leaders who will in turn multiply value to others. If you’re wondering what a successful leader looks like, if you’re wondering how you can be a successful leader, let me tell you something. I think John Maxwell, after 50 years of leadership, is qualified to talk about today’s podcast session. In today’s session, John’s going to talk about ten traits successful leaders possess. And I’m going to tell you again, I’ve just already said this, but I’ve watched John not only develop leaders, but assess leaders. I’ve watched John not only instruct leaders, but learn from the best leaders in the world. And so today, I can’t wait for you to hear what John is going to teach us on how to identify characteristics and cultivate characteristics in our leadership.

Mark Cole:
After John’s lesson, my co host, Chris Goede and I will be sitting down to give you practical ways that you and us can apply what we’ve learned to our life and our leadership. Don’t miss out on the bonus resource or the option. To watch this episode on YouTube. Go to maxwellpodcast.com/successfulleaders to access these resources. Okay, grab a pen, grab a paper, grab a mirror. Because John Maxwell is going to teach us on ten characteristics. Here is John Maxwell.

John Maxwell:
What are the ten traits that successful leaders have in common? The question I’m asked most often when I do leadership training and development is I have people constantly ask me the question, how do I find potential leaders? How do I know that I’ve got a potential leader? And what I try to do in that setting is I try to draw them a picture of what a potential leader looks like. You’ve got to have a picture. If you don’t have a picture of what a leader looks like, you don’t know how to identify one. So therefore you don’t know whether you’ve got one or not. What we’re going to give you here now in these ten traits of successful leaders is somewhat of a picture of a potential leader. Number one, passion. No trait is more noticeable in the leaders of our list than passion that they share for their people and for their companies. Quite simply, they love what they do.

John Maxwell:
To be successful, you have to love what you do. And when you have that passion, when you love what you do, you don’t even work. It’s just fun. Work becomes fun. I’ve always said I’ve never worked a day in my life. I’ve gone to work every day, but I’ve never worked a day in my life. I love what I do. Number two, intelligence and clarity of thinking.

John Maxwell:
It perhaps goes without saying that the most successful business leaders are highly intelligent, and some of their intelligence is clearly the kind of raw intellectual horsepower that is innate. Here’s what I want you to catch. However, equally as important as the native smarts is their ability to make the complex seem simple. This is key to make the complex seem simple. I have an expression about making the complex simple. By the way, educators take something simple and make it complex. Communicators take something complex and make it simple. They have the ability to the expression I use all the time.

John Maxwell:
They have the ability to put the cookies on the lower shelf so everybody can have some. Now, how do you put the cookies on the lower shelf? Four questions to ask. Number one, do I understand it? Don’t try to communicate something you don’t understand yourself. Number two, how can I help others understand it? Question number three, do they understand it? Question number four, do they understand it well enough? And by the way, question number four is absolutely the acid test of putting the cookies on the lower shell. Did they understand it well enough to help someone else understand it? In other words, it must pass what I call the pass it on test. The pass it on test is very simple. If I’m leading this organization, if I’m leading this group of people, and I share with you a vision, I got to ask myself a question. Do I understand the vision? When I’m done, do you understand the vision? How can I break down with that vision? So you can’t understand it.

John Maxwell:
But the biggest question is, have I given you the vision so clearly that you can walk out of this room and you can pass it on someone else until you have communicate it so clearly that the second person can pass it on to the third person without the first person being there. You have not broken it down, because all great visions must go from me to we. And the only way that you could take a vision from me to we is to say it in such a compelling, simple way that when you’re done, people can take it and repeat it with others. And if they can’t take it and share it with someone else, it’s too complicated. Back up. Do it again. Number three, the third trait that successful leaders have in common is great communication skills, the ability to communicate effectively. I’ve been privileged over the years to do a lot of teaching on communication.

John Maxwell:
There’s a difference between information and communication. A lot of people think information is, well, I gave them information. We sent out memos, we did emails, we did all this stuff. A lot of people think information is communication. It’s not. Information is giving out. Communication is getting through. And there is a world of difference between giving out stuff and getting through to people.

John Maxwell:
And you nor I have ever effectively communicated until we get through. Number four trait number four of successful leaders. High energy level. Successful leaders having a high energy level. Elizabeth Dole has a quote from Teddy Roosevelt that hangs on her wall, illustrating this energy level required of leaders that applies even more aptly today than when it was first written in Teddy Roosevelt’s day. Here’s what it says. We’re face to face with our destiny, and we must meet it with a high, resolute courage. For ours is a life of action, of strenuous performance, of duty.

John Maxwell:
Let us live in the harness of striving mightily. Let us run the risk of wearing out rather than rusting out. High energy. The key to high energy is passion. Passion and high energy are identical twins, and they’re always together. Number five. The fifth trait of successful people was that their egos were in check. They checked their egos at the door.

John Maxwell:
As my friend John wooten many, many years ago said, it’s what you learn after you know it all that counts. You don’t build or manage a business with one person. You have a team that does that. And the more you highlight one person, the more it detracts from the whole team. Number six. Inner peace. The most successful business leaders have a difficult time to describe, but nonetheless perceptible solidity to them. It feels good to be around them.

John Maxwell:
It’s no wonder that people, especially employees, are drawn to them and want to follow them. We’re not talking about charisma. Number seven. The 7th trait of successful leaders and people is capitalizing on formative early life experiences. We cannot control who our parents are, what order we are born in, or what economic stratum we grow up in. But we can control what we make of our early life experiences. Reminds me of a statement I’ve said often. It’s not what happens to you, it’s what happens in you that counts.

John Maxwell:
Number eight. Strong family lives. Wow. Strong family. No substitute for it. Number nine. Positive attitude. Successful people have a positive attitude.

John Maxwell:
I wrote a book called failing forward. The thesis of the book is the major difference between achieving people and average people is their perception of in response to failure. That’s so true. In fact, in the book, one of the things I said is when you fall down, while you’re down there, pick something up you’re already down there. Clean the floor. You’re not down there all the time. The problem is, when we make mistakes, we try to leave them as quickly as we can instead of learn from them because mistakes and failures embarrass us. And I learned a long time ago, you never learn from that which embarrasses you.

John Maxwell:
So you’ve got to get through the embarrassment phase of making mistakes and failures to really learn and grow. And number ten, wrapping it all up. Focus on doing the right things right. And so I bring you to the last statement of the lesson. As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. The next best, the people honor and praise, the next the people fear and the next that people hate. When the leaders, when the best leaders work is done, the people say, we did it ourselves. And that’s our goal, to lead in such a way that the people get the credit.

John Maxwell:
Mark Twain said, it’s amazing what can be accomplished if the leader doesn’t care who gets the credit. I close with this phrase, it’s wonderful when the people believe in their leader. It’s more wonderful when the leader believes in the people.

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Mark Cole:
Hey, welcome back, Chris. I say this often because I respect you so much. I really do. You’re a successful leader. And so to sit down with you, and I think we’re successful because we’ve got some born qualities that we probably attribute to our faith. Thank you, lord, and also to our parents. Thank you for a leadership environment, certainly for me growing up, but also we’ve been around John’s environment, and John says this often podcast family, he says, after 13,000 times of speaking, if I don’t do a good job, somebody come and wake me up and tell me I’m in the wrong thing. Well, if you and I can’t talk about the characteristics of a leader.

Mark Cole:
Not saying we’ve got it all figured out, but, boy, we’ve been around it, and so I’m really excited to talk about the characteristics.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, I think from an osmosis standpoint, as you’re saying. Right. If we don’t have some of that, somebody better come get us out of here.

Mark Cole:
Exactly.

Chris Goede:
We don’t need to talk.

Mark Cole:
Hey, and by the way, sometimes they’ve tried, and they have tried.

Chris Goede:
Yeah. We just keep showing back up. Right.

Mark Cole:
That’s exactly right.

Chris Goede:
What I love about this, and I think why you and I have been able to absorb some of these from John, is that man, he talks about in the lesson, he puts them on the bottom shelf. And, you know, there’s a lot of studies out there with all these different attributes of a leader. We got the emotional intelligence and. But what does that really mean? How to be authentic, all those things. But I love where he goes in this lesson. He’s like, let me just give you ten very practical things. And I think that’s why you and I are probably still around here. Right.

Mark Cole:
Cause we can.

Chris Goede:
We can work on that level. But what’s good is, I think, that it relates to every leader out there. And remember, we believe that it’s all about your influence. It’s not about a position, it’s not about a title. And so no matter where you’re leading from, and we mean that leading from family, community, in an organization, a team, all of this is relevant. We have lived this out through learning from John. So one of the things we’re going to do today is Mark and I talked briefly, and we just picked a couple, and we’re going to talk a little bit about Mark’s journey in developing these, of which we’ve learned from John. But then it’s up to us individually to develop them.

Chris Goede:
What does it look like for us to lead from that position, to have this trait? And the first one I said to Mark is, I was like, hey, we got to talk about this one. Where he says, intelligence and clarity of thinking.

Mark Cole:
Yeah.

Chris Goede:
Because that is a trait. And you start off by saying, hey, we’re grateful for our genes and our family and all stuff. That one has got to be developed over time. And I started thinking about this, and we’ve been on this journey a long time together. And I was like, man, Mark, we’ve got to hear from you in regards to how have you not, how have you become more intelligent, although you want to. You want to speak to that because of the world around John, but more importantly, have you gotten the clarity of thinking as a leader? Because that is extremely important. And we’ll blend both of these together in this conversation. But to be a successful leader, I don’t think enough people spend enough time on thinking.

Chris Goede:
And not only that, and you know this, John talks about thinking in so many different layers. Today, we’re just going to talk about the clarity of it. What has developed inside of you? How have you done that? What as leaders, what do we need to know about that to gain intelligence and clarity of leading?

Mark Cole:
Yeah. So it’s funny that you say that, because I wrote down while John was teaching, because we listen, by the way, podcast family, Chris. And often I will try to listen even before we get to studio. But before we even get into applying this, we listen to it again. Jake plays it. We listen to it. And while John was teaching just a moment ago, I wrote down, the greatest challenge of an effective leader is not spending time or spending time on thinking. And I really do believe that.

Mark Cole:
Why? Because most leaders have the propensity to action, but we act often without putting in proper thinking, and therefore we end up with results that we could have had better results. Did we do some intentional thinking? I was. I love this topic. And truly, we could take the entire podcast and talk about this one segment. We’ll try not to do that. I was struck with two experiences this week. On the week of recording, I was struck with two experiences. One was with our director of content.

Mark Cole:
He’s our evp of publishing of content, Jared Cagle. And most of you know this. We’re just now getting into the publishing world. We’re just now learning what we don’t know. Okay? We’ve been publishing books for years with other people’s intelligence, speaking of intelligence and other people doing our thinking for us. And we would just deliver the manuscript and then off we would go. So we’re now looking at how do we weight overhead? What is the real cost per unit? What does running a book business really look like as a publisher, not as an author. Okay, so it’s a business unit.

Mark Cole:
And so Jared was instructing me because I made a very bad business deal this week. I made a deal so bad that we may have to pay somebody to move books for us. Okay. And so Jared was kind of breaking down the intelligence that we’ve now put into our business model on book. And Jared said, don’t you think that’s smart? And I went, I do. He said, don’t you think we’re wiser now? And I went, no. And I said, there’s a difference in this particular case, and I believe this is true across the there’s a difference in doing something smart and doing something wise. We’re doing something smart in putting weight and putting additional cost factors into every book unit that we sell.

Mark Cole:
But we’re not wise with it yet because we have not done it enough. It goes back to, how have I, your question, how have I become more intelligent? It’s experience, not just thinking. And often we go, oh, man, let’s think, let’s think, let’s think. And we paralyze ourself from acting by thinking when it really takes both. So I cut on all of us leaders that have the propensity to act without thinking. Right? There’s also the leader that thinks without acting. It really does take both for us to have wisdom, you’ve got to put things into practice. And I told Jared, I said, Jared, this is smart.

Mark Cole:
This is the best we have now. But I guarantee you half of these metrics will change 69, 12, 18 months from now, because then we’ll be wise. But I was just plain dumb. I wasn’t smart or wise in the book deal that I just established. Right? The other thing that came to mind, Chris. So this idea of finding time to think, just recently I had one of the biggest decisions that I’ve had to make as an owner just recently, and I’m sitting here going, I don’t know how much of this to give to frame it for our podcast family. Here’s the well frame. You know, there’s decisions and then there’s big decisions, right? Every leader has a big decision every day, or you’re not leading very effectively, or you’re not leading very much.

Mark Cole:
One of the two. So big decisions come all the time. But then there are the decisions that truly have the ability to shape the trajectory instantly of what you’re leading. I was facing one of those moments, and so I just determined my schedule had changed. I had gotten some travel off my back, and I was sitting at home and I went, you know what? The next day, I’m going to give me the gift of thinking, since I got a gift of time back. And I spent the entire day thinking on this decision. And I wish I could tell you after a day that I nailed it. I did it.

Mark Cole:
I needed another day. But I got so far with that first day that in the middle of the second day, just like a light from the heavens just shined down and gave great clarity. And my point in even illustrating that is to tell you you’re not thinking enough. You’re not putting intelligence and thinking into your leadership enough. Leaders. I promise you again, I toy and balance the barrier that some of us have, that we have thinking paralysis. We paralyze ourselves. And if that’s, you don’t even listen to this segment.

Mark Cole:
But for those of you that are acting, acting, acting and getting the same results, or less than results, or not coming up with the conclusions you need to, I’ll go ahead and tell you. As a leader, you have got to have think time. John wrote a book, how successful people think. It is a derivative off of another book he wrote, thinking for a change. And those two books truly has begun shaping my leadership. Now, I got one more little quick illustration.

Chris Goede:
That’s good.

Mark Cole:
Great friend of ours, Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta, he’s on our board. He said, the greatest difference I’ve shared with this on the podcast before, the greatest difference between being the CEO of Delta Airlines and the president of airlines is how much time he has to think about the future rather than execute in the present. And for those of you that are the CEO of your life, the CEO of your company, the CEO of your team, you need to spend more think time thinking on the future and not do only planning or acting in the present. If you’re not putting both of them together, you’re not leading effectively.

Chris Goede:
I hope all of you caught what Mark just said, because in a quick second right there, he said, the CEO of your life. So maybe you’re listening to him and you checked out and you go, I don’t have to make big decisions. I don’t know about that. The CEO of your life is what you said. I don’t even think you realize you said it. That means that every single one of us need to do this. Let me go back to just a couple of things and we’ll move on to the next point. First of all, you were talking about that book deal that you made.

Chris Goede:
This is why we skipped over number one in this trade of passion, because I didn’t really want Mark to share, because Mark has got a lot of passion. And I guarantee you that decision was made from the trait of passion which we talked to mark about often. But that’s okay. We’ll deal with that at another time. But I do want to come back to this because those examples were fantastic. And I got to hear some of the results of your thinking time, which would have only come from the thinking time, the substance of which you shared with me. Some of the revelations came from that I want to encourage everybody because I think you need different things to help you launch into thinking time, where you have to have some data, you have to have some context of what you want to do to then just go think. That’s how it works for me.

Chris Goede:
Others of you can get in and just say, I need to just think on the business, and your mind will go there. I want you guys to be in a place to where this is so important to you as leaders, CEO of your life, that you prepare yourself going into that thinking time like Mark did so that he could come out with a result that was better for not only the CEO of Mark.

Mark Cole:
Let me say one more thing, too, Chris. If you think about it, and you’ve been walking this journey with me, it’s been two and a half months of the exact same place in this decision. I couldn’t give even any updates. There’s no new updates. What’s happened to me, Chris? And for many of you leaders, if you’re stuck with something you know you need to make a decision on and you can’t make the decision, there may be a chance that the busyness of your life, you think you’re thinking about it, but you’re really not stopping everything and going deep within yourself and doing that. Because I’ve been traveling, like, unbelievable the last two months, so I have no thinking time. I’m on a plane, but I’m not really thinking. This was carving out and just saying, I am going to tackle and wrestle this thing to the ground this day.

Mark Cole:
It didn’t happen that day. You know what I did? I changed my schedule the second day. That challenge should stick with a lot of us that are, have been waiting a long time to make a critical decision in your life or your leadership, and you seem to be stuck. I’m going to challenge you. What would a day of just thinking through that do for you?

Chris Goede:
No doubt. I love that. And I want to encourage everybody, you need to be doing this on a weekly basis. You need to. You need to. And I feel, um, maybe not as integra saying this, because I put it on my calendar, and then I allow things to get in the way of that, and I go, oh, just. I’ll put that meeting there instead of think time, man. You got to protect that for.

Chris Goede:
For daily things as well as, as big decisions. I want to state right here on this point number two, because what I love, and John is brilliant at this. He’s a brilliant thinker, but he’s brilliant at taking the complex and making it very simple. We started off by saying these ten are simple. That’s why you and I are still here. And. And he talked about, hey, let’s put the cookies on the bottom shelf. And in order to do that, you have to take that intelligence that the results of that thinking, and then you have got to communicate if to your family, to your community, or to your team in a way that they can pick it up.

Chris Goede:
And it gives you four things there are so important. And I think I saw you live that out after your thinking time on this decision, and it immediately made me think of something that I’ve seen you model as a leader in team settings that I think is brilliant. I’ve started using it now, too, because we got to make sure that we’re communicating what’s in here, which may be a little bit more complex than where your team is or your family or your daughter, whatever it might be. And you ask this question, which also makes me pay attention, which sometimes I will zone out in meetings a little bit more. I go, Mark will go around, and he’ll be like, Chris, what’d you just hear me say? And if I can’t articulate it back in the way that he wanted me to hear that, then he will make it even simpler. And he goes around the room and does that just talk real quickly about the power of that question for you as a leader when you’re leading the team of people so that you know what’s in your mind and what you’ve been thinking on has been able to be received clearly from the team.

Mark Cole:
Yeah. It goes back to you making the point that intelligence comes with experience. It doesn’t just come with revelation. It comes with tested, tried experience. So, uh, first two years, 2020, 2021, I’m giving all of this vision to people, and then I’m going back to John and saying, john, I just nailed it. And John would get feedback from others saying, man, Mark, I heard your meeting today was incredible. And I’d say, yeah. And six weeks later, I’d go, John, they’re not doing anything that I said in that meeting.

Mark Cole:
And John said, let me tell you something. You’re communicating to get it off of your heart, not to get it into the heart of your team. And he said, you’re only going to know if it is captured when you hear how it has been received. And so in mid 2020, mid 2021, I started asking that question, and it was born out of frustration that I had just had this powerful meeting. Everybody’s slapping me on the back. Basically. They’re carrying me out of the boardroom on shoulder saying, man, that was powerful. Championship.

Mark Cole:
And then six weeks later, I’d go, no, it wasn’t a championship, because nobody’s repeating it. I started asking that question. Here’s what I found out, gang, you guys already know this. It was a revelation to me. Go around any organization, many times you’ll say, hey, what’s the values of the organization? What’s the vision of the organization? What’s the mission of the organization? And depending on how many people’s in the room, add one and you’ll probably get that many different answers right there. Two, people will say, well, I think it’s either this or this. And by the way, I have more examples of what it is than I even have people in the room. It’s true.

Mark Cole:
When you cast vision and you give direction in a meeting to people, hear things from their frame of reference, from their perspective, from their load, from the problems they’re trying to solve. Therefore, it’s not that they weren’t listening. It’s not that they were not paying attention. They were paying attention from their perspective, not necessarily the leader’s perspective.

Chris Goede:
Got it.

Mark Cole:
So going around and having people repeat it does two things for me. One, it does give me a sense of did the message stick? The second thing it does is it lets me know the frame of reference of the people in the room where I can come along and maybe do some one on ones to help them a little bit more. And the payoff of that was incredible. I did it at first because I was frustrated. I did it to make sure they now could be repeaters, because leaders are repeaters. I now do it to see if they’re repeating it, but also to see what their perception is.

Chris Goede:
That is so good. And so it’s just one way that Mark’s using as a leader that came out of frustration, but now has been such a incredible asset to his leadership when it comes to the intelligence that he has from the experience, the way he’s thought through things. But then what’s really important is, as John talked about, how do you get that to your team? Okay, we were just going to spend two minutes on that, but we just spent 20. And Jake’s already telling us to end the podcast. But let me move on. The 9th one that John mentioned in here, he talks about positive speed and he talks about positive attitude. Again, this is simple, yet hard to do. We’ve seen a guy model it through all kinds of things.

Chris Goede:
You’ve sat shotgun on that entire ride. What we know is that leadership is hard. It doesn’t matter what you’re leading, it doesn’t matter who you’re influencing. It is hard and it is going to be tough and you’re going to fail. And things are just not going to go that the way you want. You’re going to. You’re going to learn from them. You’re going to be embarrassed from them.

Chris Goede:
But, man, you have to have a positive bent. I know for me personally is that when I get around negative people, I remove myself. I shut down. Because, again, osmosis. Being in this world and this trade, I know what John believes from a leadership trait of successful people. So I just have very little tolerance for it. That’s not right or wrong. It’s just, it’s just how I respond.

Chris Goede:
You, on the other hand, 100% are on that positive side all the time. Right? And it’s made a difference in your leadership. And leadership is hard. And you and John have had to walk through some hard things. Why is this, why is that trait so important to you to continue to model as you carry this mantle? For John and Maxwell, leadership going forward as a. An important trait of leadership?

Mark Cole:
Well, the thing that sticks out to me on this is positive and speed. So leaders, by default, needs to be some of the fastest people in the room, right. If everybody else comes to a conclusion before you do, there’s a chance you’re not the leader. So you need to have a speed. There is a speed. There is a sense of being ahead of others. There’s a sense of responsibility in every leader to have speed quicker than other people. What we don’t realize sometimes it’s got to be positive speed and not just positive mental attitude.

Mark Cole:
That’s great. That’s good, but it’s got to be movement in the right direction. I love when John says the organization he used to be a part of, their idea of progress was moving backwards slowly. Right. I’ve seen a lot of leaders have a lot of speed. They’re just going in the wrong direction. It’s not positive in the sense of. Yes, positive mindset, but it’s nothing in the right direction.

Mark Cole:
And as I listen to John teach this, and as I hear you talk to me, I think we as leaders have to really make sure that not only is our attitude, does our attitude matter, yes, but the direction that we’re creating momentum in matters, too. And oftentimes we get people on the wrong road, but because we’re moving, we identify it as progress. And really it’s regress, it’s regression. And you’re going to have to make up speed. Make up time for that. The pace of the team is set by the leader, and the mindset of the team is set by the leader. And leaders, I can’t challenge you enough to be positive. I mean, Chris, what I get from your people all the time, the people that call you your direct report, they’re God’s people and our people.

Mark Cole:
But the people that you directly lead is how positive, how encouraging, how their sense of belief heightens when they have interaction with you. Every person, your leading leader, wants to feel better from having an interaction with you than worse.

Chris Goede:
Yeah. Yeah. And what I love about this is that I’ve never seen somebody accept a negative situation, a negative decision. Learn from it. Like you said, learn from it, reflect on it. But then it is just like it never even happened. And I know we’re not gonna get into it. Cause Marcus shared this on the podcast before.

Chris Goede:
Or millions of dollars of mistakes we’ve made.

Mark Cole:
Absolutely.

Chris Goede:
And we’re like. We’re carrying it. And John’s like, hey, let’s get going to lunch. Let’s. What are you talking about? And I want to just pick on one thing you said before we move on to the last point, and then I’ll. I’ll let you close up. Momentum can go either way. And Jon talks about how momentum is a leader’s best friend when it is in the positive direction, and that you’re doing that with great speed.

Chris Goede:
So I love that you brought that out right there. Okay. The last one I want to talk about, this is something that. It just really struck me, and I don’t want to get away from this time without our listeners and viewers on YouTube actually hearing from your heart on this, where John says, man, this is a trait you have to have. Focus on doing the right things. Right. Here’s what I wrote out next to it, and I told you before we got started, I want you to just talk a little bit about this, because I think this is a direct reflection on the people believing in the leader and also the leader believing in the people. I wrote do right versus being right.

Chris Goede:
And I think there are too many leaders out there, even myself included. Look at certain times where I’m like, oh, no. And I’m competitive as they get. I may be a little bit more reserved, but deep down inside, I’m like, I’m gonna. I’m gonna be right. You start looking at that, and you go, man, that is not the right trade as a leader. We want to make sure we do right. And I said to Mark, and then I want to throw it to you and you can wrap us up with after your thoughts.

Chris Goede:
I said to him, I said, matter of fact, sometimes I’ve challenged Mark and said, oh, man, I don’t know how you did that, because not only did he do the right thing, but he did the right thing twofold. And I actually sometimes feel very convicted because I’m in the. In the behind the scenes telling Mark, don’t. Don’t do that right, don’t ex whatever. And then I find out he doesn’t come tell me. I find out from somebody else that he did it, and then, in the long run, 100%, that was the right thing to do. So, talk about that trait in you as a leader and why you err on the side of doing right versus being right at times.

Mark Cole:
Yeah, I do better. I do this okay. In some areas, and I really have to work on it others. There’s just such a competitiveness in me, Chris, that man, I want to be right. I want to win the argument. And there’s probably no place that I’m more convicted, as you ask me that, than at home. I just so want to be right with my strong willed, competitive wife, and I just got to quit. I got to work on this, try to talk about how I do it, but right now, I feel real convicted about not doing it.

Mark Cole:
So let me.

Chris Goede:
I’m glad you didn’t ask me the question. I got to ask you the question.

Mark Cole:
Let me get through this. Here’s the best way to illustrate it. As soon as this podcast is over today, the recording of it, I’ve got to go make something right. We have totally missed it. We promised something, couldn’t deliver on the promise, changed it, forgot to tell the people who it was going to be impacted, and then today shows up, I got to go make that right. So I not only have to make right that we promised something we couldn’t deliver on, I now have to make it make sense to people that feel very violated that’s going to affect them, and they feel violated that they heard it from somebody else other than us. And it’s one of the hardest types of meetings to walk into. Not to say I’m wrong, but to say I promised something and I’m wrong.

Mark Cole:
And by the way, I didn’t come tell you about it. You heard about it from somebody else. Now, can I apologize about 14 times in one time and make everybody right? It’s a very hard environment to get into. I think that when you try to get it right, it’s a heart issue. It’s a motive issue. It’s not a perfection issue. We’re human. We made a business decision six months ago.

Mark Cole:
It was not the right decision. The team came to me and said it wasn’t the right decision. I said, okay, let’s go. Let’s go try to fix the decision, and it’s going to impact people. I know, I got it. But then oftentimes what happens is in life, in business, in leadership, podcast, family, you do your best with what you know today, and you make commitments off of that and you make promises off of that, and you build plans off of that, only to find you can’t execute, you can’t deliver. If God will help me, and you all know I have a faith reference, and I need the Lord to help me. If God will help me and my heart can help be shown today, we’re going to get through this.

Mark Cole:
Yeah, because the heart, this is not a matter of the heart. This was a matter of the head and making a decision that I couldn’t see the full picture. And then we go and we have to make it. I have found, not every time, that when you have a right or wrong issue and you go inside yourself and check your heart and you find a motive that is pure, you have to vulnerably show that motive and be willing for people not to agree with that heart and agree with that decision. But nine times out of ten, and I promise you, it’s that high. Nine times out of ten, when you go in and realize the motive part, and you will vulnerably do that, take responsibility for the wrong. Nine times out of ten, you will get through it, and things will eventually get better. But the alternative is to not do it at all, not take responsibility for it.

Mark Cole:
And then that’s just try to be one out of ten times, you’re going to be okay with that. So here’s what I want to do. I want two things to challenge you with today as we kind of wrap up the podcast. First, I want you to go to the website, and I want you to go to the show notes, and I want you to download the bonus resource, because here’s what I want you to do. I think John has given us ten categories to work on to be better leaders today. I think. I think, absolutely, you could spend the next month with these ten things that John gives you that’s listed in the show notes, that’s listed in the bonus resource, and you can begin working on a game plan to improve your effectiveness as a leader. I want you to do that.

Mark Cole:
That’s first and foremost. If you do nothing else, I want you to go and I want you to rank yourself. Rate yourself. Hey, where am I on passion? Where am I on thinking? And I want you to just go through that and begin to work on that. The second thing that I want you to do is I want you to help me carry the message of high road leadership. We are in a year right now. Some of you listening are watching social media, you’re watching news channels, and you’re going, what happened to leadership? It’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed when my daughter asks me about things she sees in media about leadership.

Mark Cole:
I want you to help me carry the message of high road leadership. What is high road leadership? It’s a book that John wrote. It’s a culture map for teams and organizations and for you to get better at yourself being a high road leader. We’ve created a digital product on high road leadership. We’re going to make it available to you for $199 as a podcast listener. It’s normally dollar 299. I want you to go and I want you to begin developing that and applying it to your leadership. It will make a difference.

Mark Cole:
I love what Salem said to us, that Salem listened to the podcast. Four qualities of a team player. We’ll put that in the show notes. Go listen to that. Salem, thank you for what you said. He wrote it to us. Chris said. Thank you, Mark and Chris, for the podcast discussion on four qualities of a team player.

Mark Cole:
It was very insightful. How to enlarge your team by enlarging yourself. That was the point, Salem. That’s the point for you. That’s the point of this podcast. Go be a high road leader. Everyone deserves to be led well.

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