21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership

1. The Law of the Lid

Principle: Leadership ability is the lid that determines a person’s level of effectiveness. The lower an individual’s ability to lead, the lower the lid on his potential. The higher the individual’s ability to lead, the higher the lid on his potential.

• Paradigm: Your leadership ability is the bottleneck to your self improvement
  
• Practice
  • Growth is the only way you can lift off the lid of your life.
  • Pride gets in your way to improve as a human being, stay humble, never be afraid of admitting your shortcomings, and improve yourself!
  • The question is not whether or not you have lids, the question is what are you going to do about it?
  • Seek mentor figures that can help you lift your lids
  • As you try to continually lift the lids of your life, aim to be lid-lifters, people who help lift the lid of others

2. The Law of Influence

• Principle: Leadership is influence. It cannot be mandated, it must be earned.
  
• Paradigm
  
  Leadership is not…
  a. Leadership is not management. Leadership is about influencing people to follow, while management focuses on maintaining business systems and processes
  b. Leaders are not necessarily entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are people who are skilled at seeing an opportunity and meeting them in a way that produces profit
  c. IQ or education is not necessarily leadership
  d. Leadership is not being a trendsetter. Leaders have people following their lead and acting on his vision e. Leadership is not a position
• Practice
  
  • If you want to find out how good your leadership really is, then try leading volunteers as a volunteer in a nonprofit organization.
    
  • Factors determine the leadership quality of a leader (consider which qualities you need to develop more and create a plan of action)
    a. Character- who they are: true leadership: leadership begins with the inner person
    b. Relationships- who they know: you’re a leader if you have followers and that always requires the development of relationships- the stronger the relationship, the stronger the potential for leadership
    c. Wisdom- What they knowledge & instincts: You need a grasp of the facts, an understanding of dynamic factors and timing, and a vision for the future. 
  • d. Knowledge won’t make a leader, but you can’t be one without it. Leaders seek to recognize and influence intangibles such as energy, morale, timing, and momentum.
    e. Experience- what they’ve done: your track records speak louder than your words. Every time I extended myself, took a risk, and succeeded, followers had another reason to trust my leadership ability—and to listen to what I had to say.
    f. Ability- what they can do: your followers want to know whether you as a leader can lead the team to victory. As soon as they no longer believe you can deliver, they will stop listening and following.
    

3. The Law of Process

• Principle: What matters most in leadership is what you do day by day over the long haul.
  
• Paradigm
  • Successful leaders are learners. Their goal each day is to get a little better, to build on the previous day’s progress
  • 5 Phases of learning
  • I don’t know what I don’t know
  • I know what I need to know
  • I know what I don’t know
  • I know and grow and it starts to show
  • Simply go because of what I know
    
• Practice
  • Have a clear self-improvement plan
  • Provide opportunities for your followers to grow
  • Create a culture of growth

4. The Law of Navigation

• Principle: Leaders need to chart the course of the organization. They see the whole trip in their minds before they leave the dock. They have vision for getting to their destination, they understand what it will take to get there, they know who they’ll need on the team to be successful, and they recognize the obstacles long before they appear on the horizon.
• Paradigm: Everyone can steer a ship, but leaders chart the course
  
• Practice
  • Before charting the course, consider to:
  • Draw on past experiences: Take time to learn from your experiences through active reflection
  • Examine the conditions before making commitment
  • Gather the right information
  • Ensure your conclusion represent both fact and faith: You’ve got to have faith that you can take your people all the way. If you can’t confidently make the trip in your mind, you’re not going to be able to take it in real life.
  • The following acronym can help you chart a course: Predetermine a course of action. Lay out your goals. Adjust your priorities. Notify key personnel. Allow time for acceptance. Head into action. Expect problems. Always point to the successes. Daily review your plan.
  • Do make it a habit to reflect on your positive and negative experience
    

5. The Law of Addition

• PrincipleThe bottom line in leadership isn’t how far we advance ourselves but how far we advance others. That is achieved by serving others and adding value to their lives.
  
• Paradigm: Are you making things better for people who follow you?
  
• Practice
  1. Care for others- Leaders who add value by serving believe in their people before their people believe in them and serve others before they are served.
  2. Make ourselves more valuable to others: You can’t give what you do not possess. What do you have to give others? Can you teach skills? Can you give opportunities? Can you give insight and perspective gained through experience? None of these things comes without a price.
  3. Know and relate what others values: Listen to their people’s stories. They find out about their hopes and dreams. They become acquainted with their aspirations. And they pay attention to their emotions. From those things, they learn about their people. They discover what is valuable to them. And then they lead based upon what they’ve learned.
  4. Do things that God values: God desires us not only to treat people with respect, but also to actively reach out to them and serve them.
  5. Make adding value part of your lifestyle. Begin with those closest to you. How could you add value to the people on your list related to what they value? Start doing it.

6. The Law of Solid Ground

• Principle: Trust is the foundation of leadership, leaders cannot continually break trust and influence people
  
• Paradigm: 
• Trust is the glue that holds an organization together

• Trust is like change in a leader’s pocket. Each time you make good decisions, you earn more change. Each time you make poor decisions, you pay out some of your change to the people
• You measure how trustworthy you are by how open others are to you
  
• Practice
  • How does a leader build trust? By consistently exemplifying competence, connection and character. Character make trust possible. And trust makes leadership possible. So develop character
  • Character communicates consistency, potential, respect,
  • Focus on integrity, authenticity and discipline. To develop your integrity, make a commitment to yourself to be scrupulously honest. Don’t shave the truth, don’t tell white lies, and don’t fudge numbers. Be truthful even when it hurts. To develop authenticity, be yourself with everyone. Don’t play politics, role play, or pretend to be anything you’re not. To strengthen your discipline, do the right things every day regardless of how you feel.
  • If you have broken trust with others in the past, then your leadership will always suffer until you try to make things right. First, apologize to whomever you have hurt or betrayed. If you can make amends or restitution, then do so. And commit to work at re-earning their trust. The greater the violation, the longer it will take.
    

7. The Law of Respect

• Principle: People naturally follow Leaders who are stronger than themselves
  
• Paradigm: People who are an 8 in leadership (on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the strongest) don’t go out and look for a 6 to follow—they naturally follow a 9 or 10.
  
• Practice
  
  • Grow your leadership ability- All leaders are not created equal, but you can develop your leadership skills
  • Respect others- Good leaders rely on respect. They understand that all leadership is voluntary. When leaders show respect for others—especially for people who have less power or a lower position than theirs—they gain respect from others. And people want to follow people they respect greatly.
  • Courage
  • Success- when leaders led a team to success, they believe they can do it again
  • Loyalty
  • Commitment to add value to others
  • Measure of respect (1) Look at who you attract (2) How your people respond to a change you propose
  • Check how those closest to you respect you
    

8. The Law of Intuition

• Principle: Everyone possesses intuition. They are just intuitive in different areas according to their strength
  
• Paradigm: Who you are is who you see. leaders see with a leadership bias, they can see a group of people and quickly grasp what is going on. They read situation, trends, resources, people dynamics and self quickly
  
• Practice
  • Begin to rely on your intuition, especially in your area of strength. First, determine which is your strongest natural talent. Second, participate in that talent, paying attention to your feelings, instincts, and intuition. When do you know something is “right” before you have evidence? How can you tell when you’re “on”? Do your instincts in this area ever betray you? If so, when and why?
  • Learn to be a reader of people
  • Practice delegation: Who is the best person to take this on? What resources do we possess that can help us? What will this take financially? How can I encourage my team to achieve success?

9. The Law of Magnetism: 

• Principle: Who you are is who you attract
  
• Paradigm: If you have hired staff you will recognize that your staff share the same: generation, attitude, background, values, energy, giftedness, leadership ability
  
• Practice
  
  • If you are dissatisfied with the leadership ability of the people you are attracting, then embrace the Law of Process and work to increase your leadership skill. If you want to grow an organization, grow the leader. If you find the people you attract to be unreliable or untrustworthy, then examine your character.
  • Find mentors to develop your characters
  • On the other hand, you may be saying, I like who I am, and I like the kind of people I attract. That’s great! Now, take the next step in effective leadership. Work at recruiting people who are different from you to staff your weaknesses.
    

10. The Law of Connection

• Principle: Leaders touch the heart before they ask for a hand
  
• Paradigm: People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care
  
• Practice
  
  • Connect with yourself: know who you are, have confidence in yourself Answer each of the following questions: How would I describe my personality? What is my greatest character strength? What is my greatest character weakness? What is my single greatest asset? What is my single greatest deficit? How well do I relate to others (1 to 10)? How well do I communicate with others (1 to 10)? How likable am I (1 to 10)?
    
  • Communicate with openness and sincerity:
    
  • Know your audience: when with individuals, seek to learn what makes them unique, when with an audience, learn about the organization and its goal. What they care about.
    
  • Live your message
    
  • Go where they are: Speak the other person’s language, be attuned to their culture and background and education.
    
  • Focus on them and not yourself
    
  • Believe in them: People’s opinion of us has less to do with what they see in us than it does with what we can help them see in themselves
    
  • Offer direction and hope
    
  • When you are out among your employees or coworkers, make relationship building and connecting a priority.
    

11. The Law of the Inner Circle: 

• Principle: A leader’s potential is determined by those around him.
  
• Paradigm: A leader’s potential is determined by those closest to him. What makes him different is his inner circle. Be aware of this law, and don’t let chance determine your inner circle. Strategize to optimize it
  
• Practice
  
  The following questions will help:
  
  • Do they have high influence with others?- look for influencers
  • Do they bring complementary gift to the table?
  • Do they hold a strategic position in the organization?
  • Do they add value to me and the organization?
  • Do they positively impact other inner circle members?
    
• Effective leaders are continually developing current and future inner circle members. How do they do it?
  
  • They spend extra time with them strategically to mentor them and to develop relationships.
  • They give them extra responsibility and place higher expectations on them.
  • They give them more credit when things go well and hold them accountable when they don’t.
    
• When should you transition to a smaller inner circle, a sort of team within the team?
  
  • When your immediate staff numbers more than seven
  • When you can no longer directly lead everyone
  • In the volunteer world, when others besides paid staff should be in the inner circle
    

12. The Law of Empowerment:: 

• Principle: To lead others well, we must help them to reach their potential. That means being on their side, encouraging them, giving them power, and helping them to succeed.
  
• Paradigm: to keep others down, you have to go down with them. And when you do that, you lose any power to lift others up.
  
• Practice:
  • The main ingredient for empowering others is a firm belief in people. If you believe in others, they will believe in themselves.
  • Be wary of the three barriers to empowerment
  • Desire for job security: remember if you can continually empower others and help them develop so that they become capable of taking over your job, you will become so valuable to the organization that you become indispensable.
  • Resistance to change
  • Lack of self-worth: remember leaders gain authority by giving it away
  • Start by selecting your best people and setting them up for success. Train them, give them resources, and then help them set accomplishable goals that will help you and the organization. Then give them the responsibility and authority to follow through. And if they at first fail, help them keep trying until they succeed.

13. The Law of the Picture:

• Principle: People do what people see. When the leaders show the way with the right actions, their followers copy them and succeed.
  
• Paradigm: the better the leader’s actions, the better their people’s
  
• Practice
  
  • Followers are always watching what you do
  • It’s easier to teach what’s right than do what’s right
  • Work on changing yourselves before changing others
  • The best gift you can give as a leader is to be a good example
    

14: The Law of Buy-In: 

• Principle: People buy into the leader, then the vision
  
• Paradigm: The leader finds the dream and then the people. The people find the leader and then the dream.
  
• Paradigm: Leader + Vision= Result
  
• Practice
  
  • Create a vision statement, make it compelling
  • Appraise how much buy-in you get from your staff
  • Boost your credibility. There are many ways you can do that:
  • By developing a good relationship with them
  • By being honest and authentic and developing trust
  • By holding yourself to high standards and setting a good example
  • By giving them the tools to do their job better
  • By helping them to achieve their personal goals By developing them as leaders

15. The Law of Victory Principle: 

• Principle: Leaders find a way for the team to win. The alternative to winning is unacceptable to them
  
• Paradigm: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road my be; for without victory, there is no survival.”
  
• Paradigm: In their view . . . Leadership is responsible. Losing is unacceptable. Passion is unquenchable. Creativity is essential. Quitting is unthinkable. Commitment is unquestionable. Victory is inevitable.
  
• Practice
  • Three formula for victory
  • unity of vision: a team can’t win if each players have different agenda. Do a little informal research to find out what’s important to your team members. Ask them what they want to achieve personally. And ask them to describe the purpose or mission of the team, department, or organization.
  • diversity of skills: We’re all like parts of the human body. For that body to do its best, it needs all of its parts, each doing its own job. Think about all the skills necessary to achieve your goals. Write them down. Now compare that list with the names of the people on your team. If there are functions or tasks for which no one on the team is suited, you need to add members to the team or train the ones you have.
  • Raise players to their potential: It takes a leader to provide the motivation, empowerment, and direction required to win.
  • The first step in practicing the Law of Victory is taking responsibility for the success of the team, department, or organization you lead. It must become personal. Your commitment must be higher than that of your team members.

16. The Law of Big Mo: 

• Principle: Momentum is a leader’s best friend. If you can’t get things going, you won’t succeed
  
• Paradigm: Momentum is like a magnifying glass, they makes things bigger than they are
  
• Practice
  • Momentum starts from the leader. Have you taken responsibility to start momentum?
  • Remove demotivating elements from your organizations
  • Celebrate your people’s accomplishment

17. The Law of Priorities: 

• Principle: Activity is not necessarily accomplishment, Busyness does not equal productivity
  
• Paradigm: Pareto principle, 20% of your work produce 80% of results; 80% of your problems come from 20% of your sources
  
• Practice
  
  • Remember the 3 R when considering priorities:
  • What is required? What must I do that nobody can or should do for me?
  • What gives the greatest return?
  • What brings the greatest reward?
  • As the leader, have you taken responsibility for prioritizing and thinking ahead for your area of responsibility? Have you carved out specific time on a regular basis to revisit priorities for that area? If not, you need to start doing so immediately.

18. The Law of Sacrifice: 

• Principle: A leader must give up to go up
  

• Paradigm: as you rise in leadership, responsibilities increase and rights decrease
• Paradigm: there is no success without sacrifice
• Paradigm: sacrifice as a leader is an ongoing process, not a one time payment
• Paradigm: the higher the level of leadership, the greater the sacrifice
  
• Practice
  • Know what you can sacrifice and can’t sacrifice as you go up on
  • Be wary of destination disease: the idea that leaders can sacrifice for a season and then arrive.

19. The Law of Timing: 

• Principle: When to lead is as important as what to do and where to go. It can be a difference between success and failure
  
• Paradigm: wrong action + wrong time= disaster right action + wrong time= resistance wrong action + right time = mistake right action + right time = success
  
• Practice
  

• Spend some time analyzing recent failed initiatives for your organization, department, or team to determine whether they were caused by the wrong action or the wrong timing. (These initiatives can be yours or others’.) To help you, answer the following questions:
  
• What was the goal of the initiative?
  Who was the individual responsible for leading it?
  What factors were taken into account while the strategy was planned?
  Whose experience did the strategy draw upon?
  What was the condition or temperature of the organization at the time of the launch? What were the market or industry conditions?
  What “leverage” was available and being used to aid in the initiative?
  What factors were clearly working against it?
  Might the initiative have been more successful had it been launched either earlier or later?
  Why did the initiative ultimately fail?
  
• As you prepare to engage in future plans, use the list of factors from the chapter to prepare for the timing of your actions:
  Understanding: Do you have a firm grasp on the situation?
  Maturity: Are your motives right?
  Confidence: Do you believe in what you are doing?
  Decisiveness: Can you initiate action with confidence and win people’s trust? Experience: Have you drawn upon wisdom from others to inform your strategy?
  Intuition: Have you taken into account intangibles such as momentum and morale? Preparation: Have you done everything you must to set up your team for success?

20. The Law of Explosive Growth: 

• Principle: to grow explosively, find and grow leaders
  
• Paradigm: If you develop yourself, you can experience personal success. If you develop a team, your organization can experience growth. If you develop leaders, your organization can achieve explosive growth.
  
• Practice
  
  • What are you currently doing to find and gather leaders? Are there places you go, events you attend, and networks you plug into to look for potential leaders? If not, start looking for some. If so, then what do you do to connect with leaders and recruit them for your organization, department, or team?
    
  • What are you doing to gather and hold leaders? Are you becoming a better leader so that leaders will want to follow you? Are you trying to create an environment where leaders can thrive and succeed? Are you giving leaders freedom to lead and be innovative? Are you clearing away red tape? Are you providing them with resources and greater responsibilities? Are you praising risk and rewarding success?
    

21. Law of Legacy: 

• Principle: your value as a leader is measured by succession, by the legacy you left
  
• Paradigm: What is your life sentence? (What legacy are you leaving?)
  
• Practice
  • Know the legacy you want to live: Someday people will summarize your life in a single sentence. My advice: pick it now! Take some time to consider the big picture concerning why you lead. This will not be a quick process. The idea of legacy is closely related to a person’s sense of purpose in life. Why are you here? What gifts and skills do you possess that relate to your highest potential as a human being? What unique opportunities do you possess based on your personal circumstances and what’s happening in the world around you? Who might you be able to impact and what might you be able to accomplish as a leader in your lifetime?
    
  • Live your legacy: what must you change in the way you conduct yourself so that you live that legacy?
    
  • Choose who will leave your legacy
    
  • Make sure you pass the baton