Chad Silverstein argues the best leaders hold themselves to higher standards instead of being hard on others. He offers a test: would you accept the treatment you give? Watch how your presence shifts the room's culture.
Chapters
One of my favorite things about Build to Lead, especially working with Chet, is that he never asked me to do anything that he wasn't doing himself or that he hasn't already done. And most leaders are really good at telling other people what to do or what they should do, and they're not doing it themselves. But the best leaders are always going to be harder on themselves, and the worst leaders are just hard on the people around them. Power and being in a position of authority does that to people. It gives them a green light to treat people a certain way that they wouldn't even treat themselves. And again, I always talk about that litmus test because you got to ask yourself if you'd be willing to work for yourself. If you think about your interactions over the past 30 days, the past couple days, you know, if someone was with you the way that you've been with other people, and they were acting and spoke to you the way that you've spoken to others, how would you feel? Just take an honest assessment of wherever you're at with your relationships with people. How's your culture, your 20ft around you? Do people like to come in for a closer look and you're attracting people, or are people staying far away? When you walk into a room, how much of the vibe do you change? Is it negative? When you walk through your office, you jump onto a zoom meeting. Is the vibe positive? People smiling tune into it says a lot about your leadership skills. It says a lot about who you are as a person, the way you make people feel. And hopefully you'll do what the built the lead leader is doing, which is going to be hard on themselves, which again, is very attractive to the people they're leading because they see that they're doing the hard work. And then it gives you the green light to be able to call other people out because they see you doing it. So make sure that if you're calling other people out, that you call yourself out first. And there's just no way around that ability. Leaders are hard on themselves, not down on themselves.
