A short monologue by Chad Silverstein outlining key characteristics that differentiate great leaders. He emphasizes four core qualities—courage, belief, trust, and willingness to engage conflict—and recommends practical habits (e.g., Dan Sullivan’s "Experience Transformer" one-page exercise) and modeling trust to build longer-term teams. The talk also references Silverstein’s Build to Lead program as an endorsing context.
Chapters
There are so many different ways to define leadership, and there are so many different types of leaders and different positions of leadership. And again, there's no right or wrong, but there are certain common denominators that great leaders have, and it's important that you know what those are if you're going to be striving to become a great leader for the people that you're working with or the people that you eventually one day want to be leading. And I think if you have these characteristics and it's a great foundation for the essentials of being a great leader. And the first is having courage. You know, having courage to walk into hard situations and to be able to take risks. Almost all great leaders have an abundance of courage, and that could be in any area of their life. It's what makes a leader really strong, is they have courage to do things that most normal, average people won't do. It doesn't mean that you have to go start a business. It just means that you have the courage to maybe have that conversation that nobody wants to have or bubble up the elephant in the room that nobody's talking about. You know, it's the ability to take a risk when an opportunity presents itself. And, you know, you usually can do that when you have this belief. And that's the next quality that leaders are believers. They have belief in themselves, they have belief in other people, and that allows them to have that courage because they have this belief, this foundation that, you know, they know what they believe, they know why they believe it, they know why they do what they do, and then they can tap into other people and they can instill belief in other people that they truly believe in. And there's so much incredible transformational relationships that, you know, occur when people have this belief. And so if you have a leader that believes in you, or if you're a leader and you believe in other people, you really want to not take that for granted, because that's a really special quality that leaders. They give that to people, that power of belief. Another thing that leaders do, great and great leaders do, is they trust. And they trust first. You know, they don't have this mindset of, you know, I'll trust when you earn it. You know, it doesn't mean you have to be naive. It doesn't mean that you need to be a doormat and have people walk over you, but you extend that trust. And until someone, you know, breaks it, you know, you want to basically not judge people based on things that may not be correct. And so by trusting People and instilling this belief in people. When you start working with them, you start building trust early and doing things like that early and often have compound interest with the people that you're working with on your team and it will become contagious. And if you model the way and not only trust yourself, but extend the trust to other people, that's a very powerful quality of a leader to be able to do that. It's not easy for a lot of people who've been burned over and over and had a lot of people screwing them over, stealing from them, quitting on them without notice. I mean, there's just a lot of things that happen in business and as a leader you experience that make you a little jaded about trusting people. You know, I remember I used to, I used to lend people money in my company because I had people that had financial hardship. And you know, I get. Some of my closest employees get pissed off because, you know, I'd get screwed over or someone quit and I didn't get paid back and they'd say, why do you do it? You know, and for me, it was simple. I'm not going to change who I am because of that person. They've got to live with themselves, not me. I, I feel good about what I've done. So I trusted them. And occasionally you'll get burned. And that, that is a consequence of being a little bit transparent. Trusting first, but still think it's a better alternative than to not trusting and making people earn it and not being able to build those transformational relationships that really are required if you're going to be a great leader, because otherwise you're going to have turnover that constantly happens. And if you don't create trust and if you don't create an environment where people feel comfortable and know that you believe in them, when you really do, you don't want to fake it. Then you're going to be starting over with new employees every year that you know that, that constant revolving door. And you're basically. It's like starting a new company every year. You want a great company and you want to be a great leader. You need people to stay with you to. You need, you need the time to build trust with them. And that is done over time with consistency with your behaviors, your words, the way you repair with people, the promises that you make, repairing the ones you break and being human, showing them that you're real, that you're not perfect. Extending trust is a really powerful thing that leaders can do. And they also aren't afraid of conflict. If you're a leader, you're most likely avoiding conversations that you should be having with people. You're delaying the inevitable and you're making things worse because everyone around you in your environment is wondering when are they going to talk to this person. Everybody knows that, everybody's thinking it. But as a leader you've got to go step into that. It's a hard thing. You have to build the capacity to just have those conversations and eventually it's like getting out of bed. It's never easy, but it gets easier. And you shouldn't run from those. You should mind those up and bubble them up and then deliver those with the right way of delivering a message, which is again, not stomping on people, making them feel terrible about themselves. It's empowering people and letting them see maybe the mistakes they met, they made and asking them what they can do different so that it doesn't repeat itself over and over. I learned a real powerful tool in Dan Sullivan's Strategic coach program which was called his experience Transformer. And it was a one pager, real simple. And anytime anything happened, I used to pull out the sheet and you would write out what happened, what I could have done different, what I learned from it. And then I would share that with people. Think about that. You know, you have one leader who screws up, makes a mistake, blames other people, complains about it, comes home, they're terror with their family, always in a bad mood. Or someone who takes that obstacle, that challenge, that mistake, that failure and turns it into an experience that they can use as a platform so they never repeat that mistake again, Share it so other people don't and learn from it, look human and build trust. And this is where something like strategic trust comes into play. Because people want to believe in their leaders that wherever you say we're going to go, that they believe that you can take us there. And by having experience, sharing and being able to learn from all the screw ups and being able to empower other people to do the same thing, that's a powerful, powerful thing that leaders can do. Something we strongly encourage people to do at Build to Lead. Because the best leaders do it. They do it. It's rare. And if you have that, you're blessed.
