5 Things Great Leaders Do | Jack Canfield

Hi there. I'm Jack Canfield. You know, lately I've been speaking a lot about the benefits of becoming an outstanding leader. Now, whether you're climbing the corporate ladder, building a network marketing downline, or working for social change, or even coaching a Little League team or organizing a civic event, knowing how to be an effective leader will make you more successful in any role. Becoming a leader gives you the opportunity to magnify your impact in the world. It allows you to leverage the hearts and actions of others toward the achievement of goals and objectives that you care about. It allows you to produce bigger results faster than you could ever do on your own. And while we're not all destined to become leaders on a level with John F. Kennedy or Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela or Steve Jobs or Mother Teresa, we can all learn to develop our leadership skills for more positive impact in our organizations and our local communities. And along the way, we can even transform the lives of the people we lead. We can help them grow, expand, and improve. We can help them cope better, think bigger, and become more confident. Growing people is what transformational leaders do every single day. And there are really five qualities that I think elevate someone to the significance of a great leader. Let's take a look at those. The first is that a great leader is open to feedback. A great leader isn't afraid of hearing the truth. In fact, great leaders proactively seek out feedback from their team, their peers, the marketplace, their customers, in whatever form those individuals might be. They don't argue with the feedback or get angry. They just take it in as information. Next, a great leader creates a safe space for people to voice their ideas, their concerns, their solutions, and their feedback. Nothing should be off the table. In fact, listening without prejudice is probably the greatest skill of a leader. It's how new ideas get heard and gain traction. It's how new products are invented, new methods are developed, and innovative solutions become mainstream solutions. So listening well is the third quality of a top leader. So what's number four? True leaders understand that they have the opportunity and the ability to respond differently to every situation. When events rise, whether they're good or bad, leaders see these events as neutral, but they see their response to the event as crucial. Good leaders know that the way they respond can save a situation or it can make it worse. They can turn a negative event into an opportunity for positive change. They can turn mistakes into teachable moments for their team. And they can use sensible responses as examples that transform their team members into smarter, more innovative and more collaborative participants. In reaching that goal. Mary Parker Follett, who was a pioneer in organizational theory of behavior, once said that the most essential work of the leader is to create more leaders. Now think about that. You have the ability to create more leaders. Which brings me to my fifth quality of great leaders. They transform individual team members into people with leadership qualities and who can take on greater responsibility and begin leading key aspects of a project, a business or an initiative. Now the world is getting ever more complicated and as a leader you'll face increasing levels of uncertainty and complexity. That's just how the world's working right now. You can't possibly know or control everything. So one way to overcome this is to coach your people to take a leadership role in their part of the project that you're working on. So growing people is something we in the transformational and human potential field have been doing for decades. And over the past few years, I've worked with a number of emerging leaders to hone their skills and give them the tools and the training they need to transform team members into smart, motivated, responsible and forward thinking people who are focused and driven to achieve goals in their organization. And for 40 years, I've been refining something we call the Canfield Methodology, a combination of personal transformation exercises and success skills that we've brought to literally millions of people in hundreds of countries. And I'm now helping to develop the next generation of conscious leaders who are skilled not just meeting organizational goals, but also at growing the next generation of leaders and innovators for their organization. So I'd like you to take a moment to consider this. Do you have what it takes to become a transformational leader? Is your leadership career something you and I should be working on together? Let's find out through a unique and free leadership quiz that I've developed for you. It's instantly downloadable, so check it out now and see where you could take your career as a leader of the future. So thanks again for watching and remember, nothing will change for the better until you do. Now, if you found this video helpful, make sure you like it, share it with a friend who may need it, and subscribe to my channel for more videos like this one, and for some additional resources on how to develop your human potential, visit my website at jackcampfield. Com.