Short motivational talk by Jim Johnson urging people who lead teams to genuinely care for their team members. He argues that real leaders prioritize their team’s growth and success over personal convenience, and that caring must be shown through actions (coaching, role-modeling, taking calls, encouraging, challenging, and recognizing achievements).
Hey, are you a leader? Are you somebody that has a team that expects a lot out of you? You look at yourself as their leader. You're trying to drive them and get the most out of them, help them reach their potential. If you are or you believe that you are, you should ask yourself a few questions. First off, do the folks that answer to you or work with you in your team, do they do everything they can to meet your expectations? Are they inspired by you? Are they excited about what they do? Do they even like what they do? Are they passionate about what they do? If you can't answer yes to those questions, I'm going to challenge you on your leadership. Because people want to do special things. They genuinely do, and they are looking to people to lead them to accomplish those special things. And real leaders have one thing that sets them apart from everybody else. They actually care. They don't care about themselves, and they don't even really care as much about the business. They care about the folks who are part of their team that they're trying to get the most out of. If you feel like it's a burden to have to talk to your people or explain something for the third or fourth or fifth time, if you feel like, hey, I just can't take another phone call, if you feel like, man, that training is boring, if you feel like you're just tired of having to deal with all the responsibility of being a leader, then you're not a leader. You should want to, you should love to, you should care about it. You should be excited and impassioned about helping the folks that work for you. It's important to have that quality, that caring ability, that you genuinely care more about them and their success than that dinner that you need to go to that night, that video game you want to play, that fishing trip you might want to go on, their success is more important to you than your own success. Their ability to reach their fullest potential is your passion to help them achieve that. You're willing to go on a sales call. If you're a sales leader, you're willing to go to a management meeting. If you're an owner, you're willing to dig in and get in the trenches and not just tell somebody how to do something, but show somebody how to do something and actually do it for them to see an example of what that might look like and then challenge them to do it on their own and then critique them on it, work with them and role play with them on whatever task it is that you're trying to do. Until they get to the point of mastering it. Because you'll get then what all leaders are after. The real reward that they're after is seeing that person that was not confident, low self esteem, didn't have the skill set to be successful at what we do. Having them reach that pinnacle and see that success and accomplish something they never even thought they could accomplish on their own. And you were the factor that made the difference. So if you want to lead people, you've got to genuinely care. Take time today if you're a leader, to figure out how you're going to do that. And that's the real key. How do you care? You can say it till you're blue in the face. That doesn't mean anything. Your actions show whether you care or not. Do you bend over backwards? Do you take that phone call? Do you send that text message? Do you encourage people? Do you inspire them to do great things by challenging them to work outside of their comfort zone and then recognizing when they do great, great things? Challenge yourself today to see if that's who you are as a leader. And if you're not, do everything you can today to shock your team about how much you care for them. Have a good one.
