Significant Leadership Seminar '14 - Saturday

This morning I have been given an interesting task. And after last evening and you can see that there are moments in different people that you speak with that you have to alter the way that you choose to approach them. In this particular venue I stand in a place where I need to proceed. To me not only one of the greatest communicators that are alive in the world today, but also someone that you respect and anyone that you respect, you always must walk timidly before their arrival to the platform. Last night I decided to change what I was going to talk to you about today. And so at 3:30 this morning I was then attempting to alter the direction of our time together. So let's see how it came out. I want to talk to you this morning on the topic of the seven leaders or seven reasons why leaders fail. 77 years ago in his book Think and Grow Rich Napoleon Hill talked about the attributes of a successful leader. These attributes are little different than they are today. Even when all the technology and with all the things that we do new and the newly discovered brain and emotional sciences principles are more timeless than ever. Here are these attributes. Number one, knowledge about their work. Two, self control. And they remain calm under pressure. That no matter how much pressure that a leader goes through that this pressure that they have will not overcome them. They are able to remain calm under pressure. And if you don't have my notes, you can download them this morning. Once again, like Justin had mentioned, number three. A leader has a sense of justice. They have a sense of fairness. And leaders have a respect for others. They respect other individuals no matter what challenges that they face with them. Respect is a line that is never crossed. Number four. Leaders stand by their decisions. They make a decision and they hold to their decisions. There is something that my dad said in years gone by. He said that when you make a decision or leaders do you know failures and successes. There are those who will make decisions quickly and change them rarely. There are those that will make them slowly and change them often. You must beware of being able to stand by your decisions. Number five is that they have organization and planning skills. A person who is a leader needs to possess organizational and planning skills as well. Number six, A leader will always have strong work ethics. They are always an example. They always have people follow them in their working. As I was going through just the thoughts of this particular weekend, I began to see and understand that people don't bear the same work ethic. They wonder why it is that they can't get where they want to go. Why it is that. That it doesn't seem as though that they can achieve the things that they desire to achieve. And truthfully, it's almost very simple, if not touching the borders of simplistic. They just don't bear the work ethic that they need in order to get where they want to go. Number seven is their neatness and their hygiene. One of the worst things that we're facing right now in the professional world as well as in the private world or in the religious quadrant of our lives, is we're facing a lack of hygiene and we're also facing sloppiness. You know, you can wear jeans, and those jeans can be $700, but unless what you do is that you choose to put yourself into them, to put yourself into the clothes that you wear and carry yourself well, you cannot succeed. I remember when my father and I were in Sophia together. I was to meet he and Robina this after one afternoon in the lobby of our hotel. And when we finally. When we finally came together, he said, oh, I knew it was you. I said, you knew it was me? He said, yes, I saw you walking on the street. He said, well, I couldn't see that it was you. He said, but when I saw the way that you carried yourself, I knew that it was you that was walking down the street. Because you don't put something on in front of people. It's the way that you live. It's the way you carry yourself. It's what you do. Because remember this and never forget it as a leader and a successful business person, is that a man is what he does. A man is not what he instructs. You will always discover the truth of a person's life. As I was preparing for this, I got the opportunity to read one of the greatest lectures on leadership of all time. It was a military lecture, and what it did was it talked about how that ultimately the people who follow you will find out about what is inside you. A man cannot escape what lives within. And then number eight of leadership was they have empathy. Well, what really is empathy, because you have sympathy, empathy and apathy. And they all mean different things. But the word empathy is interesting because it means the ability to share the feelings of others, to be able to share their feelings. Number nine, which I believe should be number one, and we'll talk about that in a moment, is to be detail oriented, to have an orientation of being detailed. And I'll tell you what that means. Number 10 is a person must have accountability. Deed not just in word. Now, here it was that 77 years ago a man wrote these words. But even with all of those wonderful things, I feel that what now has occurred and Kenneth Copeland and I spoke about this last night, is somewhat at length. But I feel that what has happened has been, is that we have spent so much time telling people what it means to be a success. We have never told them the things that they must avoid in order to get there. Many people believe that you can continue to do right things and then right things will happen, but that's not necessarily true. You can do right things all day long, you can keep pouring gold in your pocket, but if there's a hole in the bottom, it doesn't really matter because it's all going to go out on the street and someone else ultimately will pick it up. For me, in my life, there are moments when I have to know what not to do, not just what to do. So what are the reasons why? I want to tell you about seven reasons why leaders, business owners fail. Number one is this. They lack detail orientation. What does it mean to have detail orientation? They're not familiar with what is going on. A true leader, a real leader, a business leader, a business owner should be able to go into any area of the business which they own and to be able to at least compete, if not exceed, every person that they have working in every one of those areas. If in fact that you are going to be a person that is respected, a person that is going to be followed, a person that's actually going to be able to stay out in front, then you have to know what other people know. I've discovered that what happens is that a lot of times people very well meaning, but sometimes they don't really know how to tell you the truth. And if you don't know the details of what's going on, then you'll never really be able to know what's happening. They lack detail orientation. They lack the ability to be able to know what is happening. No genuine leader, friends, is ever too busy to do anything that may be required of him in his capacity. When a man admits or a woman admits that they are too busy to change their plans or give attention to any emergency, they admit their inability to lead. The successful leader must be the master of all details that are connected with his position. They must master the details. Remember this, we have this saying that says the devil is where he's in the details. Believe me, he lives there. Actually he lives everywhere. But he seems to to have his most success in details. Because there are small things that people underlook but overlook. But remember this. Small hinges swing huge doors. Small hinges will always swing huge doors. Number two. The second reason why that leaders fail is their unwillingness to work alongside those below them. What happens is many times is that people begin to believe that they've become somebody. And because they believe they've become somebody, what happens is that they're the individual, they're the suit that walks down the corridors, they're the person that will walk through the factory or the manufacturing plant. And everybody knows exactly who they are. But if truth be told, they're unwilling to be able to do the work that the entry level employee is willing to do. And in so doing that we need to remember, we need to know how to do that as well as the person that's there. Back when I used to have a job a long, long time ago in a far, far away place, one of the things that I had chosen to do was I had chosen to be what was called a swing driver. A swing driver was someone that was actually trusted to be able to go into other areas of responsibility and other people's areas of responsibility. And you didn't need a babysitter. And so as I would go from place to place, geography to geography, it would take me one day to actually equal the person that was there all the time. But by the second day, I was able to exceed their performance. And so management and ownership was always looking to me to find out whether or not that someone was really doing their job. You see, I must always be willing to work alongside those who are even at entry level positions. Now that's not where I need to live. Because what happens is, is that if you spend so much time with the entry positions, you'll never really be able to become the leader that you desire to be. But there are many people, friends, that are just unwilling to work at those areas of life. You see, when a person comes to the place of being unwilling to do that, failure will begin to set in. Because great leaders are always willing to perform any sort of labor which they would ask another to perform. If I ever ask you to do anything, if you ever ask an employee, if you ever ask a co worker or a fellow laborer in what you do to do something, remember that you need to be willing to do it just as well. As a leader, we must always be willing to help out. You see, no business owner or leader can be truly successful if they ask more of others than they're willing to ask of themselves. A person is not a leader if you view them consistently. Downloading responsibilities to junior staff. If a person is consistently downloading things and putting things off to other people because they there are people, and delegation is a great thing, and delegation must be done, of course. But if you find a person delegating things that they must do themselves, you've just discovered that that person is not the leader. The leader is probably the person that they delegated it to. Number three, what is the third thing that cause leaders to fail? Is wanting to be rewarded for what they know instead of what they accomplish. We have just been around this in America over the last 20 years. There's been a huge outbreak of people wanting to be rewarded for what they know. They're not wanting to be rewarded for what they do. What people don't understand, what people don't understand in business is this, is that you cannot be rewarded for what you know until what you do creates money. If what you know doesn't create a green bottom line, then you can't be rewarded. Because all we're doing is giving useless tidbits of information to people that do actually nothing with it. So how important is it for us to be able to take the knowledge and create productivity out of the knowledge that we have? Why leaders fail is because there are many people that know many things. There are individuals in here that you have absolutely no education and you're tremendously successful. And then there are those in this room that are tremendously, tremendously educated, but very much unsuccessful. The difference is, once again is in what a person does, it's not in what a person knows. Number four. The fourth reason why leaders fail is because of intemperance. I searched for a word to not use this one, but came up shy. And the reason why I came up shy is because there's no other word that takes the place of intemperance. Take a look and see what it is. Intemperance just means the lack of moderation or restraint in any kind of pleasure. Their inability to be able to exercise restraint. It's something that you see, and when you see it, you want it. And when you want it, you take it. But when you take it, you don't think about the consequences that you'll create in at least 200 people's lives directly. For every decision that you make statistically, friends, please understand that every decision you make will touch at least 223 people's lives directly, not even indirectly, but directly touching people's lives. Intemperance is one of the things, it's one of the pleasures. It's Something that attacks us after we have achieved a bit. When we've achieved a little bit, we think, hey, let's slow down, okay, let's smell the roses. Let's just have a cup of latte. Let's just kind of think that, you know, let's sit back for a while. We've really need. We really need to chill. Because at the moment that you think you really need to chill is the moment that you are at the most dangerous place in your life. That is the reason why that I mentioned last night. It is important to do what you love, but it is much more important to love what you do. Because love can be chosen. You can choose. Because a successful leader lives his life by duty, not by desire. I live by duty. I do what I must. Somebody said, what do you want to do? And I come up with an absolute blank. I have no, no environment to even think of that about what it is that I want to do. Because I'm doing what I must. I'm doing. Because remember, friends, the answers to your life and the fulfillment of your life is in meeting the needs of others, not in trying to be able to meet your own. When you help other individuals fulfill their dreams, when you help other people to pay their bills, when you help others to take care of their family, to pay their taxes, to do things with their lives financially because you've been able to get them to focus. When you're able to do that, you then can be happy over your productivity. But if your productivity is only based upon you being able to do more, have more, and be more, and look like you're more in front of everyone else, you'll be sadly disappointed in a number of years. At first it works because we have to be able to get ourselves out from underneath the pressures that we have when we first begin to make some money. Pressures like, my bills aren't paid. Pressures like, I don't have a very nice car, I don't have a very nice house. My wardrobe is really kind of, you know, it lacks attention at best. And because of that, what we need to do is that we need to bring ourselves up to the place, to where we have achieved. Understand this about excellence, because every one of us wants excellence in our business. Excellence. Friends, a man or a woman of excellence will always bring their environment up to the level at which they live. We bring our environments up to the level that we live. Why? Because the worst thing for any leader to really focus on or have to see all the time is that it's very difficult for me to look at need and walk away and say, I have no responsibility to it. So every leader must raise their environment up to a place where they feel good about giving people another opportunity. Because the greatest person that you will ever meet in your entire life, friends, is a person who gives you an opportunity. It is those individuals that you embrace and those also that you never let go of. But in the arena of intemperance, intemperance is the lack of moderation or restraints in any kinds of pleasures, no matter how that you want to define those pleasures, whether they be in food. There are people who overeat. One of the greatest Christian sins is eating. They just eat. They don't have. They don't go around. They don't get sloppy drunk and fall down. All of us realize after a couple times of sloppy drunk and falling down, that person is probably going to have to have a software upgrade. We realize that, but how many people do we ever really talk to about how much they eat? It's just that you're sitting at the table and you're looking at them and you're thinking, what's up with that? Because they're hungry. But we don't talk to people about that. But that's intemperance. It doesn't have to do with just, you know, drinking and drugs and sex. It doesn't really have to do with all of that. Intemperance is a place where what. What happens is, is that an individual lives life in any area with no borders. That's intemperance. The Bible calls it in the fruit of the Spirit. In Galatians, chapter 5, verse 23, it calls it self control. Because the greatest enemy that you will ever face in your entire life is not difficult business times. The greatest enemy you'll ever face, you knew them many, many years ago. They actually live inside your bathroom. They don't live wherever you live. They only live in your bathroom. The moment that you look in the mirror is the moment that you discover the person that has to be controlled. And then number five, the fifth reason why leaders fail is authoritarian leadership. Let me explain this to you because it's really important to know. After having looked at this and studied this and gone around this whole idea, I discovered that one saying became common. And that is when what you do is that you force people to do something that they are not prepared for, ultimately you can't do or keep doing all these things and you will wear out. So authoritarian leadership. Let me read to you what I have written about that because it is so true authoritarian leadership are those who lead through fear and intimidation rather than respect. A manager like this has the idea or a business owner who says I'm the leader and you'll do what I say. There are types of people who live this way. There are marriages in this room that live this way. There's an authoritarian type leadership. But genuine leaders lead friends by encouraging and not instilling fear in the people at work with them. You see you have to make a decision. People certainly do. As a business leader they do work for you. That's really true. But if you really got down to it and were honest with yourself you would be willing to say that they actually work with you. They work with you in your business. Their happiness, their ability to be able to work without the fear of loss is really important. Certainly friends and all of you in here who know my dad you will remember that it is good at times.