5 Most Helpful Leadership Lessons - Everyone Has Advice, These Had the Biggest Impact

Hey folks ??, I'm Kenneth Burke. #BurkeBits is where I share stories, data, and frameworks to help you become a better marketer. Subscribe for free to level-up.

I’m not a wise old sage who’s been there, done that, and has a story for everything (maybe one day). But whether it’s been with a club, a board, or a department, I’ve been in many positions of leadership.

I’ve struggled through several of those positions, and these are the 5 leaderships lessons I’ve been taught that have been the most helpful for me (and for the folks I serve).

1. Find vignettes of time.

Some years ago I was in a young professionals mentoring program. The mentor I was paired with was former Chattanooga Mayor and Senator from Tennessee, Bob Corker.

He wouldn’t remember me from Adam, but I got to learn from him in a group setting and then meet with him one-on-one in his office.

A question I asked him—something I was struggling with at the time—was “How do you build relationships with your employees without trying to be their friends?”

He stood up, walked across the room, and picked up a book off the coffee table.

It was a photo album his staffers had put together and gifted him when he left the Senate, and it was filled with personal notes about various moments where he’d made a positive impact on them.

He kept repeating the phrase “find vignettes of time” to ask employees how they’re doing, or about one of their interests, or to say you thought about them. Over time, those vignettes become a professional relationship, often with mutual respect, and often creating a dynamic that leads to better performance from both of you.

So I started doing that, and he was right. It helped tremendously.

Related: 5 Traits the Best Managers Have in Common

2. Most problems aren’t problems.

As a leader, everything comes from you and back to you.

When everything is a shimmering success, this is wonderful. You get all the credit! When anything is less than ideal, it’s a terror. You get all the blame, and it becomes your responsibility to fix.

But you can’t do everything.

In order to prioritize fixing those problems, you have to deprioritize something else, and that can be costly. It also turns out you can often still hit your goals while those problems persist.

Every employee doesn’t have to like the next. Every process doesn’t have to be streamlined. Every dollar spent doesn’t have to create a direct return. Every problem is not actually a problem.

How can you tell whether something really is a problem, and is worth the time and effort to fix? There are 3 good questions to ask:

• Does this problem keep us from hitting our #1 goal?
• Will it ruin our reputation or the customer experience?
• Are we going to make more money (or earn more subscribers, or whatever your key metric is) by solving this problem than by letting it continue?

Turns out, the answers are usually “no.” So I let the fires burn, and things have been just fine. In fact, we’ve made better progress, and stress is way down.

See leadership lessons 3, 4, and 5 at burkebits.com.