Sullivan's 10 Laws of Leadership

1.??Great Leaders are not the best at “everything”. They find other leaders who are great at ONE thing and put them together on the same team.?When hiring an outstanding new leader remember Steve Jobs classic advice: “You hire smart people to tell you what to do, you don’t hire them so you can tell them what to do.”

2.????"Leadership is at its best when the vision is strategic, the voice persuasive, and the results are tangible,” writes Michael Useem." "You need to lead, manage, and coach. To be excellent, you have to do all three.”

3.????Ideas are easy. Execution is hard. The ability to execute is what separates average leaders from exceptional ones; not the ability to simply come up with new ideas. Accept that change is a process and that transformation will not happen overnight.

4.????Leaders who consistently accomplish things don’t sit back and let things happen to them. They go out and happen to things.

5.????All work is teamwork. In the words of NBA great Bill Russell: “The most important measure of how good a game I played was how much better I’d made my teammates play.”

6.????Abandon all hope that “normal” will return for two reasons: 1) Hope is not a strategy and 2) normal is not coming back. As Robert Hewison said: “If the only new thing we have to offer is an improved version of the past, then today can only be inferior to yesterday.”

7.????The best leaders plan and achieve small wins in succession to build a team’s confidence and competence. Research has shown that of all forms of human motivation the most effective one is progress. Why? Because a small, concrete win creates momentum and affirms a team’s faith in their own abilities and further success.

8.????Doing is more important than knowing. Greg McKeown: “Since what is ultimately most important is what people are able to do, training should focus on doing rather than on knowing—and, in particular, on bringing everyone’s skills closer to the level of the best performers in a given area."

9.????The leader’s job is not to find the right team, but to get the team right. Getting the team right means that people are better as a group than as individuals. Putting the wrong person on your team is a much bigger problem than operating one team member short.

10.?Pre-Shift Meetings should be mandatory and not optional. These daily meetings set the tone, focus and energy for every team and every shift’s success. The team leader is responsible for Pre-Shifts. It's awfully hard to win when your coach puts all the players on the field then refuses to call any plays.?

Jim Sullivan is a popular speaker at Leadership Conferences worldwide and is the author of two books that have sold over 400,000 copies. Companies using his products, programs and services include The Walt Disney Company, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Panera, Chipotle, Marriott, Walmart and more. To inquire about his availability for a presentation message Jim here at LinkedIn.