Leadership is about building leaders

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Multi-billion dollar business genius Donald Trump and two of his sons that are being coached by The Donald himself to become great leaders of The Trump organization.

As a leader you are constantly challenged with important decisions to make. The most important decisions are the ones that involve your followers.

Your success as a leader is measured by the results of those you lead. Thus, planning for successors is one of the most critical things you can do to ensure your company's ongoing success.

So the question is: are you building leaders?

Building leaders is about making daily choices. Here's a simple sample:

• You can choose to keep all your knowledge to yourself or share it with those you trust.
• You can choose to let them work with their current skills or empower them with the tools they need to succeed.
• You can choose to tell them what to do and disappear or you can be the example of the leader you want them to be.
• You can choose to let them be ducks that all they do is quack about problems to their superiors or you can make them become eagles focused on finding solutions to the customer.

The main reason that so many leaders don't build successors is because they think that leadership is about power. They think that leadership is about what's written in their business card. With this mindset a successor is seen as a potential threat.

Great leaders understand that they leadership isn't about power. It's about serving the right people and achieving great results. It's not about what's written in their business card but it's about they influence others with their leadership point of view.

How can you build a platform for building leaders?

Leadership starts with leading yourself. It begins by answering three simple questions:

• who you are?
• whose you are?
• are you the example?

Then, it evolves into one-on-one leadership. It's about sharing your leadership point of view with one person at a time. It's about knowing them. Their strengths and weaknesses. However, always remember that it's their choice to follow your vision or not.

After you've build a relationship based on trust and on you leadership culture, you go to the next level: team leadership. In this stage you combine each team member's strengths and weaknesses to build a high performance team. You set clear & measurable goals, praise them when they achieve them and redirect them when they go off track.

The last stage is combining different teams into an organizational structure that is prepared for growth because each team is a platform for building leaders.

If you aren't building great leaders you're not really leading.

Solitude - A leadership habit

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TV. Books. Blogs. E-mail. RSS. Podcasts. YouTube. Twitter. Instant messaging. Facebook.

These are a sample of inputs that you expose your mind on a daily basis. With so many many sources of unlimited information flow it's so easy to get overloaded with information to process. Technology breakthroughs and the Globalization phenomenon made Information Overload one of the top issues today's executive face.

But it gets worse than that. Besides getting a severe case of "information overload", you're so busy processing new information that you don't have time to think for yourself. You don't have time to make your own opinions. You don't have time to set a new vision for the future.

Solitude can the most important habits that you can choose to embrace.

Solitude gives you a time and a place where you can process all the things that you exposed your mind to, turn information into knowledge and see new paths to walk. New products to launch. New solutions to old problems.

Consider this:

• Just because you have access to information, it doesn't mean that you should access it in the first place.
• Exposing yourself to all information channels it's your choice! You still have the power to filter them.
• You need time to hear yourself! How can you expect to do this with everybody screaming for your attention?

Today's business world is more competitive than ever. Now is the time to make yourself stand out from the crowd or become irrelevant. To do this you need to understand who you are, whose you are and what you stand for. The only way you can do this is if you choose to make solitude one of your habits as a leader.

The final choice is up to you.

And early in the morning, while it was still dark, he [Jesus] rose up and went outside and left for a lonely place, and there he began praying. - Mark 1:35

Be yourself and change the world

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You want to stand out from the crowd. You want to differentiate yourself from your competition. You want to drive your competition crazy! You want everybody to understand your value!
But how?
All previous sentences were focused on your competition. Well... I believe that, in order to beat your competition, you have to focus on yourself first.
Be yourself!

The NBA Way to Success

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Success.

You know what it looks like, right? It's when the clouds clear, the sun shines and the angels start singing... it's a beautiful thing to witness. It happens when you finally reach the goal you worked so much for.

The problem is: it's not going to be easy because, in any game, you're not the only one that's trying to win. There will be the ones that will try to break the rules and put you out of the game. Others will try to break you. Others though, will help you.

NBA players know a lot about this. Their goal? Wining the championship by scoring as much points as possible while preventing the other team to do the same. Their problem? There's a total of 30 teams, each one with 15 players on their roster, making a total of 450 players competing for the same thing: wining!

The question is: how they succeed?

Business lessons from Marylin Manson

Love him or hate him. Marilyn Manson is without doubt one of the most controversial and inspiring leaders in the music industry.

The music industry is one of the most competitive and challenging markets to be in business. There's plenty of competition and a dying business model that makes the path to success a hard walk.

However, Marilyn Manson did succeed! Millions of records sold. Sold out concerts around the globe.

So, what lessons can we learn and apply into our business?

True Leadership isn't about the Leader

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Recently, I've read an article, wrote by Marshall Goldsmith, that I consider brilliant about Leadership. The focus of this article isn't about the Leader but the Team of followers.

The article has the following great quote: "The best leader, the people do not notice. When the best leader's work is done, the people say, 'We did it ourselves.'" .

This is the top level of leadership. Great leaders influence and persuade people to go from point A to point B on their own! Why we don't see this level of leadership more often?

Find out how you can achieve true leadership and change the world!