You have to look at leadership through the eyes of the followers and you have to live the message.
Interpretation
True leadership requires understanding the perspective of those you lead and embodying the principles you promote.
This quote emphasizes the importance of empathetic leadership, suggesting that effective leaders must view situations from the perspective of their followers. Furthermore, it stresses that leaders must not only communicate their ideals but also live by them, setting an example for others to follow.
In practice
In a corporate training seminar focused on effective leadership styles.
I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses and made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently . . . This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.
I started The Body Shop in 1976 simply to create a livelihood for myself and my two daughters, while my husband, Gordon, was trekking across the Americas. I had no training or experience and my only business acumen was Gordon's advice to take sales of Β£300 a week. Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.
If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.
But if you can create an honorable livelihood, where you take your skills and use them and you earn a living from it, it gives you a sense of freedom and allows you to balance your life the way you want.
Quite apart from anything else, my experience is trying to change things for the better makes you feel better, healthier. Humans are communicative animals: when you do good in a community, the benefits eventually get back to you.
First, you have to have fun. Second, you have to put love where your labour is. Third, you have to go in the opposite direction to everyone else.
Strong countries and strong presidents talk to their adversaries. That's what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That's what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That's what Nixon did with Mao. I mean think about it. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela - these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying we're going to wipe you off the planet.
Instead of seeming to impose new obligations, they should appear as people who wish to share their joy, who point to a horizon of beauty and who invite others to a delicious banquet. It is not by proselytizing that the Church grows, but by attraction.
The worst mistake a leader can make is to mentor no one, choose no successor and leave no legacy.
Faith in people is an essential quality of an influencer when working with others, yet it is a scarce commodity today.
There is only one way... to get anybody to do anything. And that is by making the other person want to do it.
Aggression is the most common behavior used by many organizations, a nearly invisible medium that influences all decisions and actions.
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