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.
The intoxication of power rapidly sobers off in the knowledge of its restrictions and under the prompt reminder of an ever-present and not always considerate press, as well as the kindly suggestions that not infrequently come from Congress.
Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.
Whether it is with friends or family, I expect them to set a great example for me, and hopefully I will do the same for them. And that is all part of being a leader.
I don't like offending people, and it's easy to offend people when you don't know as much as they do. This group knows more about what it takes to lead in this way than I ever will. My goal is to push people, but I need to do it from a place of respect.
No doubt we have to have bigger projects, bigger industries, basic industries, but it is a matter of the highest importance that we look to the common man, the weakest element in the society.
For me, I've learned that the best thing is to focus on the team you play for and yourself and what you need to do.
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