The Golden Rule of Leadership: “Leading others is a privilege that is earned, not a right.”
Regardless of industry, size, geography, or title, we are all impacted by the quality of our leadership, which directly relates to our ability to scale. We are unique in how we lead and what our end goals are, but we can find common ground through our desire to become better leaders.
Since we can all connect through leadership, let’s look at leadership through the lens of a former Navy SEAL…
Mark Divine takes us through seven crucial qualities of leadership in his book Staring Down the Wolf: 7 Leadership Commitments That Forge Elite Teams. Divine shares compelling stories to illustrate the importance of each commitment. While most of us are not Navy SEALs, we can certainly relate to these messages.
Let’s look at his seven commitments and the main takeaways.
Courage
It takes courage to build an elite team, everyday can seem like a firefight. Don’t let fear hold you back.
Never leave your teammates in danger.
To breed courage, you need to train for it. Make training more reality based.
Be extremely transparent.
Act with humility. Leave your ego at the door.
When you screw up, take responsibility.
Respect
Act with integrity, authenticity, and clarity.
Don’t denigrate anyone when they screw up.
Have each other’s back.
Growth
Chase continuous growth through challenge, variety, and mentoring/coaching.
Find a way to change things up for the team to unlock accelerated growth.
Excellence
Constantly improve the way you do things
Always drive forward to the next thing. Don’t take yesterday’s accomplishments and think you have it figured out.
Become the best version of yourself.
Resiliency
Be elastic and expand your capacity but don’t get to the breaking point.
Have a can-do attitude.
Detach from the outcome.
Alignment
Without the other six qualities, alignment won’t happen.
Define your vision, mission, and purpose as a team/organization.
Create an open and focused communication process.
As Divine describes, developing these battle-tested leadership commitments will enable you and your team to thrive under VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Adversity.
We will always be fighting fires (some of our jobs requiring us to do so more literally than others), but the way we lead will allow our teams to fulfill our purpose and do the seemingly impossible! And we will come out of it with an elite team!