I've been thinking about what leadership actually is.

Now, over the recent months, I've spoken to a lot of people where whether it's the main topic of the conversation or not, leadership has cropped up in the conversation.

And different insights, different lessons have come away from that.

And it's something that's really interesting to me.

I think I'm always trying to be a better leader, both in my work life and my personal life, always looking to improve that aspect of my life.

So I wanted to pull together a few ideas that I've learned from guests over recent episodes and some going a bit further back about what actually makes someone a leader and what leadership looks like.

So let's get started with the first one.

Let's get into it.

So this first insight comes from my conversation with Mary Howe, who was an AC130 gunner in the American Air Force and has gone on to become a nurse.

So we spoke a lot in that about service and whether that was service in a military sense of the word, a service in the nursing sense, the word you're serving other people for a reason.

And the conversation of leadership naturally came up in this episode.

And Mary talked about this thing called internal leadership, and I never heard of that before.

And when I speak about it now, I suppose it makes sense.

And it is quite obvious that it is something we should be speaking about it.

But that's almost the beauty of it, because it's so obvious.

But we don't speak about it.

When we speak about leadership, we think about the external things.

We think about the teams, the organization organizing those teams into something and the mission.

So how do we get this team to do the thing, to succeed in the mission?

But before all of that, before you've even got a team, you have to start with yourself.

You have to be able to lead internally.

And what that means is, my thoughts, Can I lead what my thoughts are saying, Can I lead my reactions to things, or do I just flip out uncontrollably?

My discipline, am I disciplined enough to lead others?

Can I lead myself before I lead them?

And my standards, and this is a big one as well, because you get so many people who have not got the same standards that they're asking of people, which by definition makes you a hypocrite.

You cannot ask other people to do something that you would not be willing to do.

End of as a leader that is not on.

So you've got to have all those things in line.

And again, when you look at, in that conversation with Mary, the military side of Things and for me, perhaps the fire service side of things.

We look at the mission, we look at the job, we train to work towards what's going to happen, what could happen.

But we rarely look back a step further and think about what we're doing ourselves.

Do I do the things I'm asking people to do when I'm not looking?

And we can use those same focuses on the mission and flip them around and shine them on ourselves.

And speaking to Dakota Maya, he said it was a mirror test.

You look at yourself, are you.

Would you lead yourself?

I think that's the word he used.

So if you looked at yourself in a mirror and you acted how you act, would you lead yourself?

You have to be able to change what is inside you to lead other people.

So if you can't change that, if you can't lead yourself, you're just holding a position.

You're not leading people because they're going to see that, they're going to see that you're not holding yourself to those same standards.

They might only be doing things because they're scared of the repercussions.

So you've got to be able to lead yourself in order to lead others.

That is number one.

The second insight comes from Sebastian Page.

And this was a conversation I had a little bit longer ago.

But Sebastian works in a high pressure environment with large sums of money on the line and really important that he can lead effectively.

So it's really insightful conversation, I think is one of the better performing ones on YouTube as well.

So if you haven't seen that one yet, do check it out.

One of the bits that he really sort of drilled down on and it sort of shocked me as well, was he said that one of the most prized skills as a leader is to be able to quit.

And he said it in relation to business.

If you're committed into something, you have to know when to quit.

If something isn't working out, you have to be willing to pull your plug.

And it sounds the opposite of what we typically would advise people to do, you know, push through, don't quit.

And again, we talk about this hustle culture that teaches us to do hard work and grind ourselves to the bone just to get through to the next bit so we can do more work beyond that.

And there's never a, never going to be a break in that.

So when we look at something, if we've committed into this thing as a leader, maybe we've asked our team to do something if he's not having the desired effect and you have gone through and evaluated it and worked out why that is, whether there's anything that can be done.

If there's still nothing that can be done, quitting can be the best option.

Because quitting doesn't mean you haven't learned anything during that time.

It doesn't mean you're going straight back to the point where you started.

It means that you're going on a tangent now, you're changing direction.

If you're walking down a road and the road comes to a fork, you choose one direction.

Now, previously I've spoken about this as there's no harm in coming back to that fork and going back off in another direction.

But I don't think that's quite right.

I think if you get halfway up that fork and decide you maybe want to try the other direction, you just go off road, you cut straight across because you don't go backwards because you still learn stuff from that experience.

You've learned a.

You've learned what not to do, but you've also learned so many skills potentially.

And yeah, it can't just be thrown for nothing.

And the sunk cost fallacy comes up here.

The idea that when you've put so much time, energy and effort into something, we're less likely to leave it behind because we see the value we've put into it and it's so much harder to let go.

But I suppose this is why he said it was a prized skill because so few people are willing to do it because they think it looks bad on them potentially.

It's an ego thing.

And if you admit that what you're doing isn't working, are you admitting that you're a bad leader or a bad.

Like a failure?

That's how a lot of people would perceive it of themselves.

If your best friend was doing it and they were quitting for the right reasons and they could justify it to you, you wouldn't tell them they were a failure, you wouldn't tell them that they're not a good leader.

You tell them that they've done the right thing, they've made the right decision.

So be honest with yourself and have a look at it.

And sometimes having the humility to stop is an excellent skill to have as a leader.

Insight number three comes from Mark Robinson, who is a professional football coach.

And if you're in America, that's soccer.

But we're going to use football here because we are UK based.

And it's also correct because you use your feet anyway.

He has managed AFC Wimbledon, Chelsea under 21s a number of other clubs and other coaching roles.

So he's been around top level players, clubs and he's seen how they run and he's seen how to lead.

More importantly, he spoke about the importance of ownership and this is something that he used to instill in his, especially in his youth teams, but throughout all of his teams.

This idea of giving people ownership as a leader, we sometimes want to sort everything ourselves and try and do everything by ourselves.

And if someone's having a tough time, we might try and fix it for them with good intentions.

But really, is that the best thing for that person?

In order to grow, you have to take ownership and accountability.

You have to be able to make mistakes in a safe environment, in a safe way and be able to learn from those mistakes.

More importantly, again, if you turn around and they make mistakes and you're berating them, it's not going to help them.

If you make them comfortable to make those mistakes, that's when growth happens because they can learn things, they can get things wrong and learn from it.

The key balance comes when you look at the sort of challenge and support.

So you've got to get the right amount of support for the challenge.

So if it's something quite tough, you're not going to give them no support at all because you are setting them up to fail catastrophically.

If it's something quite easy, again, you don't want to just do it all for them because you're doing nothing for that person.

So you've got to sort of.

It's almost like two sliders on a scale and you've got to move them along in order to give that person more or less support and sit somewhere in the middle.

So if they are gonna run with this, they're taking ownership of a, an opportunity, they're gonna run a presentation for whatever it is.

If you sit them down and go through that presentation with them and make it all for them and tell them what to say, it's not their presentation.

Also, if you sit down and every time they come and say, oh, can you help me?

You say no.

They're going to really struggle to come up with anything because they've never done this before.

This might be your expertise.

So it's somewhere in the middle of helping them get started, but not doing everything for them, letting them go alone and learn from the things that they do, whether that's good or bad.

If you give them too little support, you end up with chaos.

And if you give them too much support, you get dependency.

So it's Finding that balance and not doing everything yourself, but instead giving people ownership.

The next one comes from Dakota Meyer.

So Dakota is a US Marine vet who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in Afghanistan in 2009.

And it was a real honor to have Dakota on the podcast.

He's been on loads of big podcasts, Joe Rogan and Jocko Willink, to name a few.

So to get to sit down and sort of pick his mind was really interesting.

And we delved into the topic of leadership, and more specifically, leaders versus managers.

I'd seen him write about it before, and I was interested to sort of learn a bit more and understand how he differentiated this, because I've.

I've had this conversation with different people, and everyone's got a different idea.

So if you're listening, you've probably got a different idea as well.

But I thought it was interesting.

So the way he defined it, or one of the ways that he sort of defined it during the episode was that he said managers were primarily organization first, whereas the leaders were people first and team first.

So someone who is out for their own game, maybe they're looking for a promotion, maybe they're looking for what's best for the company, but not really thinking about how that affects the people and the people on the front line, potentially.

So they're not doing it for the right reasons.

They're not doing it with the people in mind.

A leader will take that and flip it and think, what effect will this have on the people?

He also mentioned about how people who are following them.

So are they following this person because they are fearful of the repercussions, in which sense you would be a manager?

Or are they following you because they believe in you, they believe in your mission and they want to follow you, in which case you'd be a leader.

That is a simple test that he said about how to determine which one you are.

So have a think about it.

Do people do what you say because they believe in you or because they fear you?

It's an interesting take, and I think there's probably more to it and there's probably more nuance to be discussed, but it's an interesting take that I hadn't.

Hadn't seen before and hadn't considered.

So I like it.

Simple.

Let me know what you think.

Point number five is about personal power versus organizational power.

And this one comes from Ryan Gottfrisson.

We had a great conversation on leadership, and this sort of continues from the last bit that I was speaking about Dakota's insight.

So Organizational power and personal power.

What are they?

These are how someone runs something.

So are you leading with organizational power or personal power?

Organizational power would be stuff like your title, your rank, your authority, and using hierarchy to get what you want.

People below, they follow you because they have to.

When you're leading with personal power, you're looking at things like your character, your credibility, your integrity, your competence.

And he was saying that the most impactful leaders rely on personal power.

And I think I can see why.

I think that's completely correct.

I think any manager you've had, any boss you've had at work or captain in a sports team, you've wanted to follow them because of who they are, because they hold their standards high, because they live what they say, they live what they ask of you.

There'll be people that try and abuse the power and say, I'm the manager, so you have to do what I say.

And if you've ever been through that, you will know you don't like that.

It's horrible.

So you know why you're following someone.

And I think that organizational power versus personal power is a massive thing.

And if you are a leader, have a think about how you're using those things.

Which one are you more in?

Because it's, it is a spectrum.

There's definitely aspects of it that you need to use at certain times and definitely potentially in these high stakes environments like military, police, ambulance, fire service, when there's life and death situations, you might need to order someone to do something using your rank because it's to save life.

So it's definitely a spectrum.

But I 100% agree that personal power is the place you want to be in almost every other instance.

I think it's so important to live what you're asking other people to do.

And that comes back to what I said at the start about internal leadership.

They all sort of link in really nicely.

So it's been quite nice.

And I think just to recap over.

So when we look at the original question that I asked and I said, what actually makes someone a leader?

It's not necessarily a title or a job role or anything like that.

It's these things that I've mentioned and more, I haven't got all of them by any account, so I'm not pretending to.

But if you can lead yourself first, lead yourself internally, know when to stop, know that it's not going to be a bad look on you.

If anything, people might be impressed that you had the ability to step back and go, yeah, we do need to stop that and try something else.

If you empower others, if you can give people that ownership and accountability and that space for them to learn and grow, that's where the growth comes.

You need to put people first as a leader.

If you're putting the company first or yourself first, which is even worse, people will despise you and they won't want to work for you, and you'll be fighting a battle way more than if you just put the people first.

And the last one, again, influencing through character.

Looking at that personal power, looking at how we come up, how we show ourselves, are we aligning our actions with what we're asking people to do?

None of these require a specialist role or management title or anything like that.

Anyone can be a leader, and that's the beautiful thing about it.

I think a manager is more of a role.

But a leader can be a way of life, it can be a skill, and it can be a skill that you can learn and you can grow.

So if you think some of these things today that you don't resonate with and you want to start learning them, it doesn't mean you're a bad leader.

It just means that you can get better and you can learn from them.

And we've always got more stuff to learn.

That's a beautiful thing about it.

So no one's ever the finished product.

So that's five things that I've learned on leadership, and I've enjoyed sort of going back through them and learning and reaffirming them in my mind.

So let me know how you found it and if you haven't already, join the community.

Follow the show if you haven't already and leave a comment, maybe tell me which one was your favorite Insight.

Are any of them you're going to take away and work on now?

Maybe.

But for now, all I'll say is thank you for listening, stay curious, and I will see you in the next one.