Top 10 Leadership Tips

In a new book M.A. Soupios and I co-authored, The Ten Golden Rules of Leadership, we share scores of leadership tips of great thinkers, Aristotle, Plato, Thales, and Hesiod. Here are my top ten tips. The most lethal distortions come not from the lips of our opponents or competitors. They tend to flow, instead, from our own hearts. The investment of power—granting a leader meaningful authority—is the trigger that will rapidly reveal that person’s inner qualities. Nothing will more rapidly disenchant and alienate workers than a manager who delights in resorting to the stick as opposed to the carrot. Supervisors who constantly micromanage, who second-guess every subordinate decision, who gleefully await any and all opportunities to criticize and bully, are a toxic presence in any environment. Understand the formal and the informal structure of your organization. Realize that effective leadership requires command over both the formal and the informal organization. Supervising the formal organization is the easy part, as the organization chart sets the lines of authority and grants the leader official status. Directing the informal organization is the difficult part, as formal management status cannot guarantee that subordinates comply privately with executive decisions. What can warrant such a compliance is the integrity of your character, a higher code of life that turns subordinates into faithful followers. Are you worthy of their loyalties? The "fate" of organizations is not based on the stars. The character of an organization's leadership determines a company's destiny.