Transcription
This question comes up a lot, and you know, you read articles and they're like, "Charisma." You know, I I've known a lot of great leaders who you wouldn't even know they're the leader. They like walk with their shoulder against the wall, right? Um, so, you know, those things, I I've seen yes and no.
But the the the few things that I've seen universally about amongst the great leaders I've met, number one, um, and these things, number one and number two sort of go together. Number one is courage. Number one is courage. Uh, the courage to speak truth to power, the courage to be honest about my own failings, my own my own capabilities. Um, the courage to be open about my my failings and my capabilities. Like, these things are excruciating. The courage to tell somebody something that you know is going to hurt their feelings. Like, these leadership is an incredibly difficult thing to do. Um, and and courage, which then begs the question, where does courage come from? And I do not believe for one minute that courage is a deep internal fortitude where you dig down deep and the courage, courage for me is social. Yeah. So, like, I have the courage to jump out of a plane because the parachute on my back, the external thing, yeah, gave me the courage. And so you need at least one person in your life, professionally or personally, to say, "I believe in you. You got this." And if everything goes south, I'll be I'll still be there with you. That'll give you courage.
Number two, closely tied, is integrity, which is to do the right thing. And weirdly, we all know what the right thing is, rather than doing the expedient thing. Like, I can't stand it when companies do unethical things and all the CEOs are dragged in front of Congress and they all say the same thing, "We broke no laws." No, you you didn't break a law by raising the price of your essential drug by a thousand percent, but it's pretty unethical, yeah? Right. Like, we all know what right is, and the law is a lower standard. Um, and so the the the courage to have integrity and integrity driving my courage. Like, those things go go together.
And the third one I'd say, um, they're a student of communication because a huge part of of leadership is the skill of listening and the skill of speaking in a way that allows people, uh, to not only to feel listening in a way that allows people to feel heard, and speaking in a way that people can hear, as opposed to triggering people, etc., etc.