Life and leadership are a series of choices. First, you make your choices. Then, your choices make you.
Though you want both options in each case, the following are three distinct choices the most successful leaders make when required to:
1. Character Over Competence
The number one thing successful leaders should value more than anything else is character. This sustains your leadership as your competence, skills, talents, and abilities continue to grow.
2. Devotion Over Loyalty
The second choice successful leaders make is valuing devotion over loyalty.
Loyalty alone does not make you a leader but disloyalty disqualifies you from leadership. Many leaders confuse loyalty with devotion and actually prefer loyalty. This is a mistake.
Loyalty is about allegiance to the leader. It is constant support. Loyalty is characterized by continual praise and adulation along. It is often telling the leader what he or she wants to hear. This behavior often crosses the lines of “blind loyalty” and self-preservation. Loyalty often foregoes hard conversations in exchange for peace.
What leaders should prefer is devotion. Devotion is about allegiance to the leader AND the organization. A devoted person says, “I care about you so much I don’t want you or the organization to look bad or fail and we’re about to make a mistake.” They care about the person enough to tell them the truth, even if it causes temporary pain for either party.
Devoted people put the mission above all else. Devoted employees often do the finest work on your team because they refuse to allow the leader or organization to look bad.
Loyalty is nice but devotion is much, much better.
3. Quality Over Quantity
On July 21, 2023, legendary performer Tony Bennett died at age 96 after a seven-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease. In this NBCNews.com article, his widow Susan Benedetto told the story of the two of them watching YouTube videos of Bennet’s career along with a health care worker.
Susan said, “And Tony was alert enough that he’s like watching. And he said, ‘Was I always popular?’ And I said, ‘Yes, sweetheart.’ I said, ‘You’ve been popular for over 70 years.’ And he said, ‘That’s because I stayed with quality.’”
Let me repeat Bennett’s words, “That’s because I stayed with quality.” WOW!
What we learn from Tony Bennett’s 71-year career is quality is timeless. Quality lasts. It unites generations. Quality never goes out of style. It outlasts trends. When all else fades, quality remains.
In 1960, David Packard told a group of Hewlett-Packard managers, “The real reason for our existence is that we provide something which is unique. Our particular area of contribution is to design, develop, and manufacture electronic measuring instruments. … The reason for our existence and the measure of our success is how well we are able to make our product.”
I want large quantities of quality. But if you make me choose one or the other, I will choose quality every time. Because that is what Tony Bennett and David Packard did.
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