Four Simple Steps to Becoming a Better Leader by Bob Schwartz

Step #1: Feed Your Confidence Daily

If you were to go a whole day without eating, do you think you'd get
hungry? What if you stopped eating for a week? Do you think your body
would get weak? Yes, of course it would (to both questions).

Well, your self-confidence needs daily feeding too. You need
to "nourish" your confidence daily in order for it to grow healthy
and strong. It's not complicated, but you have to make an effort to
make it happen.

Listen to positive affirmations about yourself. Read self-development
books. Only associate with positive and supportive people. All these
activities will help feed your self-confidence and keep your mind
strong.

Step #2: Do The Things You Fear First

When you move towards what you fear, your confidence grows stronger
and stronger, but when you move away from what you fear, you let self-
doubt take the upper hand. Develop the habit of moving away from
things that make you uncertain, and you'll soon build a prison for
yourself--four invisible yet impenetrable walls forged of
doubtfulness.

No one can deny that our fears can sometimes be debilitating and
intimidating. They sometimes scare us so much we vow never to face
them. Unfortunately, when we do that, we let that fear control our
lives. In order to grow mentally strong and have complete control
over ourselves, we must face our fears head on. Even if we fail in
completing whatever task scared us, we still win by learning from our
mistake and now knowing what doesn't work. We simply must rethink our
strategy and try again.

Step #3: Keep Self-Promises

When you complete steps #1 and #2, you'll be making a written list of
promises to yourself. These promises are the easiest to break, but
they are by far the most important ones to keep. Why? Because the
very basic nature of confidence is trust. For example, would you
trust anyone who lied to you repeatedly? Of course you wouldn't!

Now, think for a moment and answer this question: Do you lie to
yourself? (Would you believe most people can't even answer that
question honestly?!)

Those who think they can get away with lying to themselves are
absolutely, positively mistaken. It can't be done. Self-perjury is,
always has been, and always will be, self-sabotage!

You know that gnawing sense of anxiety we've all felt at one time or
another (and which most people feel just about every day)? It's the
feeling that things are getting out of control. Do you know what that
really is? It's not a sign the world is spinning faster each day, nor
is it a symptom of global overcrowding. It's actually our minds' way
of punishing us for not keeping our word.

When you know deep down inside that you should be doing something,
and you're not doing it, you're lying to yourself. Before long, your
self-trust--your confidence--will begin to vanish, and that void will
quickly be filled with uncertainty and anxiety.

The good news is, it's simple to strengthen your self-trust. In fact,
it's something you can start to feel the powerful effects of by this
time tomorrow if you just decide it's something you must do.

Step #4: Focus on Progress, Not Perfection

Once you begin to keep self-promises, your next step to strengthen
your confidence is to forget about the whole concept of perfection.
It doesn't exist. My experience has taught me that chasing after
perfection is a futile as trying to find the pot of gold at the end
of the rainbow.

Perfection, like the end of the rainbow, is an illusion.
If your objective is to achieve perfection in any aspect of your life-
-your body, your relationships, your career--you can look forward to
a continual sense of deficiency, failure, and uncertainty.

On the other hand, if you learn to focus on progress--on things you
can actually measure--you'll have a growing sense of achievement and
an ever-strengthening level of confidence.

Obstacles are the Stepping Stones of Success by Harvey Mackay

A man was walking in the park one day when he came upon a cocoon with a small opening. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through the little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It looked like it had gotten as far as it could, so the man decided to help the butterfly. He used his pocketknife and snipped the remaining bit of the cocoon.

The butterfly then emerged easily, but something was strange. The butterfly had a swollen body and shriveled wings. The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected at any moment the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time. Neither happened. In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and deformed wings. It was never able to fly.

What the man in his kindness and haste did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly to emerge was natural. It was nature's way of forcing fluid from its body into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom. Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our lives.

If we were allowed to go through life without any obstacles, we would be crippled. We would not be as strong as what we could have been. And we could never fly.

History has shown us that the most celebrated winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.

My good friend, Lou Holtz, football coach of the University of South Carolina, once told me, "Show me someone who has done something worthwhile, and I'll show you someone who has overcome adversity."

Beethoven composed his greatest works after becoming deaf. George Washington was snowed in through a treacherous winter at Valley Forge. Abraham Lincoln was raised in poverty. Albert Einstein was called a slow learner, retarded and uneducable. If Christopher Columbus had turned back, no one could have blamed him, considering the constant adversity he endured.

As an elementary student, actor James Earl Jones (a.k.a. Darth Vader) stuttered so badly he communicated with friends and teachers using written notes.

Itzhak Perlman, the incomparable concert violinist, was born to parents who survived a Nazi concentration camp and has been paralyzed from the waist down since the age of four.

Chester Carlson, a young inventor, took his idea to 20 big corporations in the 1940s. After seven years of rejections, he was able to persuade Haloid, a small company in Rochester, N.Y., to purchase the rights to his electrostatic paper- copying process. Haloid has since become Xerox Corporation.

Thomas Edison tried over 2,000 experiments before he was able to get his light bulb to work. Upon being asked how he felt about failing so many times, he replied, "I never failed once. I invented the light bulb. It just happened to be a 2,000-step process."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected President of the United States for four terms, had been stricken with polio at the age of 39.

Persistence paid off for General Douglas MacArthur. After applying for admission to West Point twice, he applied a third time and was accepted. The rest is history.

In 1927 the head instructor of the John Murray Anderson Drama School, instructed student Lucille Ball, to "Try any other profession. Any other."

Buddy Holly was fired from the Decca record label in 1956 by Paul Cohen, Nashville "Artists and Repertoire Man." Cohen called Holly "the biggest no-talent I ever worked with."

Academy Award-winning writer, producer and director Woody Allen failed motion picture production at New York University (NYU) and City College of New York. He also flunked English at NYU.

Helen Keller, the famous blind author and speaker, said: "Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired and success achieved. Silver is purified in fire and so are we. It is in the most trying times that our real character is shaped and revealed."

Mackay's Moral: There is no education like the university of adversity.

What It Takes To Be Great by Geoffrey Colvin

(Fortune Magazine) -- What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett the world's premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was "wired at birth to aevallocate capital." It's a one-in-a-million thing. You've got it - or you don't.

Well, folks, it's not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don't exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that's demanding and painful.

Buffett, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets. The good news is that your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant - talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great.

Scientific experts are producing remarkably consistent findings across a wide array of fields. Understand that talent doesn't mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It's an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, "The evidence we have surveyed ... does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts."

To see how the researchers could reach such a conclusion, consider the problem they were trying to solve. In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness.

The irresistible question - the "fundamental challenge" for researchers in this field, says the most prominent of them, professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University - is, Why? How are certain people able to go on improving? The answers begin with consistent observations about great performers in many fields.

Scientists worldwide have conducted scores of studies since the 1993 publication of a landmark paper by Ericsson and two colleagues, many focusing on sports, music and chess, in which performance is relatively easy to measure and plot over time. But plenty of additional studies have also examined other fields, including business.

No substitute for hard work

The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It's nice to believe that if you find the field where you're naturally gifted, you'll be great from day one, but it doesn't happen. There's no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice.

Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.

What about Bobby Fischer, who became a chess grandmaster at 16? Turns out the rule holds: He'd had nine years of intensive study. And as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, "The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average." In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years' experience before hitting their zenith.

So greatness isn't handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn't enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What's missing?

Practice makes perfect

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call "deliberate practice." It's activity that's explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one's level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don't get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day - that's deliberate practice.

Consistency is crucial. As Ericsson notes, "Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends."

Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It's the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

The skeptics

Not all researchers are totally onboard with the myth-of-talent hypothesis, though their objections go to its edges rather than its center. For one thing, there are the intangibles. Two athletes might work equally hard, but what explains the ability of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to perform at a higher level in the last two minutes of a game?

Researchers also note, for example, child prodigies who could speak, read or play music at an unusually early age. But on investigation those cases generally include highly involved parents. And many prodigies do not go on to greatness in their early field, while great performers include many who showed no special early aptitude.

Certainly some important traits are partly inherited, such as physical size and particular measures of intelligence, but those influence what a person doesn't do more than what he does; a five-footer will never be an NFL lineman, and a seven-footer will never be an Olympic gymnast. Even those restrictions are less severe than you'd expect: Ericsson notes, "Some international chess masters have IQs in the 90s." The more research that's done, the more solid the deliberate-practice model becomes.

Real-world examples

All this scholarly research is simply evidence for what great performers have been showing us for years. To take a handful of examples: Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century's greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, "If I don't practice for a day, I know it. If I don't practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don't practice for three days, the world knows it." He was certainly a demon practicer, but the same quote has been attributed to world-class musicians like Ignace Paderewski and Luciano Pavarotti.

Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he'd have been cut from his high school team.)

In football, all-time-great receiver Jerry Rice - passed up by 15 teams because they considered him too slow - practiced so hard that other players would get sick trying to keep up.

Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age - 18 months - and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that's what it took to get even better.

The business side

The evidence, scientific as well as anecdotal, seems overwhelmingly in favor of deliberate practice as the source of great performance. Just one problem: How do you practice business? Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, deciphering financial statements - you can practice them all.

Still, they aren't the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information - can you practice those things too? You can, though not in the way you would practice a Chopin etude.

Instead, it's all about how you do what you're already doing - you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it.

Report writing involves finding information, analyzing it and presenting it - each an improvable skill. Chairing a board meeting requires understanding the company's strategy in the deepest way, forming a coherent view of coming market changes and setting a tone for the discussion. Anything that anyone does at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill.

Adopting a new mindset

Armed with that mindset, people go at a job in a new way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it longer. They want more information on what they're doing and seek other perspectives. They adopt a longer-term point of view. In the activity itself, the mindset persists. You aren't just doing the job, you're explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense.

Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it's the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset.

Feedback is crucial, and getting it should be no problem in business. Yet most people don't seek it; they just wait for it, half hoping it won't come. Without it, as Goldman Sachs leadership-developm ent chief Steve Kerr says, "it's as if you're bowling through a curtain that comes down to knee level. If you don't know how successful you are, two things happen: One, you don't get any better, and two, you stop caring." In some companies, like General Electric, frequent feedback is part of the culture. If you aren't lucky enough to get that, seek it out.

Be the ball

Through the whole process, one of your goals is to build what the researchers call "mental models of your business" - pictures of how the elements fit together and influence one another. The more you work on it, the larger your mental models will become and the better your performance will grow.

Andy Grove could keep a model of a whole world-changing technology industry in his head and adapt as needed. Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder, had the same knack: He could see at the dawn of the PC that his goal of a computer on every desk was realistic and would create an unimaginably large market. John D. Rockefeller, too, saw ahead when the world-changing new industry was oil. Napoleon was perhaps the greatest ever. He could not only hold all the elements of a vast battle in his mind but, more important, could also respond quickly when they shifted in unexpected ways.

That's a lot to focus on for the benefits of deliberate practice - and worthless without one more requirement: Do it regularly, not sporadically.

Why?

For most people, work is hard enough without pushing even harder. Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost never get done. That's the way it must be. If great performance were easy, it wouldn't be rare. Which leads to possibly the deepest question about greatness. While experts understand an enormous amount about the behavior that produces great performance, they understand very little about where that behavior comes from.

The authors of one study conclude, "We still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice." Or as University of Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy puts it after 30 years of working with managers, "Some people are much more motivated than others, and that's the existential question I cannot answer - why."

The critical reality is that we are not hostage to some naturally granted level of talent. We can make ourselves what we will. Strangely, that idea is not popular. People hate abandoning the notion that they would coast to fame and riches if they found their talent. But that view is tragically constraining, because when they hit life's inevitable bumps in the road, they conclude that they just aren't gifted and give up.

Maybe we can't expect most people to achieve greatness. It's just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn't reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone.

Leaders Are Made, Not Born By: Brian Tracy

The Key Leadership Abilities
Your ability to negotiate, communicate, influence, and persuade others to do things is absolutely indispensable to everything you accomplish in life. The most effective men and women in every area are those who can quite competently organize the cooperation and assistance of other people toward the accomplishment of important goals and objectives.

Everyone is Different
Of course, everyone you meet has different values, opinions, attitudes, beliefs, cultural values, work habits, goals, ambitions, and dreams. Because of this incredible diversity of human resources, it has never been more difficult and yet more necessary for diplomatic leaders to emerge and form these people into high-performing teams.

Do What Other Leaders Do
Fortunately, leaders are made, not born. You learn to become a leader by doing what other excellent leaders have done before you. You become proficient in your job or skill, and then you become proficient at understanding the motivations and behaviors of other people. As a leader, you combine your personal competencies with the competencies of a variety of others into a smoothly functioning team that can out-play and out-perform all its competitors. When you become a team leader, even if your team only consists of one other person, you must immediately develop a whole new set of leadership skills.

Focus On What's Right vs. Who's Right
Whenever you have problems, misunderstandings, or difficulties within the team, you reexamine your values, your goals, your activities, your assignments, and your responsibilities. You are more concerned with what's right than with who's right. Leaders are more concerned with winning than with not losing. High-Performing teams run by excellent leaders, are determined to perform in an excellent fashion. All members know that their ability to work together in harmony and cooperation is the key to the success of every one of them.

Aim at a Common Goal
The wonderful thing about becoming a leader in your work and personal life is that you can practice the skills of influencing and persuading others toward a common objective. You can promote the principles of excellent teamwork by establishing your values and goals, determining your activities, and then leading the action. And you can improve yourself by continually evaluating your performance against your standards.

Only Compare Yourself With Yourself
One of the marks of excellent people is that they never compare themselves with others. They only compare themselves with themselves and with their past accomplishments and future potential. You can become an even more excellent person by constantly setting higher and higher standards for yourself and then by doing everything possible to live up to those standards.

The more proficient you become at getting the results for which you were hired, the more opportunities you will have to get results through others. And your ability to put together a team and then to lead that team to high performance will enable you to accelerate your career and fulfill your goals faster than ever before.

Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do to put these ideas into into action:

First, think about specific things you can do to work more effectively with the different people on your team.

Second, set high standards for yourself and for each person and then dedicate yourself to achieving those standards.

Seven Habits Revisited: Seven Unique Human Endowments by Stephen R. Covey

I see seven unique human endowments or capabilities
associated with The Seven Habits of Highly Effective
People. One way to revisit The Seven Habits of Highly
Effective People is to identify the unique human
capability or endowment associated with each habit.

The primary human endowments are 1) self-awareness or
self-knowledge; 2) imagination and conscience; and 3)
volition or will power. And the secondary endowments
are 4) an abundance mentality; 5) courage and
consideration; and 6) creativity. The seventh
endowment is self-renewal. These are all unique human
endowments; animals don't possess any of them. But,
they are all on a continuum of low to high levels.

Associated with Habit 1:
Be Proactive is the endowment of self-knowledge or
self-awareness, an ability to choose your response
(response-ability). At the low end of the continuum
are the ineffective people who transfer responsibility
by blaming themselves or others or their environment
anything or anybody "out there" so that they are not
responsible for results. At the upper end of the
continuum toward increasing effectiveness is
self-awareness: "I know my tendencies; I know the
scripts or programs that are in me; but I am not those
scripts. I can rewrite my scripts." You are aware that
you are the creative force of your life. You are not
the victim of conditions or conditioning. You can
choose your response to any situation, to any person.
So on the continuum; you go from being a victim to
self-determining creative power through self-awareness
of the power to choose your response to any condition
or conditioning.

Associated with Habit 2:
Begin With the End In Mind is the endowment of
imagination and conscience. If you are the programmer,
write the program. Decide what you're going to do with
the time, talent, and tools you have to work with:
"Within my small circle of influence, I'm going to
decide." At the low end of the continuum is the sense
of futility about goals, purposes, and improvement
efforts. After all, if you are totally a victim, if
you are a product of what has happened to you, then
what can you realistically do about anything? So you
wander through life hoping things will turn out well,
that the environment may be positive, so you can have
your daily bread and maybe some positive fruits. At
the other end is a sense of hope and purpose: "I have
created the future in my mind. I can see it, and I can
imagine what it will be like." Only people have the
capability to imagine a new course of action and
pursue it conscientiously.

Associated with Habit 3:
Put First Things First is the endowment of willpower.
At the low end of the continuum is the ineffective,
flaky life of floating and coasting, avoiding
responsibility and taking the easy way out, exercising
little initiative or willpower. And at the top end is
a highly disciplined life that focuses heavily on the
highly important but not necessarily urgent activities
of life. It's a life of leverage and influence. On the
continuum, you go from being driven by crises and
having can't and won't power to being focused on the
important but not necessarily urgent matters of your
life and having the will power to realize them.

The exercise of primary human endowments empowers you
to use the secondary endowments more effectively. We
will now move from Primary to Secondary Endowments.

Associated with Habit 4:
Think Win-Win is the endowment of an abundance
mentality. Why? Because your security comes from
principles. Everything is seen through principles.
When your wife makes a mistake, you're not accusatory.
Why? Your security does not come from your wife living
up to your expectations. Your security comes from
within yourself. You're principle-centered. As people
become increasingly principle-centered, they love to
share recognition and power. Why? It's not a limited
pie. It's an ever-enlarging pie. The basic paradigm
and assumption about limited resources is flawed. The
great capabilities of people are hardly even tapped.
The abundance mentality produces more profit, power,
and recognition for everybody. On the continuum, you
go from a scarcity to an abundance mentality through
feelings of intrinsic self-worth and a benevolent
desire for mutual benefit.

Associated with Habit 5:
Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood is the
endowment of courage balanced with consideration. Does
it take courage and consideration to not be understood
first? Think about it. Think about the problems you
face. You tend to think, "You need to understand me,
but you don't understand. I understand you, but you
don't understand me. So let me tell you my story
first, and then you can say what you want." And the
other person says, "Okay, I'll try to understand." But
the whole time they're "listening," they're preparing
their reply. They are just pretending to listen,
selective listening. When you show your home movies or
tell some chapter of you autobiography "let me tell
you my experience" the other person is tuned out
unless he feels understood.

But what happens when you truly listen to another
person? The whole relationship is transformed:
"Someone started listening to me and they seemed to
savor my words. They didn't agree or disagree, they
just were listening and I felt as if they were seeing
how I saw the world. And in that process, I found
myself listening to myself. I started to feel a worth
in myself."

The root cause of almost all people problems is the
basic communication problem people do not listen with
empathy. They listen from within their autobiography.
They lack the skill and attitude of empathy. They need
approval; they lack courage. The ability to listen
first requires restraint, respect, and reverence. And
the ability to make yourself understood requires
courage and consideration. On the continuum, you go
from fight and flight instincts to mature two-way
communication where courage is balanced with
consideration.

Associated with Habit 6:
Synergize is the endowment of creativity, the creation
of something. How? By yourself? No, through two
respectful minds communicating, producing solutions
that are far better than what either originally
proposed. Most negotiation is positional bargaining
and results, at best, in compromise. But when you get
into synergistic communication, you leave position.
You understand basic underlying needs and interests
and find solutions to satisfy them both. You get
people thinking. And if you get the spirit of
teamwork, you start to build a very powerful bond, an
emotional bank account, and people are willing to
subordinate their immediate wants for long-term
relationships. With courage and consideration,
communicate openly with each other and try to create
win-win solutions. On the continuum, you go from
defensive communication to compromise transactions to
synergistic and creative alternatives and
transformations.

Associated with Habit 7:
Sharpen the Saw is the unique endowment of continuous
improvement or self-renewal to overcome entropy. If
you don't constantly improve and renew yourself,
you'll fall into entropy, closed systems and styles.
At one end of the continuum is entropy (everything
breaks down), and the other end is continuous
improvement, innovation, and refinement. On the
continuum, you go from a condition of entropy to a
condition of continuous renewal, improvement,
innovation, and refinement.

My hope in revisiting the Seven Habits is that you
will use the seven unique human endowments associated
with them to bless and benefit the lives of many other
people.

Being an Extraordinary Leader Through Tough and Challenging Times by Chris Widener

Tough and challenging times will surely come. That is a given. The question is what kind of leadership we will demonstrate during those times. Those who are weak leaders will see lasting damage done, if not see the organization fall apart completely. With Extraordinary Leaders at the helm, however, an organization can actually become stronger and thrive in spite of the tough and challenging times. That should be our goal, so here are some ideas on how to be an Extraordinary Leader in tough and challenging times!

1. Keep Your Eye on the Big Picture.
When things get tough, everybody's temptation is to become acutely focused on the problem. The Extraordinary Leader, however, will keep his or her eye on the big picture. This doesn't mean that we don't address the problem. In fact, we have to address the problem. But what separates a leader from a follower is that the leader doesn't get caught up in the problem. The leader sees the big picture and keeps moving toward the vision. The further they take their followers toward the vision, the further away from the problem they get.

2. Don't Get Caught in the War or the Friendly Fire.
When it gets tough even the most loyal team members can be tempted to start shooting and, unfortunately, they sometimes shoot each other! Rather than focusing on the enemy on the outside, they begin to question each other and find many faults with one another that they normally would not have seen. The Extraordinary Leader is the one who can keep from being drug into the fray. They keep their eye on the big picture and act rationally and objectively. They understand that people are heated and are saying things they don't really mean. The people are firing because they are angry or scared. The Extraordinary Leader understands this and rises above it. This way, they take fewer arrows and they set the example for their followers.

3. Be First to Sacrifice.
When it gets tough, like when there has to be cuts in salaries etc, the leader should do just that - lead. They need to not only be the one who is rewarded the greatest when all is well, but they need to be the first to sacrifice. The Extraordinary leader says, "I know many of you are concerned with the salary cuts. I am too. In the long run we will be healthy again but for the mean time, this is necessary. Understanding this, I want you to know that I am taking a 20% pay reduction myself. I want you to know that we are in this together." The Extraordinary Leader is the first to sacrifice and will be rewarded with the loyalty of his or her followers.

4. Remain Calm.
Panic is one of the basest of human emotions and no one is immune to it. The Extraordinary Leader, however, takes time out regularly to think the issues through so they can remain calm. They remind themselves that all is not lost and there will be another day. They remind themselves that being calm will enable them to make the best decisions - for themselves and for their followers. Panic only leads to disaster, while calm leads to victory.

5. Motivate.
In tough and challenging times, people are naturally down. They tend to be pessimistic. They can't see how it is all going to work out. Thus, they have a hard time getting going. The Extraordinary Leader knows this and will focus in on being the optimistic motivator. He or she will come to the office knowing that for the time being, the mood of the group will be carried and buoyed by them and their attitude. Above all else, they seek to show how the end result will be good - and with this they motivate their followers to continue on, braving the current storms, and on to their shared destiny.

6. Create Small Wins.
One of the ways to motivate is to create small wins. The Extraordinary Leader knows that in tough times his or her people think that all is lost. They wonder if they can win. So the Extraordinary Leader creates opportunities for the team to win, even if they are small. They set smaller, more achievable goals and remind and reward the team members when they hit those goals. With each small win, the leader is building the esteem and attitude of his followers, digging them out of their self-created hole of fear.

7. Keep a Sense of Humor.
Look, hardly anything in life can't be laughed at. The Extraordinary Leader knows that even if the whole company goes down the drain, we still go home to our families and live a life of love with them. The Extraordinary Leader keeps perspective and knows that we humans act irrationally when we get scared and fail, and sometimes that is humorous. Don't ever laugh at someone's expense in this situation, because that will be perceived at cold and heartless, regardless of what you meant by it, but do keep the ability to laugh at yourself and the situations that present themselves. By doing this you will keep yourself and your team in an attitude that will eventually beat the tough times.