3 Top Successful Managers and Leaders Share Their Secrets

If you think that it takes a village to raise a child, you should try managing or leading a company, department, or family? Sometimes getting the people that work with (for) you to do what needs to be done is like herding cats or forcing a horse to drink water – not so easy. So what can you do, what should you do? Here are three of the world’s leading experts sharing their wisdom with you.

John Maxwell

an internationally respected leadership expert, speaker, and author who has sold more than 18 million books, has been named an inaugural SUCCESS Ambassador. Dr. Maxwell is the founder of EQUIP, a non-profit organization that has trained more than 5 million leaders in 126 countries worldwide. A New York Times, Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek; best-selling author, Maxwell has written three books that have sold more than a million copies

John Maxwell writes, “Perhaps you wouldn’t be surprised to know that a locomotive traveling 55 mph could crash right through a 5-foot-thick steel-reinforced concrete wall without stopping. But do you realize that the same train, starting from a stationary position, wouldn’t be able to roll over an inch-thick block placed in front of its driving wheel?

There’s an important lesson here that applies to your work as a leader: The size of your problem generally isn’t your problem. Instead it’s a lack of momentum that’s stalling you at the train yard. Without momentum, even the smallest obstacle can prevent you from moving forward. But with it you can plow through anything.”

1. A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.
2. Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.
3. Earn the right to be heard by listening to others. Seek to understand a situation before making judgments about it.

John C. Maxwell’s 10 Steps To Success

1. Make a commitment to grow daily.
2. Set an expectation of clear accountability.
3. Value the process more than events.
4. Recognize and applaud transparency.
5. Don’t wait for inspiration.
6. Focus on solutions.
7. Unleash the resources of your team.
8. Be willing to sacrifice pleasure for opportunity.
9. Dream big.
10. Plan your priorities.

Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan is president of Chris Brogan Media, offering business and marketing advisory help for mid to larger sized companies. Not a big guy? I also help small business owners through classes and webinars at Owner Media Group. Chris is a sought after keynote speaker and the New York Times bestselling author of nine books and counting. His next book is Dented: Retrofitting Humans for the Modern Digital

Chris write that; “I’m sitting at the airport in San Diego after speaking at Social Media Marketing World, one of two events with “social” in the name that I actually like. It’s not that I like the event. I like the people. I like who I get to talk with here. It’s a wild kind of “just for us” experience where I get to talk with people I really appreciate and admire. Lots of them. Thinking about this had me thinking about my success.

Here’s a sampling of the people I spoke with today:

 

• A ninja (no, a real one). He’s also a friend I admire.
• An actor and voice talent and his friend, also a voice talent who turns out to be a telephony nerd (I used to work in telephony).
• Someone helping people with cerebral palsy.
• Four different people suffering depression (who thanked me for posting and talking about mine).
• A pool guy turned marketing genius.
• A guy whose wife asked for a divorce.
• An almost-done-with-his-book author.
• The owner of SUCCESS Magazine (I’ve written there and love the brand).
• My ambassador friend.
• A welsh comic and business maker.
• A newly married power couple using their acting backgrounds to mint new speaking stars.
• A Hamilton-the-Musical mega fan and fitness wizard.
• A business partner who treats my customers like his best friends.
• Lewis and Gary and briefly Guy.
• Not Pat Flynn because we seemed doomed to never talk.
• Joel and John and John and Mitch and other Mitch and Mari and all the “names.”

Several hundred great people I just met.

That’s one secret of my success. All of those conversations were important to me. Each of them.

Another secret? I spent as much time as I could talking with these people. And I talked with Jacq (who wasn’t here, but I talked with her in her day).

Another secret? I spoke today about revenue. About how it’s important to help other people make it. And then you’ll make yours.

Another secret? There are no secrets. It’s about hard work, silly. And it’s about service. And it’s about failing.

My last secret: I dared to do something really risky and spoke today entirely without notes and slides and I managed to “land the plane.”

Chris’s 7 Tips to Enduring Success

1. Guard your time. If you have work to do, ask yourself repeatedly if this work moves forward your main goals. Learn how to minimize the work that doesn’t.
2. Work towards checking email less frequently in a day, and also not being a slave to your phone. We forget all the time that these tools are supposed to be helpful, not constant distractions.
3. One trick there: kill notifier lights, buttons, sounds, and other indicators, and instead, schedule a task on your calendar or however you keep your appointments, where that task is to check your mail. (I haven’t gotten that far yet, but I’m working at it).
4. Find pockets of idle time and use them for something productive. When I’m grocery shopping, I Jott little audio reminders to myself to follow up on later. When I’m sitting in a waiting room, I read books on subject matter that nourishes my career. I use drive time for LOTS of things to go along with driving.
5. Build your projects to be modular, so that you can work on them when time comes up. Blog posts are a great example. I keep a text file where I can jot ideas for future posts. Then, I go back and flesh those in from time to time, or delete them, if I can’t remember what my notes meant.
6. Learn polite ways to decline things. We say YES to wayyyyyyyy to many things. Learn very warm and polite ways to say no. (Here’s a great audio podcast by Stever Robbins about saying “no” that I need to listen to often.)
7. Decide how much of your down time is really recharging you, and whether some of it is just idle for idle’s sake.

Brian Tracy

Brian Tracy has consulted for more than 1,000 companies and addressed more than 5,000,000 people in 5,000 talks and seminars throughout the US, Canada and 70 other countries worldwide. As a Keynote speaker and seminar leader, he addresses more than 250,000 people each year.

 

He has studied, researched, written and spoken for 30 years in the fields of economics, history, business, philosophy and psychology. He is the top selling author of over 70 books that have been translated into dozens of languages.

 

He has written and produced more than 300 audio and video learning programs, including the worldwide, best-selling Psychology of Achievement, which has been translated into more than 28 languages.

Brian Tracy writes; "Welcome to the new world of business. Managers today have to do more with less, and get better results from limited resources, more than ever before. One of the interesting outcomes of these challenging economic times is an increase in the level of per person output. Many companies are maintaining or increasing their levels of productivity and quality with fewer people, but with people who are better selected, better organized, and better managed. Achieving the highest possible return on human capital must be every manager's goal. A good manager with a clear vision can quickly organize a group of average performers into a peak performance team that is capable of achieving tremendous results for the company. It's not difficult; you just need to learn how to do it."

Brian’s 7 Keys to Successfully attaining this:

1. Your life only gets better when you get better.
2. Your people only get better when you get better.
3. Make your people feel happy. The starting point is learning why and how people think and act the way they do. From there, a manager will understand how to get his or her people fully engaged in their jobs and how to get the most important results that their business depends on for success in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
4. Ask your people questions. Talk to them; ask them questions about how they are feeling today and how everything is going. When you express a genuine interest in other people, it makes them feel valuable, respected, and important.
5. Encourage improvement. Encourage people to come up with ideas to do their jobs better or to improve the company in any way possible. When someone comes up with an idea, no matter what you might think of it initially, encourage the person to try it out on a small scale to see if it works. The more ideas you encourage, the more ideas you are going to get.
6. Be a leader. The leader sets the tone by the way he talks, behaves, responds to others, and treats people every day. People tend to 'follow the leader' in that they imitate or mimic the behavior of the leader towards others. When the leader treats other people with courtesy and respect, everyone eventually begins treating coworkers with the same courtesy and respect.
7. Integrity is the most valuable and respected quality of leadership. Always keep your word.