4 Leadership gems from John C. Maxwell

G’day everyone,

This week’s book is John C. Maxwell’s ’21 Immutable Laws of Leadership.

I read mainly books on online marketing, personal finance and mindset – so a leadership book was a nice change.

I really liked this book.

There are 21 Laws in the book, I’ll go through a handful of my favourite.

1. The Law of Connection (#10) – Before asking anyone to follow you, connect with them on a personal level first. Learn about them, their background and their story. Once you get on this level with them they will be much more likely to listen to you.
2. The Law of Empowerment. (#12) – You can’t empower others in your team if you’re not first comfortable with youself. You shouldn’t need to feel like you have the power, you’re comforting distributing amongst the team so they execute. Mark Twain said, “Great things can happen when you don’t care who gets the credit.”
3. The Law of Victory. (#15)
   The goal of the leader is to ensure the team wins. Individual performances are worthless if the team as a unit doesn’t achieve the primary goal. “You can’t win WITHOUT good athletes, but you CAN lose with them.”
4. The Law of Sacrifice. (#18)
   A high quality leader knows they must personally sacrifice plenty to achieve the goals for the team. They know being selfish seldom gets them anywhere. You have to be willing to give up things personally to make way for the team doing well. When Lee Iacocca was turning around Chrysler, he cut his own salary to $1 per year. ”When you beome a leader, you lose the right to think about yourself.”

This book was only a short listen (just under 4 hours), I’d strongly recommend listening to it two or three times if you’re looking to improve your leadership skills.

I liked this book so my next book is likely to be another John C. Maxwell one, ‘Good Leaders Ask Great Questions’.

Let me know if you found the above useful in the comments.

Ray