In The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, John C. Maxwell shares what he’s learned from his lifelong study of leadership. There’s more to leadership than being in charge or having a title, and the 21 laws cover requirements such as influence, trust, and the importance of serving others. For a leader, success means achieving your vision. Following the laws will help you develop into the kind of person who can get things done.
The laws of leadership are broadly applicable. You can use them in any context, whether professional or personal.
There are several important things to consider when studying the laws:
Here are the 21 irrefutable laws. (Shortform note: For the sake of clarity, we’ve grouped the laws by theme. Because each is independent, you don’t need to follow them in order.)
These laws describe universal truths about the way the world works.
Law #1: Leaders Are Capped by Their Leadership Ability. If you’re not a good leader, no matter how good you are at anything else, you’ll never reach your full potential.
Law #7: Leaders Are Respected, and People Follow the Strongest and Most Respected Leader. By nature, people follow those who they respect, and those who are stronger than themselves. If there is more than one leader vying for followers, the followers (and weaker leaders) will flock to the strongest leader.
Law #9: Leaders Attract People Similar to Themselves. People are drawn to people who are similar to themselves. Therefore, leaders attract other leaders.
Law #13: Leaders Lead by Example. By nature, followers copy the behavior and values of their leaders. Leaders demonstrate the path to success, and followers imitate because they want to be part of the success too.
Law #14: Leaders Are Followed, Visions Aren’t. People follow leaders, not ideas. A person with a compelling vision is just a person. A leader is someone who can get others to an end (and followers may not even care specifically what that end is).
Law #9: Leaders Attract People Similar to Themselves: During the Spanish-American War, Theodore Roosevelt recruited an all-volunteer cavalry company. It was composed of two different types of people, wealthy aristocrats and cowboys. Roosevelt was born a wealthy aristocrat and later in life became a cowboy, so he attracted people from both groups.
These laws describe the ideal character traits of leaders.
Law #2: Leaders Influence Others. A leader who doesn’t affect anyone is just a person in charge. To get people to follow you, you need them to respect you and trust your judgement.
Law #5: Leaders Serve Others. Effective leaders realize that part of their job is to serve. When your followers know that you care about them, they’re loyal, and they’re happier, which makes them more productive and inspires them to do good work.
Law #6: Leaders Are Trustworthy and Have Good Character. No one will follow you if they don’t trust you. Trust is hard to gain and easy to lose, and once it’s lost, it may not be recoverable.
Law #10: Leaders Connect with Others. Leaders engage emotionally with their followers. This engagement and connection shows their followers that they care about them (recall the benefits of this from Law #5, leaders serve others).
Law #10: Leaders Connect with Others: Herb Keller, Southwest Airlines founder and executive chairman of the board, always connected with his staff. On Boss’s Day, the employees took out a full-page ad in USA Today and wrote him a thank-you note. They specifically thanked him for remembering all of their names, listening, and “being a friend, not just a boss.”
These laws describe how leaders should behave.
Law #3: Leaders Develop Leadership Ability Over Time. It takes years to become a good leader, and there are no shortcuts.
Law #4: Leaders Prepare and Plan. Anyone can be put in charge and given a title. Real leaders plan for endeavors in advance, in excruciating detail, so that the outcome will be successful.
Law #8: Leaders Pay Attention to Intangibles. Leaders notice and intuit things that others don’t. They consider things such as morale, motivation, momentum, and timing.
Law #15: Leaders Never Give Up. Leaders seek victory at all costs. They don’t give up and they’re never content with failure.
Law #16: Leaders Create Momentum. Leaders recognize that an organization tends to stay at its current state of motion (whether that’s standstill, slumping, or growing). Leaders alone can manipulate the direction of motion.
Law #17: Leaders Prioritize. Leaders know that time is a finite resource. They arrange their schedules and delegate strategically.
Law #18: Leaders Sacrifice. Leaders acknowledge that it’s impossible to achieve anything without continued sacrifice.
Law #19: Leaders Factor in Timing. Leaders consider current circumstances when making decisions.
Law #15: Leaders Never Give Up: Whenever the Chicago Bulls would scrimmage, the team that had Michael Jordan on it would nearly always win, no matter who else was on the team. Jordan’s commitment to victory was so strong, and his leadership skills so great, that he could nearly always win, regardless of circumstance.
These laws describe how leaders should interact with other leaders.
Law #11: Leaders Build a Leadership Team. No one is good at everything, and an individual’s reach is limited. Leaders build an inner circle of people with diverse skills.
Law #12: Leaders Empower Others, Especially Other Leaders. Leaders know that sharing power (for example, sharing responsibility, decision-making, and resources) is the only way to develop other leaders.
Law #20: Leaders Lead Leaders. Leaders recruit and develop other leaders, because when a leader joins a team, they bring along all of their followers. Growth is exponential.
Law #21: Leaders Have a Succession Plan. Since leaders lead people, their influence can extend beyond their own lifetime—if they plan properly.
Law #12: Leaders Empower Others, Especially Other Leaders: Abraham Lincoln regularly empowered his generals during the Civil War. When Lincoln gave General George G. Meade command of the Army of the Potomac, he wrote Meade to say that he had full confidence that Meade could do the job, and that the government wouldn’t be micromanaging the army. Lincoln told him, “Your army is free to act as you may deem proper under the circumstances as they arise… All forces within the sphere of your operations will be held subject to your orders.”
Everything that you do in life involves other people, whether it's running a business, playing a sport, pursuing a hobby, or simply being with your family. To most effectively interact with others, you need leadership skills. In The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, John C. Maxwell outlines rules to follow to increase your leadership abilities.
To be most effective, you must apply all 21 laws when acting as a leader. However, no one is good at everything. (Even John C. Maxwell says that there are five he hasn’t mastered.) Assemble a leadership team (Law #11) containing people who excel at the laws you struggle with. That way, there will always be someone on the team who can effectively apply every single law.
There are four concepts to keep in mind when learning, practicing, and applying the laws:
(Shortform note: The original edition of The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership was published in 1998. This ten-year-anniversary edition drops two laws (combining the principles with other existing laws) and adds two new ones. Some of the examples are also updated from the original edition.)
Your ability to be effective at anything is capped by your leadership ability. This is because anything you do that involves people involves leadership, and nearly every endeavor in life involves people. Think of the importance of leadership in a sport like basketball. If your dribbling skills are level 6, but your leadership ability is level 1, you’re never going to become great. You might be very good at dribbling, but the game also involves teamwork and interacting with others.
Leadership abilities limit organizations just as much as they limit individuals. That’s why, when an organization is doing poorly, often the first step is to change the leader. For example, when a professional sports team is struggling, the coaches are often fired.
How do you improve your effectiveness or the effectiveness of your organization? There are two main factors, and, as we’ll see, the second is far more important:
You can increase your dedication to success by learning to excel in your field. For example, if you’re running a restaurant business, you can work on the menu, the speed of service, the schtick, and so on.
Of the two factors, this factor is less important because at a certain point, the law of diminishing returns kicks in. You can put a lot of effort into being successful and still fail to get the results you want.
To improve your leadership ability, work on the other 20 laws that follow.
Of the two factors, this factor is more important because leadership ability is a multiplier:
Two entrepreneurial brothers, Dick and Maurice, were looking for a business opportunity. Unfortunately, even though they were innovative, they were both lousy leaders.
The brothers opened a theatre but struggled to even make rent. Next, they opened a drive-through restaurant. The restaurant was successful; so successful that they were able to move to a larger location. In this new location, the brothers innovated: they changed the service method from drive-through to walk-up, focused on hamburgers, and sped up their service. They were skilled managers and had good ideas. Things were going so well they decided to franchise. However, franchising required leadership ability, which neither of them had. They only managed to sell franchises to 15 buyers, only ten of whom actually opened restaurants.
Ray Kroc worked for a company that sold milkshake machines. He did business with Dick and Maurice and also saw potential in franchising. Unlike the brothers, he did have leadership ability.
Kroc bought a franchise, recruited an all-star team with strong leaders, and eventually bought exclusive rights to McDonald’s from the brothers. He got 100 restaurants open over 4 years, and after eight years, he was up to 500—50 times more restaurants than the brothers had managed.
Effectiveness is made up of two factors—dedication to success and leadership ability.
On a scale of 1-10, where would you rank your leadership ability? Consider: When there's a problem at work, do you brainstorm ways to solve it, or do you turn to others?
On a scale of 1-10, what is your current dedication to success level?
Multiply your scores. What is your overall effectiveness?
Would you increase your score more by working on your leadership, or on your success level? Why?
Influence is one of the most critical qualities in a leader. If you don’t have influence, you don’t have followers, and without followers, you’re not a leader. You’re just a person with title or rank, or a person going first.
Followers consider several factors when choosing whether or not to follow (or be influenced by) a leader:
There are five myths about leadership related to the importance of leadership:
Leading voluntary organizations is a good test of leadership abilities because the leader has no leverage. Military leaders or bosses can pull rank or dock salaries, but volunteers are only there because they want to be. If they don’t like the leader, they don’t have to follow, they can just leave.
At one point, Mother Teresa was one of the most influential people in the world. A good example of her influence was when she gave a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in 1994. She spoke about family values and abortion and offended nearly everyone in attendance, but they listened to her (instead of heckling her or leaving). People respected her because of her positive character traits, background, and track record. Most people even applauded when she was finished speaking.
Years before Abraham Lincoln became president, he put together a volunteer company for the militia. Usually, whoever organized the company took charge, so he became captain. He had title and position—unfortunately, he didn’t know anything about the military.
Lincoln once had to guide his men through a gate. He couldn’t remember any of the proper commands and ended up shouting: “This company is dismissed for two minutes, when it will fall in again on the other side of the gate.” This and other instances of his lack of military knowledge affected his influence.
Other people were more knowledgeable and confident, and their influence helped them gain rank. Lincoln’s influence decreased as time went on, and he finished his military service as a private.
Are people born leaders? Leadership ability is based in skill, not inherent talent. Leadership can be learned over time, and that willingness and ability to learn is what separates leaders and followers.
There are five phases to developing leadership:
There are no shortcuts to applying this law. Learning to be a leader is a process, not an aha moment. While one-off conferences and formative single experiences contribute to learning, there are no timesaving tricks. Learning to lead requires committed practice.
As a child, Theodore Roosevelt was weak and timid. He had asthma, bad eyesight, and was small for his age. Sound anything like the cowboy president who once gave a one-hour speech immediately after being shot? Roosevelt learned to become a leader, and he did it over time.
When Roosevelt was 12, his father told him that he was smart but his physical weakness was holding him back. Roosevelt began training his body and mind every day. He practiced martial arts, weight-trained, and played a variety of sports. He went to Harvard and held a variety of civil service positions before becoming president.
Roosevelt continued his daily practice while president and accomplished many things, including winning a Nobel Prize and helping the US become a world power. Even after his presidency, he never stopped learning. He led a scientific expedition to Africa and explored Brazil’s River of Doubt. When he was found dead in his bed, there was a book under his pillow. He squeezed learning into every last moment of his existence.
(Shortform note: Unlike in other chapters, no failed application is given.)
The best leaders invest in their followers, so as a leader, you should create opportunities for your followers to learn this law alongside you. Create a culture that values personal growth and leadership development, and facilitate development activities such as getting trainers for your followers, or sharing your own expertise as a mentor. When you create an environment where growth is valued, it will exponentially increase. And this growth culture will start attracting high-potential people.
The third phase of developing leadership is daily, targeted practice.
What phase of leadership development are you currently in? Are you in the ignorance phase? Are you already practicing? How do you know you’re in this phase?
Choose a skill you’d like to develop.
What is something you can do, once, to improve this skill (for example, attend a conference, interview an expert)?
What can you do, daily, to improve at this skill (for example, read a book on the subject for 20 minutes a day)?
Leaders plan and anticipate because they’re always aware that their followers depend on them. Leaders of large organizations particularly need to keep this law in mind. Decisions affect more people, and it’s more difficult to coordinate changes, with a larger team.
Here are some guidelines to using this law:
In addition to the four guidelines above, John C. Maxwell created a 9-step planning process to project completion. When Maxwell was leading a church in 1975, he encountered a problem—the church’s attendance had more than doubled, and the building was too small to accommodate everyone. He executed the following steps to achieve the goal:
In 1911, two explorations raced to the South Pole. One was led by Norweigan explorer Roald Amundsen.
Amundsen was a planner. He spoke with other Arctic explorers and copied their methods. He recruited skiers and dog handlers, selected the best available gear, and spent countless hours setting up supply depots. His team travelled six hours a day by dogsled and reached the South Pole more than a month before his competitor’s team.
The second expedition to the South Pole was led by British naval officer Robert Falcon Scott. Scott approached the journey very differently to Amundsen. He chose to travel by motorized sledges and ponies. The sledges stopped working after five days and the ponies didn’t survive the cold temperatures, so Scott’s men had to carry their supplies themselves. Scott hadn’t secured good gear, and his men suffered from frostbite and snow blindness. Scott also hadn’t properly located or stocked his supply depots, so everyone was dehydrated and hungry (which was exacerbated by Scott having decided to bring a fifth man at the last minute, when he’d only prepared enough supplies for four). Scott’s expedition did make it to the South Pole, but everyone died on the journey back.
Do a leader’s motivations matter? Is the end result more important than whatever happened to achieve it?
The author believes that true leadership is measured by how much we serve others, not how far we advance ourselves. If you’re in charge of people, you’re affecting them, and never neutrally. You’re always having an additive (positive) or subtractive (negative) effect. Often subtractors aren’t aware that they’re negatively affecting others. However, leaders who positively affect their followers are nearly always doing it intentionally, because it takes work. By nature human beings are selfish. To care for others, it takes conscious effort to prioritize their needs above your own. And as a leader, you’re often the only person who can serve people in a particular way.
When you serve others, you benefit too. Serving creates a sense of fulfillment in the leader, and helps her put together a cohesive, loyal team free of conflict and sans followers with questionable motivations.
There are four guidelines to applying this law:
Each week, the chairman of Fed-Mart schedules a meeting to purposely “raise hell” about problems in stores to see how his managers react. One manager took credit for his employees’ achievements and blamed them for problems. The manager was fired. The manager didn’t care about his employees, and the chairman knew that successes and failures don’t rest on a single person’s shoulders.
Sinegal is the CEO of Costco. He was successful because he kept costs low, didn’t advertise, prioritized high volume sales, and offered a limited number of products. These ideas weren’t that revolutionary, though—where he stands out is in his treatment of employees.
Sinegal pays his employees well (42% more than the company’s chief rival pays) and offers good benefits. He has an open-door policy, knows all of his employees’ names, and once flew to San Francisco when a Costco exec was hospitalized. In short, he cares about his employees. And as a result, he’s collected good, productive team members who are loyal to the company.
Like Law #2 (leaders influence), this law is critical. Trustworthiness is the most important trait in a leader. If you don’t have your followers’ trust, or you’ve broken it, you can’t influence people.
You build trust by having good character. If you’re honest, caring, fair, hardworking, and/or a variety of other traits followers find appealing, they’ll trust and follow you. If you lie and cheat, followers will turn away. Your character communicates three things about your trustworthiness as a leader to your followers:
You can measure your follower’s trust in your character by how much they share with you. If they share both positive and negative opinions, and both good and bad news with you, they trust you. You can measure how much your peers and other leaders trust your character by how much responsibility they give you.
Trust is hard to build and easy to break. That said, everyone’s going to make mistakes and break trust at some point in their lives. The key to regaining trust is demonstrating good character. Admit your mistakes. Do better next time. If your mistake was related to ability (for example, you’re an Olympic soccer goalie and you missed a save), it’s easier to recover from. If your mistake was related to character (for example, you lied about the status of a project), it will be harder or impossible to regain trust.
Initially, the American population supported the Vietnam War, in spite of large casualties. Americans believed that the war was important to the fight against communism.
However, over time public support eroded. The war was handled badly, it dragged on even after leaders realized they couldn’t win, and McNamara and President Johnson misled or outright lied to the country about how things were going. Once people realized that they weren’t being told the truth, their faith in their leaders dissolved and they protested. McNamara resigned. Johnson didn’t run for reelection. But the distrust didn’t end with those specific leaders. Even today, Americans still distrust their political leaders. (Shortform note: this book was published in 2007).
When John C. Maxwell was the senior pastor of Skyline Church, he accidentally broke trust with his congregation. He made three major decisions (fired someone, cancelled a service, and changed part of the Christmas show) without following proper processes. Usually, any decision-making occurred only after Maxwell had come up with a plan, consulted his other leaders, and given them and himself enough time to influence the congregation. However, in this case, he made the decisions quickly and by himself. His followers began to question his leadership.
However, because Maxwell had been successfully leading the church for eight years, he was able to recover. He publicly apologized, asked for forgiveness, and regained his people’s trust.
To develop your character, focus on three main traits:
People follow morally upstanding leaders that they trust. What does your character communicate to your followers?
What positive personality traits do your followers admire in you?
How do you gain the respect of your followers? Remember that making good decisions, admitting your mistakes, and prioritizing others all contribute.
What might be holding you back from gaining the full respect of your followers? (Do you fail to admit when you’re wrong? Do you tell half truths?)
How can you improve the message your character sends to followers?
By nature, people follow those who are more skilled than they are. When this principle is applied to leadership, it translates to: people will follow the person whose leadership they respect most. Even other leaders will follow another leader, if the other leader is stronger. And the better of a leader you are, the more easily you can assess the leadership ability of others.
There are several ways to gain respect (and therefore followers):
To assess whether or not you’re respected:
If you’re not respected, your followers will make excuses, avoid doing what you’ve asked, challenge you, or leave.
If people aren’t following you, it may not only be because you lack respect—it could also be because they’re stronger leaders than you. Even if you have a great vision or plan, you’re not going to be able to take charge of people who are better at leadership than you are. It’s very rare that a strong leader will choose to follow a weaker leader. In those cases, it’s typically out of respect for past accomplishments, or because of hierarchy.
These examples about free agency demonstrate a lack of loyalty:
Harriet Tubman had a lot of things working against her. She started life as a slave, suffered a serious head injury as a child, was a woman and an African American at a time when neither was respected, was uneducated, and was physically unimposing. None of these things particularly commanded respect. However, Tubman knew how to use this law—she was brave, loyal, and served others.
In 1849, Tubman fled slavery with the help of the Underground Railroad, a network of people who helped slaves escape the South. Once she was out, she made nineteen trips back to lead over three hundred people to freedom. She had a perfect track record—she never lost anyone—and because of this, followers respected her leadership even more. Even her enemies acknowledged her leadership: Southern whites put a $12,000 price on her head.
Leaders view the world differently than other people do. They look beyond empirical data and consider intangibles such as morale, momentum, and chemistry. They pay attention to the world, notice things others miss, and “read” their environments.
Leaders are attuned to many intangibles and can “read” the following:
Leadership often calls on you to make a decision before you have all the information. What you don’t know, you make up for in intuition. Colin Powell (retired army general and former secretary of state) purposefully collects only 40-60% of available data before making a decision.
This law is one of the most difficult, but everyone possesses some level of intuition. People are typically intuitive in their areas of strength (for example, a fashion designer knows how to match colors without even thinking about it). Therefore, natural leaders have a head start with this law, but everyone can work on it. Intuition comes from two things, talent and learning. Not everyone will have natural talent, but everyone who’s willing to learn can develop intuition.
One of the battalions in the Vietnam War was nicknamed “worst of the Sixth.” The troops were incompetent, morale was low, and the battalion had scored only 16/100 on its annual inspection. What had happened to this battalion? Poor leadership—particularly a failure to consider intangibles such as morale.
One of the battalion’s commanders never inspected his troops. The officers didn’t care about anything, men were dying, and no one was following security protocols. Instead of trying to turn this around, the commander left the battalion, blaming its failure on the troops.
U.S. Army General H. Norman Schwarzkopf was the incoming commander of the “worst of the Sixth” battalion. He quickly assessed the group and realized that most of the problems weren’t to do with the troops; they were the fault of the outgoing commander.
Schwarzkopf did everything the outgoing commander hadn’t—he studied the troops and used his leadership intuition to improve intangibles. He noticed the officers were indifferent. He noticed that no one was following basic security procedures. He noticed that sometimes when men died, it was needless—not good for morale!
Schwarzkopf retrained the troops, boosted morale, and developed leaders. The group passed the next inspection, which further boosted morale, and eventually the battalion was assigned some of the most difficult missions.
Reading people is one of the most important abilities for a leader to develop. If you struggle with this, you can improve it by:
Everyone is intuitive in their area of strength. Once you’ve learned to trust your intuition in one area, you can start developing it in leadership.
What is your greatest strength?
Imagine you’re doing an activity that involves your greatest strength. You come up against a problem. What do your instincts tell you to do?
Now, reflect on your instinctive reaction. How did you arrive at it? Did you “read” situations, resources, trends, people, or yourself? Did you know what to do because you’d seen the same problem many times before?
By nature, people are attracted to people who are similar to them. It doesn’t matter who you want to attract; you’re going to attract people who have a lot of fundamental things in common with you.
Consider your friends, followers, and the people around you. You’ll probably notice some similarities:
If you let this law run unchecked, you’ll end up with a team of people who all have the same strengths and weaknesses as you. Your team will be about as effective as a soccer team made up entirely of goalies.
To build a team of people who aren’t like you, you have to change yourself so you attract different people. Changing yourself may be just a matter of increasing your skills. For example, if you want to attract more and better leaders, become a better leader yourself. You may also need to take a look at your character. If you’re attracting negative, immoral people, consider your own values.
This law is a phenomenon rather than a rule you can break or follow, so the rule will always apply itself unless you actively work against it. Here are two examples of the law at work, one with positive consequences, one with negative:
This law can’t be “disobeyed”—you will attract people similar to yourself whether you like it or not. However, while you can’t choose who you attract, you can choose who to put on your team, and there are other ways to attract people besides this law.
For example, in the NFL, the team owners and coaches are mainly white. Members of the league wanted diversity, so they put in place a quota—at least one minority candidate had to be included in the interview process for head coaches. The policy helped hire more African American coaches. (However, other than race, the African American coaches have a similar background to all of the other coaches in the league.)
Leading is more than just giving instructions and sending off your followers to execute them—leaders need to emotionally engage and connect with their followers. People won’t follow you until you move them with emotion.
Even when leading a group, you have to relate to people as individuals. Think of a baseball team as nine individual players instead of as a faceless team.
Here are some tips on how to connect with people:
Pitfall alert! Connecting is not the responsibility of followers, it is the responsibility of leaders. Don’t expect your followers to come to you. Initiate contact yourself. Use a technique called “walking through the crowd”—literally walk through a crowd and get to know people. Learn names, listen to people, relate to them. Make time when you’re available to others. The stronger your relationships with others, the more you will connect with them.
Like Law #5 (serve others), when you’ve successfully connected with your followers, they will work harder for you and be loyal.
Four days after 9/11, Bush went to visit Ground Zero. He talked to first responders and shook their hands. He thanked them for their work and listened to their stories. When he was speaking, the crowd shouted that they couldn’t hear him, and he responded, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” Americans were angry, scared, and mourning. Seeing Bush in person, or hearing reports of his interactions with frontline workers, made people feel connected with and cared for.
Bush handled Hurricane Katrina very differently. He didn’t visit New Orleans. Instead, he flew over it in Air Force One. He didn’t meet anyone affected by the disaster in person. He didn’t address the people at all, even via another level of government. The mayor of New Orleans complained in press conferences that he wasn’t getting any help. The population felt that Bush was indifferent to their problems. Bush wasn’t indifferent. He contributed to the rebuilding process (by prompting Congress to give money) and the mayor of New Orleans eventually publicly thanked him. But because Bush didn’t directly connect with people, he broke this law.
Nobody’s good at everything. Nobody achieves greatness by themselves. A leader’s success is determined by her team.
There are limits to what you can achieve personally. Once you’ve budgeted and scheduled all your time and energy, you need help to extend your reach and continue impacting people.
A leadership team can be within an organization (for example, everyone on a board of directors) and it can refer to the circle of the people you know. Therefore, most people already have a leadership team, though they may not have been intentional about creating it. Subconsciously, leaders recruit people they like or people they’re comfortable around. Consider what you want to do and if the people around you are capable of helping you get there. If your team can’t help you reach your leadership potential, then none of your people will reach their potential either.
There are some traits to look for in potential teammates, listed below. You’ll notice that many of them are leadership traits—when you’re putting together your leadership team, you should particularly look for other leaders.
Once you’ve collected your leadership team, it’s time to develop the individuals by doing the following:
If you’re part of a large organization and have many followers, it’s impractical to include everyone who works for you in your inner circle. Narrow down your circle to a smaller leadership team when:
When John C. Maxwell arrived at Skyline Church, attendance was flatlining. Maxwell met with every staff member to assess their skills, and he discovered that none of them were strong leaders. In an organization like a church, the staff members are the leadership team. Because the previous pastor hadn’t surrounded himself with a strong leadership team, the church wasn’t attracting any new members. The only way to quickly strengthen the leadership team was to replace the staff with better leaders.
Lance Armstrong was only able to win the Tour de France seven times in a row because he had a stellar leadership team.
On his own, Armstrong came up with inefficient training routines. He needed Chris Carmichael, his coach, to help him. He also wasn’t good at tactics. Johan Bruyneel, sports director and master tactician, took over that job. The Armstrong team also included other cyclists who rode with Armstrong, and sponsors and equipment suppliers.
A leader must perform, and Lance delivered every single time, thanks, in large part, to his leadership team.
A leader’s success is determined by the people on her leadership team.
Who are the people currently in your inner circle? Consider family members, employees, mentors, and so on.
Your team probably contains several people who are good at the same things you are. What are their strengths? Are they influential or morally upstanding? What skills does each person bring to the group?
What skills does the team as a whole lack?
Think of three people (at least one of whom is a leader) who possess the skills your team lacks. Consider adding them to your team.
To lead well you need to share your power, especially with other leaders. If you give people responsibility, authority, and resources, and help them develop as leaders, they’ll achieve. Believe in people, because when you, as a leader, believe in them, they’ll believe in themselves.
If you don’t follow this law, your organization will suffer. Followers will give up on their work, or leave.
There are three reasons leaders struggle with this law:
In 1903, Henry Ford cofounded Ford Motor Company. His goal was to build a car that was affordable for the average American. He came up with the Model T and fell so in love with it that he refused to change anything about the design. One day, his designers presented a prototype of a new and improved model, and Ford was so angry he tore the prototype’s doors off and destroyed the rest of the car with his bare hands.
Ford wasn’t only protective of his designs. He didn’t like giving others authority over anything. He created a “sociological department” to keep an eye on his employee’s personal lives. He undermined his leaders, even his son Edsel, who was president of the company.
The company suffered. In 1914, Ford Motor Company had produced almost half the cars in the US, and by 1931, the company’s market share had almost halved. The best employees left.
The company got another chance when Henry Ford II, Henry Ford’s grandson, took over the company and convinced his grandfather to step away. Ford II knew he needed help to run the company and looked for talent. He hooked up with several strong leaders and they turned the company around. However, Ford II then made the same mistake as his grandfather—he failed to consider this law. He felt threatened by the strong leaders. He pitted them against each other and demoted them when they were most successful. He couldn’t share power with others, and the company and its employees suffered, just like they had under his grandfather.
Most presidents select their cabinet members from their allies. Abraham Lincoln chose people who disagreed with him, his political rivals, and his antagonists—people who were potentially as strong or stronger than him. He was confident enough in his own leadership that he had no problem giving power to other leaders.
Lincoln empowered others throughout his presidency. He didn’t micromanage or look over the shoulders of his generals. When Lincoln gave General George G. Meade command of the Potomac army, Lincoln told him that it was a very important command, that he believed Meade could handle it, and that Meade had full control of the army—Lincoln wouldn’t interfere. While Meade wasn’t perfect, he did a great job with his first major assignment—Gettysburg.
To empower people, you need to believe in them. If you have trouble with this, reflect on your followers. Consider their positive qualities, strengths, and potential. Think about what they could do if they reached their potential, and then help them reach it.
Empowering people also involves sharing authority. If you have trouble with this, start by identifying your best people, and then set them up to be successful. Help them choose goals, give them the resources and responsibility they need to achieve the goals, and if their first try fails, jump in and help them to succeed. Once you see people doing a good job with the power you’ve given them, it will be easier to share power the next time.
When leaders do things, people copy them. If the thing is objectively positive, the leader and followers have made the world a better place. If the thing is negative, people are still going to copy the leader because even if they think before acting, they can’t necessarily see far enough ahead to assess the effects of an action on the world. Therefore, as a leader, you need to carefully consider your actions, keeping in mind that they’ll be multiplied by all of your followers.
Leading by example is the best way to communicate vision. By nature, followers find it difficult to keep track of big picture things, so talking (or any form of communicating) about a vision will never be the most effective way to share it. Vision plans ahead and provides mission and purpose, which is too future-oriented for followers. Leaders must pair vision with practicality, which provides strategy and a plan for how to get to the conditions imagined in the vision. Therefore, leaders should communicate vision by visibly modeling the behaviors necessary to achieve the vision.
Leading by example is especially important in uncertain times. Uncertainty is not inherently problematic. Uncertainty means an organization needs leadership, because uncertainty is caused by intangibles, and leaders are good at intangibles (Law #8, leaders pay attention to intangibles).
As you work on this law, remember these things:
The achievements of the Easy Company paratroopers were so noteworthy that there is both a book and TV series about them, but Easy Company was only one of many elite units in World War II. There were plenty of other units with talented soldiers. Easy Company stands out because of their leadership, both good and bad.
During training, Easy Company was commanded by Herbert Sobel. Sobel was brutal, unfair, and sadistic, but his biggest flaw was that he didn’t lead by example. He was less fit and competent than his men, and he made no effort to improve. He once tried to teach his men a lesson by stealing their rifles while they slept, and accidentally stole another company’s rifles instead. He didn’t even realize until the other company showed up while Sobel was berating his own men, who all still had their rifles. Sobel was such a bad leader that his men undermined him, made fun of him, and joked that they would shoot him as soon as they got into combat.
Easy Company also had a commander named Dick Winters, who held the Distinguished Service Cross and was considered a great leader. His philosophy was “officers go first”—he embodied this law.
When Easy Company needed to take the town of Carentan from the Germans, it got into an ugly situation. As the men approached the town, the Germans pinned them down in the ditches with machine guns. Winters ordered them to move—if they didn’t, they would eventually die—but the men stayed huddled in the ditches. Winters ran through machine-gun fire from one ditch to the other to coax and kick his men, and finally ran into the middle of the road and shouted at his men to move. They all did, and Easy Company helped successfully take the town. Because Winters did the exact thing that he needed his men to do, they saw that it was possible and followed.
From the point of view of a leader, the order of operations is 1) find a vision, 2) find followers. The follower’s order of operations is opposite—1) find a leader, 2) find a vision. Followers are less interested in the cause than the leader. It’s a common myth that if a cause is noble or objectively the right course of action, people will follow it. In fact, if a cause is good but a leader isn’t, people will go find a new leader for that same cause.
Why does this happen? You, as a leader, are a messenger, and so you’re tied to the message. When you propose a vision, it’s associated with you. If you’re a credible messenger, then the message goes through. If you’re not, people will look for a more attractive mail carrier.
This law is why famous people are hired to endorse products, and why actors support causes. People think, “Oh, if Tiger Woods likes it, then it must be good or have value.” If you trust the person who’s giving you the message, then you trust that they’ve considered and/or fact-checked the message, and determined that it’s valid.
Consider the four cases below. In every case, you’ll see that buying in to the leader is the most important factor.
The author doesn’t provide an extended example of failure to follow this law. He mentions a few shorter examples:
When the people of India wanted freedom from the British, they turned to Mahatma Gandhi to lead them. Gandhi had fought the South African apartheid government for over twenty years for the rights of Indians and other minorities, and people respected and believed in him. Interestingly, Gandhi’s vision to achieve independence was nonviolent civil disobedience. Up until this point, the people who wanted to follow Gandhi had been using violence. Gandhi was such a powerful leader that his followers didn’t care that his strategy was the exact opposite of theirs—they wanted to follow him anyway.
After the British massacre at Amritsar, Gandhi asked his followers to respond nonviolently. He asked people to avoid foreign-made clothes and only wear homespun. He decided to use a march to protest the Salt Act and use this as a rallying point. Not all of these requests aligned exactly with his followers’ strategies or visions, but the followers followed him anyway, according to this law. India gained home rule in 1947.
You can develop credibility with individual people in many ways, including developing your relationship with the individual, giving them resources, helping them reach personal goals, and by applying Laws #6 (trustworthiness), #13 (lead by example), and #20 (develop them as leaders).
Good leaders accept only victory. Failure or quitting is not an option. Good leaders don’t even bother with a Plan B, because Plan A will for sure lead to victory. Victory-seeking leaders are responsible, passionate, creative, and utterly committed to their vision.
One of the best places to study this law is in sports—often leaders are behind the scenes, but coaches are out in the open. You can immediately see the outcome of their decisions when their teams score or win the game.
Victory requires all three of the following:
Before Winston Churchill became prime minister, he began expressing his opinions about the danger of Nazis. Because Churchill practiced Law #8 (leaders pay attention to intangibles), he anticipated that Great Britain was going to have to fight the Nazis at some point. Other British leaders didn’t listen or didn’t act, and eventually Churchill became prime minister. In his first speech, he said: “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.” Churchill wouldn’t compromise. He wouldn’t accept a deal with Hitler. The only thing he would accept was winning.
To win, Churchill deployed troops against Mussolini, allied himself with Stalin even though he hated communism, and developed a relationship with President Franklin Roosevelt, who he believed would help him win. Roosevelt also practiced this law (for example, he dealt with the impossible situation that was the Great Depression), and his leadership, combined with Churchill’s, helped win the war.
(Shortform note: Unlike in other chapters, no failed application is given.)
If you struggle to harness a winner’s mentality, it may be because your leadership, vision, or organization is wrong. If you’re not the right leader for a certain vision, find a new vision and/or a new organization.
Sometimes, momentum can be the only thing that makes the difference between success and failure. Think of momentum like a freight train. It takes a lot of energy to get the train moving from a standstill. Initially, it moves slowly. Until it speeds up, even small obstacles like twigs can stop it. But once it gets going, it can plow through anything.
Keep in mind that momentum doesn’t always bring positivity. The train can be full of money, or it can be full of garbage. Whether or not you want the freight, once the train is moving fast, it’s hard to stop it.
There are some keys to momentum:
The cofounder of Pixar was Ed Catmull, a failed animator who studied physics and math and eventually found his calling in computer animation. Catmull developed new software and dreamed of making computer-animated full-length films. George Lucas hired Catmull and Catmull put together a strong team including John Lasseter, who had formerly worked at Disney. Catmull’s team produced the “Genesis” sequence in Star Trek II, and while it was groundbreaking, Catmull still wasn’t able to convince Lucas to let him make a feature film. Though Catmull’s division had passion, resources, and a good team, it didn’t have momentum. Lucas sold Catmull’s division to Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs named the division Pixar and put five million dollars into it. Pixar made a short film called Luxo Jr., which is about a “parent” lamp and a “child” lamp. At the time, computer-animated films were mainly attended by industry experts who wanted to know technical information about how the film was made. After the first audience saw Luxo Jr., one of the first questions was whether the “parent” lamp was mom or dad. Luxo Jr. wasn’t just showing off new technology, it was telling a story and connecting emotionally with an audience. The film was nominated for an Academy Award. This first success moved Pixar forward, but only slowly. They did good work and won an Oscar, but still only had enough money to survive.
Lasseter tried pitching Disney a one-hour animated special. Instead, Disney asked for three full-length computer animated films. This first break started Pixar’s momentum—and once it had momentum, it couldn’t be stopped. The first film they made was Toy Story, and while there were obstacles, Pixar had enough forward momentum to overcome them. The movie was far more successful than even Jobs had predicted and this success buoyed several more—17 Oscars and 42 patents (Shortform note: As of the time of writing in 2007).
Leaders create momentum by paying attention to intangibles such as motivation.
Think about your organization. What factors are negatively affecting your employees’ motivation? How do you know?
How can you remove these factors by creating momentum?
Being busy doesn’t necessarily equate to being productive, achieving, or accomplishing. Time is finite, so good leaders regularly evaluate how they’re spending it. They choose to focus on activities that help them achieve their goals, and drop activities that don’t.
Some people are reluctant to apply this law, for a few reasons:
The Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) can help you prioritize. Rank your activities by importance and focus on the top 20%. These top activities will give you 80% of your results, so spend 80% of your time on them. For example, say you have 10 customers. The top 2 will give you 80% of your sales, so spend 80% of your time on them.
Maxwell gives three R’s to keep in mind when prioritizing:
The very best application of this law is to address multiple priorities with a single action. If you can do one action but satisfy several priorities, then you’ll be able to increase your focus without using up any extra time.
For many years, John C. Maxwell lived in San Diego. He loved the city and planned to stay there for his entire life. Since his job involved speaking, he had to travel a lot. One day he asked his assistant to calculate how much time he spent on planes, and discovered that he was spending the equivalent of 27 days a year traveling just between San Diego and Dallas (to make connections). He then came up against one of the barriers to prioritizing—doing something he didn’t want to do, which in this case meant moving to a more central city. (He eventually moved to Atlanta.)
When Jack Welch took over General Electric in 1981, it was a good company. The stock was $4 per share and the company was eleventh best on the stock market. But good wasn’t great, and Welch wanted great. Welch reevaluated the company’s priorities and used a version of the 80/20 rule to take the company to the next level.
Until Welch came along, GE included 350 strategic businesses. Welch looked at all of them and asked himself if they could be number 1 or 2 in the world marketplace. Any that couldn’t were closed or divested. Welch used the money he’d made selling the businesses to invest in the ones that remained. By 1989, there were only 14 businesses left—all of which were first or second in the world marketplace. When Welch retired, GE shares were more than $80.
Non-leaders sometimes have the misconception that leadership is pleasant—you get freedom, power, and wealth. While some leaders do get these things, the constant among successful leaders is that they’ve earned their success through sacrifice.
Here are some things to keep in mind to successfully apply this law:
Even if you don’t personally witness the payoff of your sacrifice, someone in the future does. For example, say you’re an uneducated laborer. You work hard to make enough money to send your kids to school. Because your kids had this opportunity, they’re in a better position to set up their own kids for success. And so on down the generations.
Sports teams rarely win championships two years in a row. This is because their leaders often think that if the team wins one year, they can win the next by doing the same thing. Continuing to do what worked in the past is easier than making new sacrifices, but it never pays off. Often, the competition is fiercer the next year, and by staying stagnant, last year’s champions can’t compete.
When Martin Luther King Jr. was studying at Crozer Seminary, he experienced two formative leadership moments: he learned about Gandhi’s work, and was elected president of his senior class. Soon after King moved to Montgomery, Alabama to work for a Baptist Church, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger. African American leaders arranged a one-day transit system boycott and created the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). King was elected president. King and the MIA organized and extended the transit boycott and negotiated with the city for rights for African Americans. King was arrested, indicted, and someone threw a bomb on his porch. Finally, the US Supreme Court banned segregated seating. King had achieved his goals, but he’d had to put up with a lot to get there.
King continued to make sacrifices that allowed him to lead. He received death threats. He met with presidents. He was arrested and jailed. He led half a million people on a peaceful march in Washington DC. He was stoned and stabbed. He won a Nobel Peace Prize. Finally, he was assassinated. The night before he was killed, he gave a speech talking about how he knew something bad was coming, but he had accepted it because he knew that leadership required sacrifice.
Good leaders not only need to make good decisions, they need to make these decisions at an appropriate time. To be good at leadership timing, you must keep in mind the other laws of leadership, such as that leaders must plan and pay attention to intangibles; and embody the desirable characteristics of a leader such as competence and confidence.
There are four possible case studies to consider:
The Mayor of New Orleans failed to act at the right time, and disaster struck. On August 26, 2005, the National Hurricane Center predicted that tropical storm Katrina would make landfall on August 29, 60 miles southeast of New Orleans. On August 27, many of Louisiana’s parish leaders ordered mandatory evacuation. It wasn’t until the evening of August 28 that New Orleans Mayor announced a voluntary evacuation, and not until 9 a.m. the next morning—fewer than 24 hours before the hurricane struck land—that the order became mandatory. It was too late. Many people couldn’t get out of town on such short notice. Nagin told people to shelter at the Superdome, but told them to bring their own provisions because he hadn’t planned far enough ahead to provide any.
Leaders at other levels of government botching the timing too. It took days to get the federal government organized and the Superdome wasn’t evacuated until September 4. More than 1,836 people died, 86% of whom were from Louisiana, and 80% of those were from the Orleans and St. Bernard parishes.
Not all of Nagin’s decisions were wrong—evacuating people was a good call—but the timing of his decisions was so abysmal that the outcome was a disaster anyway.
(Shortform note: Unlike other chapters, no successful application was given.)
Since leadership is the cap on success (Law #1), developing other leaders is the only way for an organization to truly excel. If you develop only yourself, you’ll personally succeed. If you develop a team, your organization will improve. But if you develop leaders, your organization will experience exponential growth.
There’s always a tension between where the leader wants their people and organization to be, and where they actually are. Leaders are impatiently up at the front, and everyone else lags. Applying this law can help eliminate that lag.
Developing leaders is very different from attracting followers. Compare the following attitudes, values, and actions, one of which attracts followers, one of which attracts leaders.
There are three main challenges to applying this law:
In 2001, EQUIP, an organization that developed leaders, came up with a lofty goal—develop one million leaders by 2008. Relying on this law, EQUIP would directly train only 40,000 leaders, but would ask each of these 40,000 leaders to then train an additional 25 leaders.
EQUIP started the program in cities in India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. When the leaders finished training and were asked to commit to training their own 25 leaders, 90% of them agreed. EQUIP continued the program in other areas, following the five steps:
Not every leader trained 25 new leaders—some could only commit to training five or ten, but others were training up to 250. EQUIP reached its one-million-leader goal by 2006, two years early.
(Shortform note: Unlike in other chapters, no failed application is given.)
When leaders join your team, they bring along all their followers, which multiplies your reach.
Are you primarily leading followers or other leaders? How do you know? Remember that followers need your direct attention and tend to be weaker, while leaders have the potential to take over for you.
Think of specific ways you might find leaders. For example, you might find them by attending events or networking, or by developing leadership potential in people who already work with you.
Consider how to recruit and keep the leaders you’ve brainstormed above. You might develop your own leadership skills, or create an exciting environment.
Because leaders work with people, including other leaders, they have the potential to influence beyond their own lifetime. For example, many people still admire Gandhi and live by his teachings. Therefore, all leaders should be concerned with succession and legacy.
Clara Boothe Luce came up with the phrase “life sentence.” The sentence both states the goal of your life and describes your legacy. Your “life sentence” will likely change over the course of your life, and as it does, look for things that each of the sentences have in common. This will help direct you toward your legacy. For example, John C. Maxwell started with a life sentence about wanting to be a great pastor. Later, he wanted to be a communicator, writer, and leader. He finally settled on: “I want to add value to leaders who will multiply value to others.” This sentence encompasses all the things he wanted to be over the years and addresses his legacy.
Here are some steps to developing your legacy:
There are four phases of legacy development:
Every year during the Oscars, the program shows clips of people who have died during the previous year. These people receive different amounts of applause during the montage, but after it’s over, everyone refocuses on the Oscar nominees. People aren’t remembered for their accomplishments; they’re measured by how well their successors continue their work.
Mother Teresa’s leadership lived on after she died because she developed leaders who would carry on her vision. Her order still welcomes new nuns in a ceremony conducted at her tomb.
The following checklist contains a question about each of the 21 laws of leadership. When your answer to the statement is yes, check it off. The more checkmarks you have, the more laws you are applying.