I distinctly remember the first time I ever heard Captain Tucker tell us that he loved us. Captain Tucker was the platoon commander charged with instilling in us the art and science of becoming Officers in the Marine Corps. As you might imagine, this raised some eyebrows. Captain Tucker is still to this day the hardest Marine I have ever met. As a Purple Heart recipient, he could have ordered us to follow him to hell and back, and none of us would have hesitated. So why would such a man openly tell a bunch of new Lieutenants that he loved us?

When We Talk About Service and Sacrifice, We Really Mean Love

When one thinks of the military, the idea of service and sacrifice appropriately come to mind. Any Marine would quickly tell you that his motivation comes from a duty to serve his fellow Marines and fellow Americans. Love, however, is perhaps a more powerful and apt identifier of what it means to be a Marine – and also to be a leader. At its most fundamental level, love implies sacrifice, and conversely, genuine sacrifice or service cannot exist absent of love. What good are our claims of loving our neighbor (or followers) if they don’t translate into sacrifice?

Love very naturally translates into the core values on which our Marine ethos is built, that is: Honor, Courage, and Commitment. Honor recognizes, endorses, and protects the dignity inherent in every human being. Courage is the ability to act honorably, even when it seems impossible. Commitment is the resolve to hold on to the other two at all costs. For an elite warrior class where effective leadership is a matter of life and death, we sure do talk a lot about love.

Without Love, Effective Leadership Is Impossible

Anyone with more than a tertiary knowledge of leadership knows the value of servant leadership, which defines the most effective leader as the one who serves those he leads. This isn’t just “a” form of leadership, it is “the” form of leadership. A true leader isn’t driven by what’s in it for him. He cares about how he can develop those around him for their sake and for the team’s sake, rather than his own sake. The leader who cares more about what his men can do for him than what he can do for them isn’t a leader, he’s a manipulator. A non-servant leader does such things as lie, unjustly accuse, and cut corners in order to enhance his position for the most profitable gain – all at the expense of those he is supposed to lead. Unfortunately, in many occupations this is such a subtle deviation from true leadership that it has become normalized and acceptable. In my occupation, dishonesty, a lack of justice, and cutting corners means Marines die. In your occupation, inept leadership may not result in lost lives, but rather losing the breath of life that powers your organization. The price is simply too high not to love and sacrifice for those you lead.

True Leadership Isn’t About You

As an Officer of Marines, my sole purpose for existence is to accomplish the mission and to serve my Marines. Enlisted Marines (i.e. non-officers) are the ones who get stuff done. To not serve them undermines both justifications for my existence (i.e. the mission and my Marines). Ask any enlisted Marine and he will tell you that if you care about him, he’ll follow you to hell and back. My job as an officer is to set the parameters (e.g. timing, tactics, rules of engagement, etc…) within which they can work and then support them in every way possible. In the same way, a healthy organization doesn’t run simply on the competence of senior leadership. It runs because the average employees have enough buy-in to put their nose to the grindstone and get the job done. I promise you that if you let Joe Employee know you sincerely care about him (and by that I mean support as well as sentiment), you’ll see a level of buy-in and output that you never knew was possible.

True leadership isn’t about you. It’s about leveraging your influence to love and serve those you have the privilege to lead. Ruthlessly holding yourself to this standard is your duty to yourself, your coworkers, your family and your country. And it is the lifeblood that makes all of these institutions successful.

Semper Fidelis.

Several years later, I got a lead role on a consulting assignment to develop a plan to significantly improve an organization’s corporate culture. In fact, I was told this was my chance to “really shape the project.” I spent the next few months analyzing employee survey data, referencing strategic plans and carefully crafting a solution. Finally I got to present my plan to a senior client in a boardroom meeting and was thrilled when he accepted it. Now it was time to get to work. But much to my chagrin, a bigger problem soon emerged: no one wanted to take responsibility for seeing the plan through.

These experiences confirmed for me a simple but poignant lesson: you can’t want something for other people more than they want it for themselves. It doesn’t matter how much you care if they don’t.

This seems to go against the nature of empathy and basic altruism. But as a leadership principle, it’s proved to be true for me.

So what do you do when you do care? Here is the approach I’ve learned to take:

Inquire About Priority

When you talk, coach or consult with others, hopefully they trust you enough to share their challenges with you. I always try to ask three specific questions to quickly understand where another leader is coming from. But just like our own thoughts or mindless complaints, at any given time their concerns can range from short-term or inconsequential to long-term, significant or overwhelming. Not every problem carries equal weight and requires an immediate solution – or even any solution at all. Instead of assuming that a person is looking for answers, try to get a sense of the priority the challenge represents. There is a big difference between a level 1 “would be nice to fix” challenge and a level 5 “front page headline” challenge.

Understand Commitment

If I had to do the culture transformation project over again, I would have asked a simple question before I even got started: who from the client team will be the executive sponsor for this solution after the planning phase is finished? Not understanding local commitment was an oversight on my part. You can avoid that mistake by pressing the issue upfront. The perfect plan with no commitment provides no benefit. It’s a complete waste of time and effort. Not only will commitment help you manage your expectations, it will help the other party decide if a solution is worth pursuing in the first place.

Ask the Ultimate Question

I mentioned above how I used to take the responsibility to try and solve the leadership challenges I encountered. I don’t do this anymore. It was hard to resist at first, but I’ve learned a much better way. It comes in the form of what I call the ultimate leadership question:

How would you like me to support you?

This question almost works like magic. It leaves all the responsibility where it belongs: with the party who has a challenge. But it communicates that you are willing help. And it gives the other person a variety of choices to make: do they prefer to tackle this challenge on their own, would they like a helping hand or do they prefer to leave it be for another day?

Jack Welch said that if you don’t like people, you should find another job because leadership is 70% people development. If you’re going to be a leader, you need to care about other people. But caring about them shouldn’t supersede the principle of boundaries. To empower others to drive change, you must keep your initiative in check. If you find that you care more about their outcome than they do, you may be headed for trouble.

Nathan Magnuson is a leadership consultant, coach, trainer and thought leader.  Receive his new ebook Trusted Leadership Advisor by subscribing to his website  or follow him on Twitter.

As organizational leaders, we tend to worship good ideas. We don’t want followers who simply show up to do their work and leave, we want ones who generate ideas on their own and possess the motivation to see them through. So what makes good ideas so dangerous? The answer lies in the substantial difference between a good idea and a right idea (tweet). The difference between the two is alignment. In the absence of a guiding vision and strategy, there is no overarching target to align ideas with (whether good or bad ones). That means no basis exists to determine whether a particular good idea ought to be pursued or not. This can be all the more true for government, non-profit, and ministry organizations, who are rewarded not in dollars earned for products/services but for meeting what can often be vague or changing objectives.

Let’s take a closer look.

When an organization’s guiding vision is non-existent or unclear, good ideas can be dangerous.

In the absence of a guiding vision, good ideas represent low hanging fruit that unfocused leaders reflexively reach for, especially when pressured to report visible success. It’s likely you’ve seen this before.  When each individual comes up with different good ideas, the operating environment quickly gets complicated. It can be even worse in large organizations where entire teams come up with ideas independently of one another. Once a team or an individual commits to a good idea, their personal success and pride are on the line. Quitting equates to failure, so ideas evolve into personal agendas that turn departments, teams, and individuals into silos. Organizations can literally be pulled apart by pursuing different “good” ideas that send them in directions. The result is a wide variety of small “success stories,” but no accomplishment of the organizational mission, effectiveness, or momentum. All too often this leads to a loss of trust, miscommunication, and a decrease in morale, not to mention loss of market share or revenue. Instead of diagnosing what went wrong, more good ideas are elicited to save the day and the vicious cycle continues.

When an organization’s guiding vision exists and is clear, good ideas drive positive change.

Clarity inspires focused creativity and guides a team’s thinking. It places a buffer between people and their (collective) ideas since each idea is evaluated based on it’s ability to accomplish the overall objective. Special consideration is given to the opportunity cost of good ideas, since each one requires time and resources that cannot be easily reallocated to another better idea. When an idea is achieved, the success story is centered around the accomplishment of the mission and realization of the vision, instead of a disjointed summary of ad hoc success stories.

So what can you do when the “Good Idea Fairy” strikes? Bobb Biehl once said that a sign of maturity is putting process between opportunity and response. In this case, the process is evaluating each idea against the guiding vision to ensure alignment. Of each idea you must ask the question, “what are we really trying to accomplish and will this idea get us closer to the realization of our vision or not?” Here are some steps you may want to use:

• Consider your guiding vision. If you don’t have one, or if it is unclear or under-communicated, give this your full attention before considering any new ideas that could risk spending time or resources pulling your organization in a wrong direction.
• Brainstorm: don’t just evaluate each idea as it comes. Collect a wide range and evaluate them collectively.
• Separate the ideas into groups of those that align with your vision and those that do not.
• Of the ideas that do align, select the very best and get to work on them. Put the others into a “parking lot” for later consideration. For the ideas that do not align, consider how you can share them with other teams or organizations whose guiding vision would support their consideration.

In all of this, remember that they key is not to try to limit creative thinking or discourage people from sharing their thoughts. The key is to always have a visible True North, so that everyone can generate, commit to, and implement ideas they are fully confident will drive your organization in the right direction.

Nathan Magnuson is a leadership consultant, coach, trainer and thought leader.  Receive his ebook Trusted Leadership Advisor by subscribing to his website or   follow him on Twitter.

If you follow college football at all, you might have been surprised when Kansas State University climbed to #1 in the BCS Poll at one point this football season. After a disappointing loss to Baylor, they’ll compete with Oregon in the Fiesta Bowl on January 3. When I was in high school, several of my teammates traveled to Manhattan, KS to partake in Bill Snyder’s summer football camp. They came back with raving reviews. My college team is actually the University of Kansas, but it’s impossible for me to ignore the powerful leadership foundation – and results – KSU head coach Bill Snyder has instilled in his program since 1989, when he took over the “worst NCAA Division 1 football program on planet Earth.” Whether or not you are a KSU fan, a football fan, or a fan of athletics at all, I believe there is something powerful each of us can take away from Snyder’s 16 Goals for Success. I’d like to share them with you.

Please don’t miss the most important lesson I take from Snyder’s 16 Goals for Success: that success starts with commitment and ends with responsibility (Tweet). And then there’s the inclusivity of leadership in goal #15 that EVERYONE can set an example.

You can read about Coach Snyder’s goals in his own words in his book They Said It Couldn’t Be Done. Here’s the list:

1. Commitment

2. Unselfishness

3. Unity

4. Improve

5. Be tough

6. Self-discipline

7. Great effort

8. Enthusiasm

9. Eliminate Mistakes

10. Never give up

11. Don’t accept losing

12. No self-limitations

13. Expect to win

14. Consistency

15. Leadership

16. Responsibility

For more information on Coach Bill Snyder’s 16 Goals for Success, visit the official website here.

What are your goals for success?

Nathan Magnuson is a leadership consultant, coach, trainer and thought leader.  Receive his ebook Trusted Leadership Advisor by subscribing to his website or   follow him on Twitter.