We Need Leaders Who ...
1. Add value to the people and the organization they lead.
Mary Kay talked about what businesses needed in their leaders. She listed a number of things that she considered imperative to leadership in today's business climate. The first one was having leaders who actually added value to a company.
This may sound like an understatement, but just study the history of business leadership and see if adding value to a company and its people is all that prevelant.
The one thing that is more important than any other to me is the serving side of it. Adding value means a business leader has to be thinking of someone other than themselves. To add to something by its very nature implies that someone is thinking outside what's best for them.
A true business leader won't be great and add value by looking out for No. 1, they'll be great because the neglect what's best for them and pour themselves into ways to make things better for their customer, workers and the company. The great leaders do that, and become great because they aren't striving to be great for themselves, but live to serve others.
Adding value is just another way of saying someone is looking for anything that can make things better for the entire reason a business exists. Adding value is looking for something outside of ourselves.
If we attempt to add value to ourselves, we'll bend the entire business to make things work for us rather than others. A business and a leader can't survive long if they're focused on what's in it for them.
Learning to add value and look outside ourselves will eventually bring us everything we personally want. It just can't be the focus of why we do things within a business. To add value is to look out for others before looking out for ourselves. Mary Kay lived and built her business based upon that very principle of wanting to help other women succeed. It worked!
Other Mary Kay Resources:
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