Omar Usman – Integrity 3 Things I Learned from Becoming A Person of Influence John Maxwell #JMTeam
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The importance of integrity and honesty in leadership roles is emphasized, along with the need for small moments to lead to small mistakes. Growth and empowering others through sharing one's power and resources is also emphasized. The speaker emphasizes the importance of respecting people and showing them that they value them. A book on John Maxwell's website is recommended, along with subscribing to the website.
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In this video, I'm sharing 3 things I
learned from John Maxwell's book, Becoming a Person
of Influence.
Now this is an important book. John Maxwell
defines leadership as influence. So this is kind
of a playbook. It's the things that you
have to do to increase your leadership or
in other words, to increase your leadership capacity.
The first thing I learned from this book
was that a person of influence has integrity
with others.
Now this is a character trait, and this
is something that everyone always says, like, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Integrity, honesty, and all those things.
And if you were to ask anybody
whether they're unethical and or they're a liar,
any of those types of things, everyone would
say no. No one thinks that they're unethical
if they don't act with integrity. We all
think that we have integrity and honesty, and
yet we find so many times, especially in
leadership capacities,
people acting without integrity.
And so he says integrity is something that
happens in the small moments. It's a habit
that's honesty is a habit. Integrity is a
habit, and it's built up in those small
innocuous moments. See, when you take a major
scandal, like, Enron or some other company that
had a very, you know, negative public falling
out or whatever the case may be,
it it's very unlikely that someone woke up
one morning and said, you know what? Let
me come up with a plan to defraud
people out of 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 of dollars.
Rather, it's something that was probably traded up
the chain. You started with something small
and then you push the limits and you
push the limits and you push the limits.
And the thing is is that when we
make those negotiations,
we always tell ourselves, like, okay, I'll stop
here. I'm gonna draw the line here and
it'll be easier to say no later. Like,
I'll let myself have this one little thing
and then I'll say no. But the problem
is that as far as our character goes,
once we've made that negotiation and compromise,
it actually becomes easier to compromise again, not
not more difficult.
And so
making those bigger mistakes, we build propensity toward
that. So integrity is something, and it's also
it's self reflective.
It's something that we make a decision to
act with honesty or to not do that.
And it's kind of regardless of environment or
circumstance or situation,
It's a personal choice that everyone has to
make. One way to assess integrity is to
ask yourself, you know, do I talk to
people or about people? How do I act
when I'm alone versus when I'm in the
spotlight? How do I treat people who really
might not have anything to offer me? You
know, there's always that example of going taking
someone to a job interview and having the
waiter or waitress mess up their order on
purpose to see how they react. Unless, you
know, everyone kinda gets that, but there's a
principle there that's very true. And that is
how do you treat people that, again, they
might not have any immediate
benefit to you or value to you, you
know, in a given moment of time. The
more that you make integrity a fundamental principle
by which you operate, the more the more
that it helps you navigate different situations. So
it actually helps you with situations like knowing,
for example, when someone's criticizing you, when to
take the high road,
and when to see it as constructive feedback.
That's something that we struggle with, but when
you act with integrity, you're trying to be
honest with yourself as well.
Another thing about integrity, and this is something
that's really interesting,
Jay Abraham has something that he calls a
strategy of preeminence,
and this is something that's made him and
his clients 1,000,000 upon 1,000,000 of dollars, but
the the basic
gist of it is this, is that
do you have trusted adviser status with your
clients?
I e, do you
act with your clients out of their best
interest instead of your best interest? So a
client might come to you and ask you
for something that you you might have the
capacity to do it,
but you realize that maybe one of your
competitors is a little bit better. Do you
have the honesty to tell them, you know
what, I would love to do it, but
actually one of my competitors
does that better than I do. And that's
blasphemy in business circles. That's very counterintuitive.
But the reality is is that you gain
a level of trust. The highest relationship status
you can have with someone is trust. And
when you have that trust, you might lose
that small piece of business in the interim,
but in the long run, you set yourself
up for a lot of wins. And that's
kind of the gist of integrity
is that we make those slips based on
short term thinking. Analytically, we all know that
long term thinking is better. It's more productive.
It's more beneficial. It's more useful,
but it's harder to act with. And the
more that we orient ourselves around the fundamental
principle of integrity and honesty,
the easier it becomes to think with that
long term thinking in mind. The second lesson
I learned was that a person of influence
empowers other people. Now, empowering other people means
sharing your influence, your power, your resources with
someone
with the intent of helping them to also
maximize their potential. See, kind of the conundrum
of influence is that a lot of times
when people become more powerful, more influential,
they tend to also get more territorial. They
wanna hold on to what power they have
and they're reluctant to share it with other
people. But a person of influence, and this
goes along with integrity,
is when they see someone that they can
empower, they rush to do it. They're motivated
to help that other person also maximize their
potential. And empowering someone, it can be as
simple as letting your child cross the street
by themselves. It can also be giving an
employee
charge an authority over a major project
and the resources to execute it the way
in which they want. And the thing is
when we
become generous with our influence and we empower
other people and we help other people grow,
that actually increases our level of respect as
well. So the more influence that you give
away and you help to empower others, the
more that it helps you grow as well
and actually increase your influence and leadership capacity.
The third thing that I learned was that
a person of influence understands people. People often
make the mistake of saying that as long
as I have the right technical skills, the
way that my people skills are shouldn't matter
because I get the job done. But the
reality is that a lot of times in
the workplace, you will find that there's people
whose technical skills kinda level off, but it's
the people skills that keep them around. And
so people are looking to see, do you
actually care about me? Do you care about
my point of view? And the more that
you're willing to try to understand people and
it's that basic thing of empathy. Can I
put myself in myself
into someone else's shoes and see things the
way that they see them? If I can
do that, I can communicate with them better.
I can understand them better. I can relate
to them better. And at a basic level,
it just shows that I care about them.
When I take the time to try to
understand
someone's situation,
I better relate and I better connect. Now
what that does
is when I show that initiative,
that person will also try to then see
things from my point of view. Now in
the business world, that has huge ramifications, when
we talk about things like getting buy in
on projects,
what makes someone really successful at seeking buy
in is that they're able to understand what
someone else wants. It's my ability to say,
okay, if I was in their situation, what
would I want? What would my motivations be?
And when I can connect with them at
that level, it's far easier
to get them to buy into a certain
project or to buy into a certain initiative,
which basically is the essence of increasing your
influence. One of the things that we notice
in the workplace is when there's a bad
culture, people tend not to do this, and
so we see communication breakdown. We don't often
see conflicts because of outright disagreements. It's usually
because of an a lack of understanding of
where someone else is coming from. So someone
suggests something,
and because we haven't understood where they're coming
from, fear and paranoia take over. And so
we'll say things like, oh, you're only suggesting
this because of x y z reasons, and
we project
a very bad intention onto whatever they're saying.
And that causes that person then to become
defensive, and then that causes a breakdown. And
when that breakdown happens, we see it. It's
politics, it's tension, it's awkwardness, it's a lack
of communication, it's uneasiness, uncomfortableness.
It's all of those kinda intangible things.
They're a result of people just not trying
to understand where the other one is coming
from. It's basically a culture where I'm afraid
to speak up, I'm afraid to share ideas.
I think that if I give my manager
an idea that I'm gonna suddenly I I
won't get credit for it, or my manager
will steal it, or if I have something
really good I might outshine my manager therefore
I need to keep quiet.
All of these things, they kinda they're rooted
they're rooted in the scarcity mindset,
but they show that there's just a lack
of people understanding one another. And if I
wanna reach that high level of leadership,
that high level of leadership capacity,
then
if I'm in that position, I have to
work to create the right culture in the
organization
where people are operating from an element of
understanding one another. One of the easiest ways
to do that is just simply
find ways to respect people and show them
that you value them. You know, when someone
works really, really hard on something, they put
a lot of effort into something. It's one
thing to say, like, oh, hey. That looks
great. That's awesome. That was mind blowing. That
was amazing.
That compliment has a certain level, but when
you stop and you tell someone, hey. I
can really tell
that you put a lot of work and
effort into this one thing,
regardless of talking about even the outcome of
that, when usually just praising someone's effort and
kind of that game recognize game, like I
can recognize
that you put a lot of effort into
something,
that alone make often makes a person feel
respected and feel valued, and they'll then respond
to you in the same way. These are
3 ways that a person can increase their
level of influence from John Maxwell's book, Becoming
a Person of Influence. There's a link to
the book in the description down below. Please
make sure you hit the thumbs up and
the subscribe button. See you next week.