Why good leaders make you feel safe

What makes a good leader? Does anyone really know what a leader looks like? Is it a rank? A title? A height weight or a feeling?

In network marketing, people join people not so much the products. Even though it took the people connecting to lead to the products connection. Make sense? Just because someone introduced someone to a product doesn’t make them a leader. Some people have no desire to be a leader they only want to share the products and leave the teaching to someone else.

Since I have been with network marketing I have had three people quit because of their expectations of me as the “leader”. At the time I was still working a full-time job, working three days a week 13 hours shifts on an average of 4 hours of sleep. Most the time less than 4 hours.

My focus was to arrive to and from work without having a wreck and keep functioning when I got home. I didn’t have the energy to lead anyone else anywhere. At the time my idea of being a leader in network marketing was having home parties and giving up tons of my time to teach other people. I just couldn’t. I was exhausted. Three people sent me nasty emailed and quit because I was not doing my “job”. The last thing I wanted to call my home business was a JOB!

People have their own vision of what a leader is and how they are supposed to act, and how they are to make you feel. A leader to me is the one not only who teaches and talks about the process but are in the trenches doing the same work they are teaching. I was working, learning how to run a business, generating content, trying to sleep, and raise a family. My trench was full but I had a very strong why.

I never once promised to make people a million dollars when they joined the company. I never pretended to know everything about all the products or attend every training call. I pointed people in the direction they could get help and taught people how to find the answers. I want them to know how to become independent and use me as a reference. Otherwise, people would sit around and wait for me to fix all their problems, which is a sure way for failure.

Just because those three people made demands doesn’t mean I was supposed to fix their issue even though I tried to help them I was maxed out in my own life at the time. I now have systems set up that will give them information on demand that they can repeat any time they need to and become independent plus share it with people they meet as well.

In the book “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek he says “Leadership, on the other hand, is about people. It’s less about what you’re doing and more about who you’re being. It’s how you show up for your people. It’s being available to handle the human side of things.”

He goes on to say, ;”Leaders aren’t responsible for the results. Leaders are responsible for the people who are responsible for the results. And without the support of our people, it’s us who feel like we have to take more responsibility for the tactical because we know it’s our butts on the line. What if we focused more of our energy on leading and building relationships with our people so that we could trust them and they’d trust us? Then we could empower them to take accountability for the tactical, which would open us up to do what we do best as leaders – look to and plan for the longer term future.”

Got a question for you – If you’re in a position of leadership in your organization, consider this question, “What percentage of my time do I spend managing vs. leading?