OS 003 - Hugh Ballou's 4 Success Principles

Welcome to session number three. I am excited about this one. I have been teaching leadership for 30+ years with social entrepreneurs. I am in the middle of watching the Olympics in Rio in 2016 while recording this podcast, and I came to the realization that I am addicted to these games. I also came to the realization that all of these American athletes have worked very hard. They have trained very hard. They have really good coaches. I meet people every day launching an enterprise, and they are just going to go do it, no coaching, no training. They are going to run a marathon and die on the road. This session is about equipping yourself for success. It’s a session about transformational leadership. Transformational leadership is the model for growing your business, and it’s infinitely scalable. It is about transforming your idea into results. It is about converting your passion to profit. It is about building your high-functioning team. It is about creating the life that you want. People say to me, “What does a musical conductor know about leadership?” I respond, “I am a musical conductor. I know about leadership.” Through 40 years of my career, I brought people together who were singers. I transformed them into a choir, and then I transformed them into an ensemble. Same thing with instrumentalists. Formed an orchestra, transformed them into this high-functioning team we call an ensemble. It is where the sum of the parts is not it; it’s greater than the sum of the parts. We have 50 players, 200 singers. It’s not about that. It’s about the culture of high performance to achieve that high standard of excellence. That culture is a reflection of the conductor, just like your team is a reflection of your leadership. When we want to complain about our team, it’s good to look in the mirror and understand why they are functioning that way. This session is about creating the culture of high performance. High-performing teams are a culture of excellence, and that is the point of transformational leadership. It was developed in the 1980’s by two authors Burns and Bass. Burns wanted to reform our political system, and his book was titled Transforming Leadership. We are still in that transforming phase. It has been adopted and moved into a style of leadership that is extremely powerful. As I said earlier, it is infinitely scalable. It is not about you; it is about the vision. It is not that we are the boss. We do what we want other people to do: we model excellence, commitment, and passion. Whatever we model, people will reflect to us. The leader sets the standard. The transformational leader builds leaders on teams, builds a high-functioning culture, mentors others, avoids micromanaging, learns to delegate, and first and foremost, influences others by power of influence, not power of position. It is not the boss, which by the way, is double s-o-b. We are not the boss; we don’t have to approve everything. We have defined a culture of high performance with the standards of excellence defined as guiding principles. By the way, if you go to my website thedefinitiveleader.com, you can get my free report on this. It gives you videos on these four principles I am going to talk about. It gives you a report about leadership, about how important this is to the excellence that you see and the vision that is in your brain. The session coming up next is going to be creating your strategy. It is important to begin with equipping ourselves for the journey, equipping ourselves to develop and implement the strategy. In this podcast, I am going to give you my four principles of leadership. If you can master these four principles, you can lead any organization anywhere. It will make you a better leader starting now. Four principles, number one: When a conductor steps on the podium, they know the score. Principle one is about foundations.