19 Mental Models of Leadership

The Law of the Lid

Credit: John Maxwell

There is a lid on my organization and on my future and that lid is me.
I am the problem with my company and you are the problem with your company
Your education, character, capacity, ability, and vision are limiting your team

Your Work as a Leader Should:

Credit: MLK

Have length – something you get better at over a lifetime
Have breadth – it should touch many other people
Have height – put you in service to some ideal and satisfy the souls yearning for righteousness

When Leaders Help Institute Change there is…

Credit: Chip and Dan Heath

Clear direction
Ample Motivation
Supportive Environment

Lead with Clarity and Conviction

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6 Techniques to Speak like a Leader

Credit: Simon Lancaster

Three Breathless Sentences

“A world at war, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a generation”

Three Repetitive Sentences

I love pasta, I love verona, I love tiramsu

Three balancing statements

Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country
If it sounds balanced, it makes it more believable
CONTRAST

Metaphor

Use metaphor every 16 words
Use to draw people towards things, and to repel them
Ex. “the Arab Spring” “The financial storm”

Exaggeration

Emotional appeal. “I am going to give you my heart and soul”

Rhyme

People are more likely to believe something if it Rhymes: processing fluency (easier to digest)
Learn things from Rhymes as toddlers

6 Gifts Human Gardeners (Leaders) Offer Their People

Credit: Dr. Tim Elmore

They Paint Pictures

Most people think in pictures. Mentors capitalize on our visual minds and paint pictures of the way leadership works by telling stories, using metaphors, or employing images.

The Provide Handles

Every door or drawer has a handle. A handle is something we can grab onto. Good mentors summarize great principles into simple terms that their mentees can get a hold of and understand. They define the principles and give practical ways they can be applied to life.

They Supply Roadmaps

(1) Give us big picture

(2) Show us where we are

(3) Show us roads to take us to our destination

(4) Reveal what roads to avoid

They Furnish Laboratories

A laboratory is simply a safe place in which to experiment and actually practice the principles being learned.

They Give Roots

Plants can only grow as tall as their root systems grow deep. Roots represent the foundation for solid growth. They provide strength and stability; something to stand on. These roots might take the form of a “moral compass,” enabling a mentee to make wise decisions based on healthy values.

They Offer Wings

Wings enable mentees to think big, to attempt huge goals, to not fear taking risks.

Leadership as a Parent

(1) I do it; you watch

(2) I do it; you help me

(3) You do it; I help you

(4) You do it; I watch

Building Culture as a Leader

credit: Dan Coyle – The Culture Code

Fill the group’s windshield with clear, accessible models of excellence.
Provide high-repetition, high-feedback training.
Build vivid, memorable rules of thumb (if X, then Y).
Spotlight and honor the fundamentals of the skill.

Three Questions Leaders Should Ask Their Teams

What is one thing that I currently do that you’d like me to continue to do?
What is one thing that I don’t currently do frequently enough that you think I should do more often?
What can I do to make you more effective?

Leaders Build Systems with 3 things

credit: Donella Meadows – Thinking in Systems

Elements
Interconnections
Function or an purpose

A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way to achieve something

The Four Tools of Leadership Discipline

credit: Scott Peck – The Road Less Traveled

Delaying of gratification
Acceptance of responsibility,
Dedication to the truth
Balancing

The Four Disciplines of Execution

credit: FranklinCovey

1. Focus on the Wildly Important: Focus on the one or two goals that would make all the difference.

Focus your finest effort on the one or two goals that would make all the
difference, instead of giving mediocre effort to dozens of goals. Leaders must learn how to create energy around the most important projects,
not just what’s on fire.

2. Act on the Lead Measures: Lead measures tell you if you’re likely to achieve the goal.

Lead measures tell you if you’re likely to achieve the goal. They can be influenced by the team and are predictive of the outcome. Lag measures tell you if you’ve achieved the goal.

3. Keep a Compelling Scoreboard: This helps your team know the score at all times.

This helps everyone know the score at all times, so they can tell whether or not they’re winning.

4. Create a Cadence of Accountability: Meet weekly to report on commitments and review the scoreboard

This is where the execution happens. Your team should meet weekly for 20–30
minutes to report on commitments and review the scoreboard. Disciplines 1, 2, and 3 set up the game, but until you set up Discipline 4, your
team isn’t in the game.

Tools to Improve Your Leadership

credit: Craig Groeschel

A discipline to start
The courage to stop
A person to empower
A system to create
A relationship to initiate
A risk to take

The Habits of Excellence

Become a lifelong learner

How to Change Your Perspective as a Leader

credit: Mark Batterson

Change of pace + Change of place = Change of perspective

The Laws of Combat Leadership

credit: Jocko Willink

Cover and Move
Keep Things Simple
Prioritize and Execute
Decentralize Command

Leadership Psychology of Growth

Help the person get their story straight (where are you now? Where are you going?)
What is it that you’re afraid of that’s stopping you from moving forward?

The 80% rule of Decision Making

Based on 80% of the information available are you 80% sure this is the right decision?

Storytelling as a Leader

credit: Donald Miller

Stories are the best invention to deliver mental models that drive behavior, how we make meaning of life
Simple structure to stories: a character has a problem, then meets a guide who gives them a plan and calls them to action. That action either results in a comedy or tragedy

A character: a person who will take the journey
The Problem: three levels, external, internal, and philosophical
Meets a Guide who Understands their Fear
And gives them a plan: you used to think this way, I want you think another way
That calls them to action
That results in a comedy
Or results in a Tragedy

Mastery Starts with YOU

For the Self-Directed Leader

The Rule of Three

When telling stories: Find a Beginning, a Middle, and a End
In a crisis: Assess, adjust, act
Look, listen, speak
In conversation: Ask the person to go deeper 3x and you’ll get closer to the truth

Building a System of Belief – Constructing a Culture

Why – Purpose – Belief (ethos)
What – Pillars – Values (pathos)
How – Processes – Systems (logos)

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19 Mental Models of Leadership

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How Leaders Can Produce Compound Interest

The biggest benefits in life come from compounding interest. Relationships, habits, money, success, and growth are the result of making small investments in the right things and watching those investments grow (on top of each other) over time.

As a leader, you must think like an investment manager—you must ensure the growth of your team by directing them to invest in the right things.

Here are three “investing” principles that will allow you to harness the power of compound interest which will lead to exponential growth.

Invest Consistently

The first principle of investing is simply to invest consistently. Those who consistently make small deposits will reap the exponential benefits over the course of time. Investing consistently allows your investments to grow on top of your investments—this applies to your resources, people, and leadership.

Think about this concept through the lens of a basketball team. When a coach invests in helping his player become smarter, more skilled, and a better teammate, that initial investment by the coach not only benefits that specific player, but the entire team. That player is now more equipped to multiply the coach’s influence throughout the group.

The principle of multiplication is a powerful force. The more time, energy, and care that you invest in the lives of people around you, the stronger your team will become.

Invest Your “First-Fruits”

In the world of finance, psychologists have come up with a nifty trick to help people save more money. They call it the “pay yourself first” principle. Research shows that people who pay themselves first (i.e. saving money by having it automatically taken out of their paycheck at the beginning of the month) will save more than people who are required to make the decision voluntarily. When people make the decision to save money ahead of time, they will not fall into the temptation of overspending in the future.

So it is with leadership. Leaders who invest their “first-fruits” have made the commitment to invest the best they have to offer into their teams. Effective leaders don’t wait to give their key assets their focus, time, and energy until they are distracted, hurried, and tired. Leaders that give away their first-fruits consistently give away the best they have to offer to those who need it most.

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Invest in the Long Game

Successful investors play the long game. They are not held captive by the ups and downs of the market, but rather focus on generating consistent returns over the course of time.

Compound interest is accrued—in money, life, and leadership—when you make a regular deposits over the long-term. Leaders (and investors) can easily get caught up in the latest trends or the excitement of short-term results. Real value, growth, and impact is found in a leader who makes decisions today that will pay dividends tomorrow.

Reflection

Ask yourself these three questions:

Am I investing in my team with consistency or sporadically?

Am I investing the best I have to offer or my leftovers?

Am I investing with short-term or a long-term mindset?

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You Are What You Repeatedly Do

What are the habits of excellence?

The habits of excellence are a guide to living well. They are the actions that repeatedly, habitually drive you towards a life of meaning, virtue, and purpose.

The habits of excellence are the guardrails that guide your decision-making as you navigate life. Excellence is first (and most importantly) a series of habits because “we are what we repeatedly do”.

The concepts of habits and excellence cannot be separated, because excellence is a never ending pursuit of incremental improvement. It is a striving towards meaningful ends in an effort to become your best possible self.

The Habits of Excellence

Become a lifelong learner

Excellence is a never ending process of striving, refining, learning, and growth. It is the infinite process of realizing your potential, of dying to your old ways and becoming resurrected on the other side. The cycles of death and rebirth, of breaking down and rebuilding, of failure and progress and never-ending.

Those in pursuit of excellence are constantly evaluating where they are and where they want to go. In the middle of this process is a commitment to building systems that help you to surpass yourself again and again.

Excellence is found in the perpetual effort that is required to become a life long learner. It is found in the resilience needed overcome new challenges by changing who you will become tomorrow with what you do today. Excellence is the process of incremental improvement, of constant tweaking and iteration. Excellence is incompatible with excuses; it sees the big picture but focuses on the small task. Excuses are short-term bandaids while excellence is building for the long-term. Excellence is learning to live in the moment without losing sight of the months and years to come.

It is the process of learning to live well in a way that inspires others to greatness. You will never arrive at a destination called “excellence” because excellence is more about the process and rarely about the result.

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You Are What You Repeatedly Do

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Becoming a Purpose Driven Leader

Sometimes we can feel stuck in our growth, and stagnant in our leadership. We feel a lack of purpose to our days, and a loss of direction in our lives. What if there was a better way forward?

What if there was a clear path forward that would help organize your system of belief for a life of meaning and purpose.

Let’s be honest: everyone has felt lost at some point in their lives:

If you’ve felt lost and aimless, and ineffective in your leadership, this is for you.

If you’ve felt overwhelmed and uncertain about the future, this is for you.

If you’ve felt a lack of fulfillment, purpose, and direction, this is for you.

Sometimes as leaders we try to do the right things but fail to see results. We lead with good intentions, but still feel disoriented. We try and lead with excellence, but don’t have the skills to push our teams over the top. The purpose driven leader is someone who drives consistent excellence over the long term. All of us aspire to make an impact with our lives, if you’ve ever felt inspired to lead differently, this is for you.

If you want to live a more meaningful life, if you want to live a more fulfilling life, a life with clear direction, and a well-defined aim, this is for you.

If you want to lead your team and build something special, this is for you.

If you want to be remembered for the content of your character and the quality of your contributions, this is for you.

Becoming a Purpose Driven Leader will change your life and the lives of those around you forever.

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WHY should YOU care about becoming a Purpose Driven Leader?

In life there are two kinds of people: those who are driven by purpose and those who aren’t. Ask yourself:

Which one are you? Which one do you want to be?

Now think to yourself, do I have the tools I need to reach my potential? To help my team reach its potential?

All high-performing leaders start with a clear purpose.

Let me say it again. The leaders who consistently produce the best results are the ones driven by purpose, NOT by external measure of failure and success.

The leaders driven by purpose have a hunger to make a lasting impact with their lives, they want to make their life count.

They are the type of people who care more about what is said at their eulogy than what is listed on their resume. They are the type of people who want to look back from their deathbed with no regrets.

Purpose driven leaders are passionate about excellence, they are focused, intentional, humble, and ruthless in the pursuit of their calling. Does that describe you?

So, back to the question: why should YOU care?

If you believe that you shouldn’t waste your life, this is for you.

If you believe that life is more about what you give and less about what you take, this is for you.

If you believe in living for a higher purpose in service to others, this is for you.

If you believe that mediocrity is unacceptable, this is for you.

If you believe that the quality of your leadership determines the quality of your outcomes, this is for you.

Purpose driven leaders drive long-term results by creating a culture of excellence, intentionality, and discipline. They set their teams and organizations on a trajectory that delivers real results time after time.

Purpose driven leaders are able to stay the course when others fall away. They create loyal team members and strong organizations. They have the ability to adapt to any environment while sustaining a high level of excellence.

Here’s how you can do it.

Lead Yourself

Purpose driven leaders are driven by a passion to change the world. But purpose driven leaders understand that in order to change others they must first lead themselves.

Our lives and leadership all tell a story about who we are, what we believe, and what we are on earth to do. We get to choose the type of story we want to tell with our lives. This choice is the single greatest consideration we have as leaders.

We have been given a unique mix of talent, background, experiences, personality, and perspective that we could share with the world. The problem for many leaders is we fail to “systemize” our good intentions into a coherent framework.

We become less effective in our leadership when our good intentions are not organized into a clear plan of attack. At a basic level, we believe that life, coaching, and leadership is about more than just getting results. But if we fail to develop the necessary structure to live meaningful lives of purpose our leadership becomes less impactful. Our desire is to live purposefully, but we simply don’t know HOW. The execution of our good intentions can limit our ability to learn, grow, and lead others – the road to mediocrity is always paved with good intentions.

The bottom line is this: we cannot lead our teams, our families, or our communities with effectiveness until we learn to lead ourselves.

Do you feel lost and aimless?

Learn to Lead with Purpose

Organize, Clarify, Regulate

Leading ourselves is one of the most difficult (but important) steps in our journey of leadership.

The first step in leading ourselves comes in the organization, clarification, and regulation of our desire to make a difference. The purpose driven leader is able to bring clarity to the direction of his leadership when he systemizes his beliefs into a framework of organized meaning.

This idea of organizing your beliefs into a “system” may come across as rigid and uninspired, in fact, just the opposite is true. The leaders who make the greatest impact are the ones who constantly return to a (well thought-out) system again and again and again.

The implementation of a system delivers great clarity and conviction to what you believe. It serves as a compass to help you navigate challenges, and gives you an anchor that keeps you grounded during life’s storms. Systems give us direction and stability, a foundation of meaning and a clear direction.

A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way to achieve something
Donna Meadows

The Story of Purpose

Just as all good movies and books have a narrative structure that draws us in, captivates us, and brings us to a final resolution, all good leaders have a system of belief that allows them to communicate and live a compelling story.

The beginning of every great story starts with your core purpose. Your core purpose is why you get out of bed in the morning, the reason you exist, your fundamental belief about the reason for living. It is your calling and your reason WHY, and it drives everything you do.

Your core purpose can be religious in nature or not, but it always points to a bigger story outside of yourself. It is the story we tell others with how we choose to live.

Purpose tells us (and others) a story about two things: it provides meaning about who we are and it tells us where to go.

It gives us identity and direction, it is both an anchor and a compass. Purpose is a story that is written down in our own thoughts, but is confirmed through our daily habits and decisions. In the end, we all become the story we tell ourselves.

The Pillars of Purpose

The middle of your story is found in how you construct, build, and select the values that define who you are. The pillars of purpose are carefully constructed principles of truth that govern who you are and what you do. As the architects of purpose, you build on your WHY when you decide on your WHAT.

You’re WHAT is the principles you believe in, the core values that define your habits.

The Pillars of Purpose are best expressed as a set of core values that become the guardrails to your decision-making. Principles are ways of understanding what is true about life and how we should operate in the world. They are the core values that give us stability through the storms of life and leadership; they keep us grounded, faithful, and committed to our purpose.

The Habits of Purpose

The end of your story are the habits of purpose.

They are the natural activation of your core values in the world, they are the HOW that flows from your WHAT and your WHY.

Our core behaviors are the activation of our purpose in everyday life, they are the 24/7 manifesto of what we believe. There is a principle buried underneath each of our core values that we express as behaviors – what we believe doesn’t matter unless it changes what we do. Put more completely: our principles determine our core behavior and our core behaviors activate our values in the world.

This is the basic structure of the purpose driven leader: a beginning story of purpose, a bedrock of core values, and a set of consistent habits.

Where do you go from here?

Throughout past decade I’ve put together a system for leaders to organize their system of belief of a life of leadership. Ask yourself the following questions:

What do you believe?

Why do you believe it?

Could you describe it in a few sentences?

Do you have clarity and conviction about what you believe and how you lead?

In order to, LEAD you need to know what you BELIEVE.

This system is for the leaders don’t ever stop in their pursuit of excellence. For those who are more afraid of mediocrity than catastrophe, more terrified of purposelessness than the risk of failure. This is for the man or woman who is passionate about pursuing purpose because they understand there is only one life to live. This is for those who want to become purpose driven leaders.

The purpose driven leader never stops in their pursuit of excellence.

The purpose driven leader keeps building and pushing to be better than before.

The purpose driven leader never stops climbing.

This system is for the leader that never backs down, never settles, and never ever gives up.

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The Purpose Driven Leader is a simple system that will change your life forever. It will help you:

Build a system of belief for a life of purpose
Find your WHY, your WHAT, and your HOW (The Purpose Pyramid)
Give your life meaning and direction
Clarify your identity
Elevate your leadership

If you are passionate about growing into the leader you’re capable of becoming, this is for you. Here’s what one leader had to so about their experience with the Purpose Driven Leader.

Being a successful leader can sometimes seem like an accident, but the Purpose Driven Leader is your roadmap to leadership success; the journey is up to you.
Matt R (Airline Pilot and Community Leader)

Make the investment now that will last a lifetime.

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Additional Resources

Here are some great additional resources to help you become a purpose-driven leader.

100 Top Quotes on Leadership and Purpose

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The Principle of Perseverance

(as originally posted on The Assist)

There are times in all of our lives when we feel like giving up. Circumstances and challenges can conspire against us in a way that makes it difficult to press on. For these reasons, perseverance becomes critical in the life of every leader. Perseverance is necessary for anyone passionate about living a life of purpose through their leadership. It will push you through the times in life when you feel like giving up or checking out. Any leader who is committed to transformational, life-changing leadership must embrace the principle of perseverance in order to walk in purpose. The principle of perseverance is simply this: perseverance will propel you towards your purpose.

Digging a little deeper, perseverance can be defined as simply running YOUR race well, one step at a time. Purpose can be defined as the work that only you can do. Armed with these definitions, let’s look at how we can apply the principle of perseverance to our lives.

Learn. Grow. Lead.

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The Path of Perseverance

No two people ever walk the same path. History is replete with examples of men and women who persevered through the peaks and valleys on their journey to help others. Men and women like Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Harriet Tubman demonstrated perseverance to endure through challenging times which ultimately helped propel them toward their purposes. The path of perseverance will look different for everyone, but leaders who are committed to excellence will anticipate the inevitable valleys and prepare for the challenging times ahead. They will have the foresight to encourage their teams to run their races well, each and every day, one step at a time.

The Place of Perseverance

The place of perseverance refers to the times when perseverance becomes most critical in a leader’s journey. The two most difficult places to exercise perseverance are in the peaks and in the valleys. Everyone can relate to valleys (most people can remember a time when life was especially difficult), but why is it difficult to persevere during the peaks, when you’re on the top of the mountain? Peaks are especially challenging because when you experience success, you can lose sight of where you want to go. You can lose focus on why you do what you do. You can misplace your focus on the things that don’t really matter. Perseverance requires having an aim and a perspective that allows you to push through your present circumstances so that you start climbing towards a new peak in the future.

The Prize of Perseverance

The prize of perseverance is not a trophy, an accomplishment, or a destination. The prize of perseverance is about people. The reason we run our races well is to effect lives that echo in eternity, to gain a prize that does not perish and will never tarnish; the prize of perseverance is our motivation, our guiding light, and our reward. The motivation to persevere comes from looking to a prize that is worth the work and challenges along the way. Leaders who understand the true prize of perseverance will learn to run their races well.

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