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

Find out How

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)

Did this help you lead with Excellence? Share with 1 person you know today.

19 Mental Models of Leadership

Thanks for Reading

Change Your Habits. Change Your Life.

Get instant access to your FREE Daily Planner and Habit Tracker

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.

Lead with Clarity and Conviction

Find out How

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.

Find Out More

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.

Click here to learn more

Lead with Clarity and Conviction

Find out How

Additional Resources

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

100 Top Quotes on Leadership and Purpose

PDF Library

Join the Movement. Get Instant Access to Our Library of Free PDFs.

The Single Decision

Each day, there is one single decision that stares each of us in the face. The decision that lies before each of us is the question of excellence. The question of excellence can not be broken down into component parts. It can not be divided into sub-goals or part-time aspirations. Rather, the single decision we all have to make is whether we have the courage, conviction, and toughness to walk the path of excellence.

I want to encourage each of you to make the decision TODAY that will help you stay the course tomorrow (or next week, next month, or next year!) when you come across a difficult part in your journey. Once the decision is made, there is no turning back. Once the decision is made you will have no choice but to continue pushing through the frustration and obstacles that stand in your way.

Here’s what the former Men’s National Gymnastics team Coach had to say about the single decision that we are all faced with (excerpt from Tim Ferris’ Book, Tools of Titans):

Dealing with the temporary frustration of not making progress is an integral part of the path towards excellence. In fact, it is essential and something that every single elite athlete has had to learn to deal with. If the pursuit of excellence was easy, everyone would do it. In fact, this impatience in dealing with frustration is the primary reason that most people fail to achieve their goals. Unreasonable expectations timewise, resulting in unnecessary frustration, due to a perceived feeling of failure. Achieving the extraordinary is not a linear process. The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home. A blue collar work ethic married to indomitable will. It is literally that simple. Nothing interferes. Nothing can sway you from your purpose. Once the decision is made, simply refuse to budge. Refuse to compromise. And accept that quality long-term results require quality long-term focus. No emotion. No drama. No beating yourself up over small bumps in the road. Learn to enjoy and appreciate the process. This is especially important because you are going to spend far more time on the actual journey than with those all too brief moments of triumph at the end. Certainly celebrate the moments of triumph when they occur. More importantly, learn from defeats when they happen. In fact, if you are not encountering defeat on a fairly regular basis, you are not trying hard enough. And absolutely refuse to accept less than your best. Throw out a timeline. It will take what it takes. If the commitment is to a long-term goal and not to a series of smaller intermediate goals, then only one decision needs to be made and adhered to. Clear, simple, straightforward. Much easier to maintain than having to make small decision after small decision to stay the course when dealing with each step along the way. This provides far too many opportunities to inadvertently drift from your chosen goal. The single decision is one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.
Christopher Sommer

Make your decision today and don’t waver! Share this with 1 friend today.

The Single Decision

Thanks for Reading

PDF Library

Join the Movement. Get Instant Access to Our Library of Free PDFs.

What Makes You an Indispensable Leader

The modern economy is moving away from people to act like machines and towards people who can add a different kind of value. The blue-collar jobs on factory floors are slowly disappearing as technology encroaches on an economic model of years past.

The new economy demands authenticity because people can smell inauthentic leadership a thousand miles away. We are starving for original thinkers and artists who can cultivate an experience that wows and inspires us.

The leadership of the future will no longer be measured in the number of units produced but by the number of people you can inspire. Indispensable leaders are the ones who creativity overwhelms their sense of duty; who are able to problem solve in a world that spits out new challenges minute by minute.

Only you can make yourself indispensable. Only you can push yourself to explore the nuances of your craft when most people settle for being mediocre. Only you can push past your perceived limits. A mediocre leader simply completes the task assigned to them, but an indispensable leader pushes past the boundary of average and into the realm of possibility.

Don’t settle for average, rather, strive for indispensable. Dig a little deeper, train a little bit harder, care a little bit more and watch the people around you rise to greatness.

Start exploring, start creating, start making yourself indispensable today.

Do you want to build transformational leaders on your team? Click the link below.

Newsletter Signup

How “Process Praise” Builds Resilience

Psychologist Angela Duckworth and her research team did a series of experiments in which they observed and measured how different types of praise had a positive or negative effect on a child’s motivation and resilience in tackling difficult challenges.

What they found was that the children who received “process praise” (i.e. praising the things within the child’s control: hard work, perseverance, diligence, strategies, focus, etc) were more likely to develop a resilient approach towards difficult challenges later in life.

In one study they evaluated the type of praise mothers gave their young children. Duckworth then followed those children’s progress and checked in with them five years later. They found that the type of praise children were given as toddlers had a huge impact on their attitude towards facing challenges later on in life.

The children who received process praise when they were young were more motivated learners and ended up doing better in math and reading compared to their peers who were praised for their talent or innate abilities.

As coaches and teachers, the principle of process praise is powerful as we try to help our team’s develop a toughness that will enable them to deal with the inevitable challenges of life. When we make it clear to our teams that a commitment to the process is the only key to success, we are giving them the tools to be successful both on the court and in life.

By praising the process we are implicitly preaching the gospel of hard work, diligence, and focus as the antidote to the challenges that we all face.

Begin today to help your team develop the mental toughness it needs to push through the ups and downs both on the basketball court and in life. Praise the process and watch your team attack the challenges in front of them with tenacity!

Did this help you become a better leader? Share with 1 friend who needs it today.

How “Process Praise” Builds Resilience

Thanks for Reading

Premium PDF Library

Buy Once, Benefit Forever

“I won’t buy anything else on the internet this year.”