The Future Leader

3The Impact of a Leader

Who is a leader you admire, respect, and want to emulate? You probably thought of a leader that you have never met, someone who is running a big successful company. Now imagine for a moment that this leader (whom you have never met) is running a big successful company and treats employees poorly. The leader pays them low wages, berates them on calls and meetings, forces them to work unreasonable hours, and quite frankly treats them like cogs. Imagine that this leader's organization was hurting the environment or local communities. What if the leader was using shady business practices to inflate the numbers? What if this leader didn't fight for any social causes? What if this leader was just simply mean? Would you still consider this person a leader even though the business was making a ton of money? Would you want to work for this kind of person?

How Great and Bad Leaders Influence You and Your Organization

For almost all of the CEOs I interviewed and for most people in general, the perception of a successful leader is based on someone who makes money and grows a business. For some, that's good enough, but for those of us who want to be future leaders and put people first, this should be unacceptable. This was specifically called out when I interviewed Abraham Schot, the CEO of Audi, the automotive company, with over 90,000 employees. He told me, “Leadership ...