Leaders, the planet needs you to act with care and courage.

What is the most important issue and opportunity/challenge facing leaders today? Whether we are in a startup, a corporation, a community, a non-profit, or in government: what will it take to change leaders?

Many years ago I worked in an explosives factory. After we killed 14 people in two explosions we came to a fairly obvious conclusion: that if you have a safety problem you have a people problem because most accidents are caused by people.

And if you have a people problem you have a leadership problem. In other words, we were the problem!

So we decided we needed to change. We embraced a framework which at the time didn’t have the name Legitimate Leadership.

It was based on research done for the employers organization in the South African gold mining industry into trust in the management of an enterprise.

70,000 miners were asked the question: do you trust management?

Surprisingly and against all predictions, there were mines where management was highly trusted. The reason they were trusted was not related to matters like pay and benefits or how well management communicated. It boiled down to a single criterion which was: ‘Are we convinced that you are in the relationship to give to us, not to get anything out of us?’

In other words, the issue was literally intent or motive.

This is true in any relationship. I take a simple example to illustrate: a robber and a surgeon. Both of them are doing the same thing – namely, cutting you open with a knife. But we trust and submit ourselves willingly to the surgeon’s knife because intuitively we know this person is doing this not very nice thing to help us, to heal us. Whereas the robber is only doing this in pursuit of self-interest.

Now, you cannot tell people that you have good intent towards them. No, they decide.

So what does that mean?

You may have authority but not power. You only have people who trust you and are willing and loyal to you when they are convinced that you’re actually here to give. They then give you power, by permission.

There are three implications to this.

• First – simply that what we need is an inversion in the line of service. In other words, as leaders we need to fundamentally understand that we are here to give to our people, not to get something out of them.
• Second – you don’t have to do anything to motivate people, be it sticks or carrots. We believe the biggest issue in the world of work right now is how we engage our employees, how we elicit their willingness. So you don’t actually have to do anything to motivate them – all you have to do is become the kind of person that they are motivated by.
• Third – growth (and another word for growth is empowerment) is not the means. Empowerment is the end. In other words, under your leadership, if you get this right, people will be more mature and empowered than when you first led them.

So are results important? You bet your bottom line they are! You don’t do anything without a desire to win in it. But the way to improve the results is not to obsess about them or constantly measure progress against them. The way to improve the results is not to raise the target, it is to raise the standard. In other words, to insist on excellence.

When we say excellence, we mean not only excellence in people on the front line, but also excellence in leaders. So you won’t solicit sustainable leaders who are givers rather than takers until your leaders understand that what they need to do is deliberately decide to fundamentally change what they are here to do. That they are not here to get results out of people, but they are here to care for and grow people. And by the way, givers beget givers and takers beget takers.

30 years ago, when we first started talking about this, people thought we were smoking our socks. They said, ‘Are you saying, “If you want to actually have your interests met, you must not pursue them …?”’

‘Yes we are,’ we said.

30 years later people no longer think this is a weird idea. In fact nine out of 10 people just say, ‘Yes, but how do we do this?’

And that’s the reason why I wrote the book called Legitimate Leadership In Action. It is a distillation of what the brave men and woman – to date in roughly 500 organisations – have done to translate this intent thing into practice.

So please reflect back on your question: What is the most important issue and opportunity/challenge facing leaders today?

Did anyone write down: ‘It’s trust’; did anyone write down ‘It’s intent or motive’, did anyone write down, ‘It’s a change of heart’?