My favorite law, the umbrella under which all of the other laws fall, is the Law of Process. Leadership can’t be developed in a day or a week. Instead, it grows and becomes refined through a lifetime of self-management, skills acquisition, and relationships:

If you continually invest in your leadership development, letting your ‘assets’ compound, the inevitable result is growth over time. What can you see when you look at a person’s daily agenda? Priorities, passion, abilities, relationships, attitude, personal disciplines, vision, and influence. See what a person is doing every day, day after day, and you’ll know who that person is and what he or she is becoming.

Often, when I speak to people about leadership development, someone in the group will ask why a new graduate or a employee in the first few years should be concerned with leadership development, since they’re at the bottom of the totem pole. My answer is three-fold.

First, it’s critical to lead oneself and develop a strong foundation in self-management. Second, usually even «bottom of the totem pole» employees soon have an opportunity to lead something, whether it’s a small project or a intern meeting. And third, as Maxwell writes, «champions don’t become champions in the ring – they are merely recognized there.» If a employee waits until a leadership position is on the horizon to begin developing good leadership skills, the position may never present itself, or if it does, the employee will lack the necessary skills to thrive in that position. (Incidentally, point 3 is well illustrated in Maxwell’s first law, the Law of the Lid.).

Good luck everyone to become a better leader AND Thank you Maxwell for giving us The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.

– A Leader’s Lasting Value Is Measured by Succession

(DAY 21 – The 21 Day Leadership Challenge)

Eventually, someone else will do what you’re doing right now. More than building other leaders, more than being a mentor, you have to build the leader that can take care of and do everything you can do. Start building a leader you can pass the baton to.

Dig into it:

• What do you want people to say at your funeral? If you want your leadership to have real meaning, you need to take into account the Law of Legacy. A leader’s lasting value is measured by succession.

• If you desire to make an impact as a leader on a future generation, then become highly intentional about your legacy. We have a choice about what legacy we will leave, and we must work and be intentional to leave the legacy we want. Here’s how:

a) Know the Legacy You Want to Leave – most people simply accept their lives – they don’t lead them. I believe that people need to be proactive about how they live, and I believe that is especially true for leaders. Someday people will summarize your life in a single sentence. My advice: pick it now!

b) Live the Legacy You Want to Leave – I believe that to have any credibility as a leader, you must live what you say you believe. If you want to create a legacy, you need to live it first.

c) Choose Who Will Carry on Your Legacy – A legacy lives on in people, not things. Too often leaders put their energy into organizations, buildings or other lifeless objects. But only people live on after we are gone. Everything else is temporary.

d) Make Sure You Pass the Baton – No matter how well you lead, if you don’t make sure you pass the baton, you will not leave the legacy you desire.

• Our ability as leaders will not be measured by the buildings we build, or institutions we established. We will be judged by how well the people we invested in carried on after we are gone.

• Jackie Robinson observed, “A life isn’t significant except for its impact on other lives.” In the end we will be judged according to the Law of Legacy. A leader’s lasting value is measured by succession.

– To Add Growth, Lead Followers – To Multiply, Lead Leaders

(DAY 20 – The 21 Day Leadership Challenge)

To grow, you need to lead everyone in the right direction. To create explosive growth, you need to lead other leaders in the right direction. Reach out and start leading other leaders today.

Dig into it:

• You can grow by leading followers. But if you want to maximize your leadership and help your organization reach its potential, you need to develop leaders. There is no other way to experience explosive growth.

• Leaders who attract followers but never develop leaders get tired. Being able to impact only those people you can touch personally is very limiting.

• In contrast, leaders who develop leaders impact people far beyond their personal reach. Every time you develop leaders and help them increase their leadership ability, you make them capable of influencing an even greater number of people.

– When to Lead Is As Important As What to Do and Where to Go

(DAY 19 – The 21 Day Leadership Challenge)

Opportunities are everywhere. One of the big things that makes something a good opportunity is timing. Recognize an opportunity and pounce on it right away.

Dig into it:

• Timing is often the difference between success and failure in an endeavor. Every time a leader makes a move, there are really only four outcomes:

1. The Wrong Action at the Wrong Time Leads to Disaster – If you take the wrong action at the wrong time, your people suffer and so will your leadership.

2. The Right Action at the Wrong Time Brings Resistance – Having a vision for the right direction and knowing how to get there is not enough. If you take the right action but do it at the wrong time, you may still be unsuccessful because the people you lead can become resistant. Good leadership timing requires many things:

a) Understanding – leaders must have a firm grasp on the situation.

b) Maturity – if leader’s motives aren’t right, their timing will be off.

c) Confidence – people follow leaders who know what must be done.

d) Decisiveness – wishy-washy leaders create wishy-washy followers.

e) Experience – if leaders don’t possess experience, then they need to gain wisdom from others who do possess it.

f) Intuition – timing often depends on intangibles, such as momentum and morale.

g) Preparation – if the conditions aren’t right, leaders must create those conditions.

3. The Wrong Action at the Right Time is a Mistake – the greatest mistake made by entrepreneurs is knowing when to cut their losses or when to increase their investment to maximize gains. Their mistakes come from taking the wrong action at the right time.

4. The Right Action at the Right Time Results in Success – When the right leader and the right timing come together an organization achieves its goals and reaps incredible rewards.

• Reading the right situation and knowing what to do are not enough to make you succeed in leadership. If you want your company to move forward, you must pay attention to timing. Only the right action at the right time will bring success. No leader can escape the Law of Timing.

– A Leader Must Give Up to Go Up

(DAY 18 – The 21 Day Leadership Challenge)

You have more responsibilities to other people and other things as a leader. Sometimes, you have to give something up to take care of those responsibilities. Sacrifice something you care about for someone else today.

Dig into it:

• If you desire to become the best leader you can be, then you need to be willing to make sacrifices in order to lead well. If that is your desire, then here are some things you need to know about the Law of Sacrifice.

1. There Is No Success Without Sacrifice – Every person who has achieve any success in life has made sacrifices to do so. Effective leaders sacrifice much that is good in order to dedicate themselves to what is best.

2. Leaders Are Often Asked to Give Up More Than Others – The heart of leadership to putting others ahead of yourself. It’s doing what is best for the team. For that reason, leaders have to give up their rights. The cost of leadership: Leaders must be willing to give up more than the people they lead. Leadership means sacrifice.

3. You Must Keep Giving Up to Stay Up – Leadership success requires continual change, constant improvement, and ongoing sacrifice.

4. The Higher the Level of Leadership, the Greater the Sacrifice – The higher you go, the more its going to cost you. And it doesn’t matter what kind of leadership career you pick. You will have to make sacrifices. You will have to give up to go up.

– Leaders Understand That Activity Is Not Necessarily Accomplishment

(DAY 17 – The 21 Day Leadership Challenge)

Leaders are busy. And some things are more important than other things. Put together a list of everything you have to do and prioritize it from most important to least.

Dig into it:

• Leaders never advance to a point where they no long need to prioritize.

• Busyness does not equal productivity. Activity is not necessarily accomplishment. Prioritizing requires leaders to continually think ahead, to know what’s important, to see how everything relates to the overall vision.

• The Pareto Principle – if you focus your attention on the activities that rank in the top 20 percent in terms of importance, you have an 80 percent return on your effort. For example if you 100 customers, the top 20 will provide you 80% of your business, so focus on them.

• The Three R’s – requirement, return and reward. Leaders must order their lives according to these three questions:

1. What is Required? Any list of priorities must begin with what is required of us. The question to ask yourself is, “What must I do that nobody can or should do for me?” If I’m doing something that is not necessary, I should eliminate it. If I’m doing something that’s necessary but not required of me personally, I need to delegate it.

2. What Gives the Greatest Return? As a leader, you should spend most of your time working in your areas of greatest strength. Ideally, leaders should get out of their comfort zone but stay in their strength zone. My rule of thumb: If something can be done 80 percent as well by someone else, I delegate it.

3. What Brings the Greatest Reward? Life is too short not to do the things you love. Your personal interests energize you and keep you passionate. And passion provides the fuel in your life to keep you going.

– Momentum Is a Leader’s Best Friend

(DAY 16 – The 21 Day Leadership Challenge)

Momentum is capital. With every success, you build momentum that makes the next success easier. Take something small and use its success to do something bigger.

Dig into it:

• If you’ve got all the passion, tools and people you need to fulfill a great
• vision, yet you can’t seem to get your organization moving and going in the right direction, you’re dead in the water as a leader. If you can’t get things going, you will not succeed. You need to harness the power of the leader’s best friend – momentum.

• When you have no momentum, even the simplest tasks seem impossible.

• On the other hand, when you have momentum on your side, the future looks bright, and obstacles appear small. An organization with momentum is like a train that’s moving at sixty miles per hour.

• Truths About Momentum

a) Momentum is the Great Exaggerator – momentum is like a magnifying glass; it makes things look bigger than they really are. Because momentum has such a great impact, leaders try to control it. When you have momentum, you don’t worry about small problems and many larger ones seem to work themselves out.

b) Momentum Makes Leaders Look Better Than They Are – When leaders have momentum on their side, people forget about their past mistakes. Once a leader creates some success for his organization, people give him more credit than he deserves. Momentum exaggerates a leader’s success and makes him look better than he really is.

c) Momentum Helps Followers Perform Better Than They Are – When momentum is strong, people are motivated to perform at higher levels, making all participants more successful than they would be otherwise.

d) Momentum Is Easier to Steer Than to Start – Getting started is a struggle, but once you’re moving forward, you can really start to do some amazing things.

e) Momentum Is the Most Powerful Change Agent – Given enough momentum, nearly any kind of change is possible in an organization. Followers trust leaders with a proven track record. They accept changes from people when they have led them to victory before. Momentum puts victory within reach.

f) Momentum is the Leader’s Responsibility – It takes a leader to create momentum. Followers can catch it. But creating momentum requires someone who has vision, can assemble a good team, and motivates others. If the leader is waiting for the organization to develop momentum on its own, then the organization is in trouble.

g) Momentum Begins Inside the Leader – It starts with vision, passion, and enthusiasm. The leader most model those qualities to his people day in and day out, which will attract like-minded people to his team. Once you see forward progress, you will begin to generate momentum. Once you have it, you can do almost anything. That’s the power of the Big Mo.

– Leaders Find a Way for the Team to Win

(DAY 15 – The 21 Day Leadership Challenge)

When something doesn’t work out, you learn something new. But it’s important not to start with that idea or else you might give in to it. Strive for nothing less than total victory today.

Dig into it:

• Victorious leaders have one thing in common: they share an unwillingness to accept defeat. The alternative to winning is totally unacceptable to them. As a result, they figure out what must be done to achieve victory.

• The best leaders feel compelled to rise to a challenge and do everything in their power to achieve victory for their people. In their view…

* Losing is unacceptable.

* Passion is unquenchable.

* Quitting is unthinkable.

* Commitment is unquestionable.

* Victory is inevitable.

• With that mindset, they embrace the vision and approach the challenges with the resolve to take their people to victory.

• Three factors that contribute to a team’s dedication to victory:

1. Unity of Vision – Teams succeed only when the players have a unified vision, no matter how much talent or potential there is.
2. Diversity of Skills – Every organization requires diverse talents to succeed.
3. A Leader Dedicated to Victory and Raising Players to Their Potential – Unity of vision doesn’t happen spontaneously. The right players with the proper diversity of talent don’t come together on their own. It takes a leader to make those things happen. It takes a leader to provide the motivation, empowerment, and direction required to win.

• Leaders who practice the Law of Victory believe that anything less than success is unacceptable. And they have Plan B. That is why they keep fighting. And it’s why they continue to win.

• How dedicated are you to winning the “fight”? Are you going to have the Law of Victory in your corner as you lead? Or when times get difficult, are you going to throw in the towel? Your answer to that question may determine whether you succeed or fail as a leader and whether your team wins or loses.

– People Buy into the Leader, Then the Vision

(DAY 14 – The 21 Day Leadership Challenge)

You believe in someone’s ideas after you already believe in the person. Practice selling YOU instead of just your ideas.

Dig into it:

• The leader finds the dream and then the people. The people find the leader and then the dream. That’s how the Law of Buy-In works.

• People don’t at first follow worthy causes. They follow worthy leaders who promote worthy causes they can believe in. People buy into the leader first, then the leader’s vision.
• As a leader, having a great vision and a worthy cause is not enough to get people to follow you. You have to become a better leader; you must get your people to buy into you. That is the price you have to pay if you want your vision to have a chance of becoming reality. You cannot ignore the Law of Buy-In and remain successful as a leader.

(In the 2008 eddition it´s called: The law of the Picture)

– People Do What People See

(DAY 13 – The 21 Day Leadership Challenge)

Leaders create followers. Great leaders create other leaders. Start being a leadership mentor to someone today.

Dig into it:

• When leaders show the way with their right actions, their followers copy their good example and succeed.

• Great leaders are both highly visionary and highly practical. Their vision helps them see beyond the immediate. They can envision what’s coming and what must be done. Leaders possess an understanding how:

* Mission provides purpose – answering the question, Why?

* Vision provides a picture – answering the question, What?

* Strategy provides a plan – answering the question, How?

• As author Hans Finzel observed, “Leaders are paid to be dreamers. The higher you go in leadership, the more your work is about the future.”

• As you strive to become a better example to your followers, remember these things.

a) Followers Are Always Watching What You Do – Just as children watch their parents and emulate their behavior, so do employees watch their bosses. If the boss comes in late, then employees feel they can too. Nothing is more convincing than living out what you say you believe.

b) It’s Easier to Teach What’s Right Than to Do What’s Right – Nothing is more convincing than people who give good advice and set a good example.

c) We Should Work on Changing Ourselves Before Trying to Improve Others – A great danger to good leadership is the temptation to try to change others without first making changes to yourself. To remain a credible leader, you must always work first, hardest and longest on changing yourself; this is essential. If we work on improving ourselves our primary mission, then others are more likely to follow.

d) The Most Valuable Gift a Leader Can Give Is Being a Good Example – More than anything else, employees want leaders whose beliefs and actions line up. Leadership is more caught than taught. How does one “catch” leadership? By watching good leaders in action.