Eddie Johnson@TecFX

Friends, there are two things that we must be honest with ourselves about. #1 Am I taking the appropriate amount of risk? #2 Is my leadership style positively infectious? If you can honestly answer yes to both of these questions, you are well on your way to a successful career, business and life. Let me explain further.

Risk is an important element to your trajectory. Although it never feels good when a situation or decision goes sour, standing idol while the world changes around you is also a recipe for disaster. I’ll even go as far to say that standing idol, with a false sense that everything is okay, is worse than spiraling down, smacking the floor, regaining composure, learning from your mistakes and getting back in the game with a renewed sense of purpose.

The unknown (also known as the golden opportunity) will always be unreachable without challenging your natural human tendency to avoid risk at all cost. Here’s a secret… fortunes are found in the failures. However, the good news is that the failures don’t have to be your own. Leaders who are vigilant and savvy will solve problems for their end customers that their competition is not aware of or willing to tackle. Great leaders are intentional about winning! When everyone else has gone home for the day, they are planning ways to be better than they were yesterday. They work feverishly, often using erasers, white-out, the backspace and delete keys. A plan is never perfect, but the implementation, with mitigating controls to address the key risks, must be flawless.

This is where the infectious leadership trait must kick in, because a leader is only as good as the people surrounding him/her who will carry out the vision. And… we all know that the troops will not give 100% to an ineffective leader. So, we must now pause and ask ourselves… Am I an empathic servant leader who listens and is able to build bridges, or do I just have power and influence to give marching orders?

Leadership is about understanding your tribe and what makes them tick. For every single person has special gifts. A leader’s job is to find out what these gifts are and to place people in positions that play to their strengths. This is how you carry out the vision that you stayed up all night worrying about.

Investing in your employees at this level will take you to places that you never dreamed of. Why? Because the troops see an authentic leader that not only cares about the bottom line, but one that understands that the destiny (and how you get there) will ultimately bring the dividend. For this is a leader whose outlook and approach is contagious!

And… courageous and contagious leadership always wins the day!  Always!!