ASK ANY RANDOM GROUP of people to name an inspiring leader from history, and the usual names will likely come tumbling forward: Alexander the Great, Elizabeth I, Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. … figures who responded to a crisis, unified their nation or “tribe,” and changed the course of history through a combination of will, charisma and daring.

Ask for great managers of history — the individuals who helped translate vision into action — and the names are likely to come a little slower: Alexander Hamilton … Lord Beaverbrook … George C. Marshall … umm … Tim Cook?

None of this should be surprising. Managers work behind the scenes. They prefer evolution over revolution, focus on execution of a plan over articulating a vision, and perhaps most importantly, the best ones work to make other people look and be better.

A leader provides clarity of purpose, outlines the big picture and leverages this vision to guide their teams. They identify the universal and capitalize on it. In contrast, good managers zero in on what is unique about each of their workers, their individual strengths, and capitalize on those.

Clearly, a great enterprise needs both: the dream and the day-to-day execution. Nation-states and corporations have the resources and scale to support leaders and managers, but when your life’s work is a small business, you must wear both hats. And that’s where it gets tricky. Not just knowing when a situation requires leadership or management but also acquiring the competencies to do so. Management is a set of skills that just about anyone can learn with sufficient emotional and raw intelligence. Leadership appears to be at least partly innate: It necessitates certain mysterious magnetic traits that are harder to acquire if you’re not born with them … an “X factor.”

Still, while you may never develop the oratory skills of Churchill, the charisma of Kennedy, or the ability to launch a new product with the confidence of Steve Jobs, you can do a lot that is vitally important to the success of your business: set the mission, lay the ethical foundation, model the behaviors you want to see, make the bold strategic calls when needed and show your workers are cared for. To be sure, there is a degree of “faking it until you make it,” but doubt about whether you’re the right man or woman for the job only puts you in good historical company. (Simply take a peek at the private letters of Washington or Lincoln.)

In Act Like A Leader, Think Like A Leader, London School of Business professor Herminia Ibarra argues that for all the theory about what makes a good leader, the only way to develop as one is to first act — to plunge yourself into new projects and activities, interact with very different kinds of people, and experiment with unfamiliar ways of getting things done. In short, to act your way into a way of thinking about the role.

In the following pages, we share tips from your peers in the Brain Squad and from some of the world’s leading experts on management and leadership. We’ve split the tips between those that apply to a manager and those that are more relevant for a leader. What they all have in common is that they are actionable … they’re just waiting for you to implement them.

LEADER1 Look the Part

Sgt. Matt Eversmann took part in one of the U.S. military’s great “no man left behind” stories, leading troops in the firefight in Mogadishu, Somalia, that served as the inspiration for the movie Black Hawk Down. So, what’s his take on leadership? Fearlessness, charisma, self-sacrifice? No, it’s looking sharp, he tells Carmine Gallo, author of 10 Simple Secrets Of The World’s Greatest Communicators. To start with, “always dress a little better than everyone else,” he advises. “Presence” makes people receptive to the important stuff that follows, he argues.

LEADER

2 From the Front

As they say, culture eats strategy for breakfast. And culture starts at the top. You’re the leader. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

But if you prefer to take your inspiration from the hard-edged world of business, consider business author Tom Peters’ recommendation, “Give a lot, expect a lot, and if you don’t get it, prune.” That may sound glib, but each part of this advice — the setting of standards, the communicating of them and the systematic support to ensure they can be carried out — requires conscious effort on the part of a leader: you.

LEADER 3 It’s About Values, Stupid

A chronic poor performer is a clear impediment to the goals you’ve set. “If you shrink from or delay in addressing the issue of a poorly performing team member, you don’t lose just that person’s contribution. You send a message to everyone else about your values,” says Joseph Grenny, author of Crucial Accountability. People want to work for a company that has high standards, that they can be proud of and that is going to bring out the best in them.

LEADER4 Fake It Till You Make It

Traditionally “gravitas” — that trait that seems to attach itself to all great leaders — has been boiled down to three attributes: confidence, decisiveness, and a clear vision. The first is probably the most important in getting people to follow you, even if it’s not a great indicator of competence. (The probability of the most confident person in the room also being the most competent is a paltry 15%.) Nevertheless, it remains the mostly widely used proxy of the right to lead. Stride into a meeting and just repeat your point the most insistently, and you’ve a good chance of carrying the day. If that all sounds a little inauthentic, that’s fine, says Ibarra. “Think of leadership development as trying on possible selves,” she says. “That’s not being a fake; it’s how we experiment to figure out what’s right for the new challenges and circumstances we face.”

LEADER 5 But Not Overconfident

According to Stanford business professor Bob Sutton, the best leaders have “the attitude of wisdom” — the confidence to act on their convictions and the humility to keep searching for evidence that they are wrong. Yes, you need to carry yourself in a way that shows you are in charge, but it’s vital to couple that strength with a humbleness that ensures you realize you will often be wrong, and that encourages people to suggest alternative ways of doing things, he says in a column in the Harvard Business Review. “Pivot must be in your vocabulary,” agrees Jami Kulpinski of the Eye Clinic of Wisconsin in Wausau, WI. “As a leader, stay humble and really listen. People will tell you exactly what you need to know, you just have to be brave enough to ask the hard things and thank the ones that are brave enough to bring you the hard things.”

MANAGER6 Always Be Monitoring

“The greatest influence in the world is the influence of norms,” adds Grenny. “When people see visual models of desirable behavior, and when that behavior becomes widespread, it also becomes self-sustaining.” However, few people understand that norms change one person at a time. When someone offers a living example of behavior that solves a problem, others can be powerfully influenced by that one person. “When we coach executives to inspire others, we tell them to find that one positive example — a person, a team, a unit that went the extra mile to help a customer, to help out a fellow employee, meet a particularly high standard — and make it evident these are your expectations and let it sink into the collective conscience of the entire organization,” says Grenny.

MANAGER7 Fire the Bottom 10%

An employee should never be surprised to learn they are being fired. If their first response is “Why, why me?” the fault lies with poor management, writes former GM CEO Jack Welch in The Real Life MBA, explaining that it was obviously never made clear to the individual that he or she wasn’t measuring up. Says Welch: “You tell the bottom 10% where they stand, and if they don’t improve, you tell them to go. You want to field the best team; the only way you’re going to do it is by having the best players.”

LEADER8 Schedule Down Time

The legendary cognitive psychologist Amos Tversky once quipped, “You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” And to no one does that apply more than a company leader. You need the time and space for reflection and the assimilation of lessons learned from experience. It was something the late statesman George Schultz appreciated. Once a week, he would shut the door of his office and sit by himself with only a pen and a piece of paper and let his mind wander. According to a New York Times profile, he would think strategically and conceptually, setting his sights forward in a way that he couldn’t in the day-to-day crush of his responsibilities as a cabinet minister. Given our always-on lifestyles in 2025, it’s now probably even more important to give yourself such a break every week. Schedule it.

MANAGER9 Meet One-on-One

Most employees and managers will cringe at the idea of more meetings. But instituting weekly one-on-one meetings with all team members can be the most important step a business owner can take to get the best out of your staff and retain your top performers. That was the result of an intensive data-driven survey conducted by Google of its own, already highly motivated workforce, according to a New York Times report.

MANAGER10 Know the Value of Your Time

The more senior the worker, the deeper the work they do should be. And yet shallow and reactive work seems to always beckon. The secret to getting out of this trap, says David Brown of the Edge Retail Academy, is to attach a value to your time and use this to guide your decisions. If, for example, your revenue target is $1.5 million a year, then divide this number by 2,250 (assuming that you’ll be working 45 hours a week, 50 weeks a year). Now you know the only way to reach your sales target is if you’re involved in activities and/or decisions that generate $670 in revenue per hour for the business. That figure alone should make you drop the squeegee and call your neighbor’s kid to see if he wants to make some extra money cleaning windows. Do a daily tracking report of all your activities in 30-minute increments for several weeks. You may find that more than 50% of your time is being consumed by “busy” work. Start delegating a few tasks each month. And remember, if you are your store’s greatest asset on the sales floor, the person responsible for all the marketing ideas, the only one who can handle certain jewelry jobs, then your business loses a lot of its potential sales value when you retire.

LEADER11 Embrace “Failure”

Warren G. Bennis, one of the pioneers of leadership studies (and an advisor to Reagan and Kennedy on the topic) had a failure epiphany that changed his life. “The leaders I met, whatever walk of life they were from, whatever institutions they were presiding over, always referred back to some failure: something that happened to them that was personally difficult, even traumatic, something that made them feel that desperate sense of hitting bottom — as something they thought was almost a necessity. It’s as if, at that moment, the iron entered their soul; that moment created the resilience that leaders need.” The lesson: Don’t fear failure. It seems valuable and important and necessary to your success. Embrace it. Here’s how to do it right:

• Fail cheaply. Always ask, “What is the minimum viable experiment?”
• Fail forward. Be sure to learn something you didn’t know before you failed.
• Fail quickly. The primary goal is to prove or disprove your concept.

MANAGER12 Communicate Better

Think you’re an effective communicator? Chances are you’re not. According to an Interact/Harris Poll, 91% of employees say their bosses don’t communicate well, be it explaining what they wanted done, where they’d gone wrong or even what the employee had done right. The study’s author, Interact CEO Lou Solomon, told the Harvard Business Review that leaders and managers could do a better job in this area by offering specific praise and recognition, giving personal and public thank-yous, sharing information, and showing their humanity.

MANAGER13 Listen

Author Tom Peters, who is now 75 years old, says listening is “the bedrock of leadership excellence,” but characterizes himself as a bad listener and “a serial interrupter.” So, to help him stay focused on the other person, he writes the word “listen” on the palm of his hand before walking into meetings. He says, “The focus must be on what the other person is saying, not on formulating your response. That kind of listening shows respect for the other person, and they notice it.”

MANAGER14 Leverage Strengths

According to Marcus Buckingham, author of The One Thing You Need To Know … About Great Managing, Great Leading And Sustained Individual Success, the key attribute of top managers is that they are extremely adept at identifying their employees’ individual strengths and capitalizing on them. Apart from the natural productivity boost of getting people to do what they are good at, there are a host of other benefits of such management — these employees are better motivated, need less supervision, and stay longer. Similarly, it helps to know what triggers people and fires them up — extrinsic motivators like money, or something more intrinsic, like participation in a team or the satisfaction of mastering a skill — and ultimately to merge their goals with your goals (more sales, making more money, greater job satisfaction, feeling appreciated, etc.). This approach, he argues, is considerably more effective than trying to improve people’s weak points — an uphill battle that yields sub-optimal returns.

LEADER15 Be Decisive

Among the virtues traditionally considered “leaderly” (such as courage, integrity, sociability and compassion) is decisiveness. “Be willing to make decisions. That’s the most important quality in a good leader,” says business author and ad man Roy Williams. “Managers say, ‘Ready, Aim, Fire.’ Leaders say ‘Ready, Fire, Aim,’ But this isn’t as crazy as it sounds. When shooting a cannon, this is called finding your range,’” he writes in his MondayMorningMemo.

LEADER16 Keep Your Powder Dry

A counterpoint: While being willing to pull the trigger is important, it’s equally crucial to appreciate you only have so much ammunition in the form of financial capital, energy and focus. The hardest thing about being a leader is saying no to good ideas, especially in retail, where it’s imperative your customers know what you stand for in the market. As Steve Jobs, who famously told former Nike CEO Mark Parker to stop making so much crap and just focus on the products people lust after, put it: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.”

MANAGER17 Hire Well

Each of the 217 times David Ogilvy opened a new office for advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather, he would leave a set of Russian nesting dolls on the desk of the incoming manager. On reaching the tiniest doll, the manager would find a fortune-cookie style note from Ogilvy: “If each of us hires people smaller than ourselves, we shall become a company of midgets, but if each of us hires people bigger than ourselves, we should become a company of giants.” One thing that is common among all strong businesses is that they hire well. In Good To Great, Jim Collins identified hiring as one of the key elements of what he called superior “Level 5 Leadership” — recognizing that no one can achieve greatness alone. They needed to build strong teams with an emphasis on assembling and nurturing talented teams. Over-invest in hiring.

MANAGER18 Say It Over and Over and…

Dictators aren’t usually the sorts of leaders you want to emulate, but in this one instance, Stalin had it right when he supposedly said: “Quantity has a quality all its own.” That applies not just to steelmaking or military strength but to communicating with employees. According to Patrick Lencioni, a former Bain & Co. consultant and author of 5 Dysfunctions Of A Team, while you may feel you’re being redundant and even annoying, “studies show employees won’t believe a leader’s message until they’ve heard it seven times.” He adds, however, that the important thing to remember about such studies is whether the magic number is five or 55, “the message is — people are skeptical about what they hear unless they hear it repeatedly over time.”

LEADER19 Trust Your Curiosity

After spending more than 10,000 hours coaching senior executives and their teams to better performance, Allan Milham concluded that genuine curiosity is what separates great leaders from the rest of the pack. In his book Out Of The Question: How Curious Leaders Win, he argues that the best leaders and managers constantly want to learn, explore, and innovate. The venture capitalist Paul Graham came to a similar conclusion in his widely read essay “How to Do Great Work,” writing “Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what’s worth paying attention to.”

MANAGER20 Coach the Coach

With the Internet now delivering much of the product knowledge and “value” that sales associates once provided, the dynamics of the sales floor have changed. Selling and people skills are at a premium, which means there is a greater responsibility for sales managers to provide such coaching, Wharton faculty member Linda Richardson recently told the business school’s monthly bulletin, Knowledge@Wharton. Her studies have shown big payoffs when sales managers upgrade their coaching skills. “If you can’t afford a training course, do e-learning or buy books,” she says.

MANAGER21 When Good Practices Turn Bad

As Ibarra said earlier, consider everything you’ve read here something to “try on.” Even the best management practices can lead to problems if left in place too long, note Yves Doz and Mikko Kosonen in Fast Strategy. Some examples:

• Forging a clear vision — can result in tunnel vision.
• Honing business processes — can create inflexible systems that cannot adapt to new challenges.
• Building deep customer relationships — can inhibit experiments.
• Choosing proven leaders for projects — can breed overconfidence and resistance to new ideas.
• Teambuilding — can lead to silos and a lack of cooperation.

The answer? Shake it up. Assign staff to work in an area that is outside their key competence, set mock constraints and set fuzzy goals. The common theme here is to keep an open mind and keep running small experiments.

MANAGER22 Firewall Your Bad Moods

The late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen once argued that managers have among the most important jobs in the world. How they treat their workers during the day will determine whether billions of people go home happy or agitated at the end of the day. How to do it? Consider managing your moods as one of your chief responsibilities. You are a “walking mood inductor” and your subordinates are “receptors.” Your mood impacts how they feel, and, consequently, how they perform. Charles M. Schwab said he considered his ability to arouse enthusiasm among his workers the greatest asset he possesses. “And the way to develop the best that is in a man is by appreciation and encouragement,” he once said.