3 Mindset Traits Every Exceptional Leader Has

A key type of winning mindset is the leadership mindset. The quality of leadership has huge implications for families, for individuals, for organizations, for our society as a whole. So the right leadership mindset is incredibly important. If you’re a leader, you’ve agreed to take on an important job. A job that can be incredibly challenging. A job with lots of responsibilities, including this big one. It’s your responsibility to help the members of your team be successful. But how do you do that the right way? In this episode of the Winning Mindset Mastery Podcast, April gives you three specific tips. Follow her advice, and not only will you build an incredible team, you’ll also develop a strong group of leaders.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

3 Mindset Traits Every Exceptional Leader Has

Thank you for joining me. One type of winning mindset is a true leadership mindset. There are lots of facets to that in lots of ways, but three that come to mind for me are empowering, blocking and tackling, and supporting. As a leader, your job is to clear the way and make anything and everything possible for your people. When I was younger, I used to want to be a leader because I wanted to be the boss of things, but I was around 6 or 7. I also toyed with the idea of being a teacher because I liked chalk.

As a leader, you are taking on the responsibility to help make others successful. It’s not really about you. One of the ways that you can make them successful is to empower them. One of my early leaders did this in an exceptional way. I had a leader when I was first in the corporate world. His name was Don Dolan. He put me in some incredibly challenging situations, but he always knew I had the ability to succeed. I may have doubted it, but he knew.

As a leader, you are taking on the responsibility of helping others succeed. Share on X

More than putting me in those situations, he would empower me. The way he did that was to put me in situations where I was with individuals who had much more experience than I did and had loftier titles. They were directors or vice presidents, but they might not necessarily have the best solution for our clients. What he would allow me to do is use his name. That would mean that when I came up with a solution and I was having a difficult time getting it implemented, he would tell me, “As long as you were doing what is best for the client, let them know that I’m behind you 100%.” Since he led a division, they would listen to me. At my level in the organization, they might not have, but you couldn’t do that with anyone.

By empowering me that way, he gave me incredible opportunities to make a huge difference for our company and our clients. He also gave me the ability to learn things, both by doing them well or by making mistakes and learning from them, but gave me an opportunity that most folks would not have had until much later in their career.

 

A lot of times, people want to keep their folks close to them. They want to micromanage. They don’t want to have to weather a mistake that could be made when someone has been empowered to do things on their own. What I would tell you is even if they do make a mistake, the growth that they’re going to have from those experiences and how much more valuable they’ll be to you because of them is 100% worth it.

Another thing that you can do as a leader is to block and tackle. I love this. I had a leader when I was in the software industry who had been in the Navy and done Special Forces work. He saw his entire job as blocking and tackling for us. Meaning, when there were things that were going on that got in the way of us being successful, he wanted to be the person who made sure that he moved those out of our way.

In a corporate structure, he might be going to bat for us with the leadership team or the board. He was fighting for us to have the best tools of the trade to do things to make our job easier and set us up for success. He did the not-fun work so that we could do the things that were amazing and get recognition. As a leader, that’s incredibly powerful because you are then allowing so many members of your team to do incredible things without getting bogged down by red tape, administrative policies, and all those not-fun things that can prevent progress. Being willing as a leader to block and tackle is huge.

 

The third one is support. There are lots of different ways that you can support your team. One of the most powerful ones as a leader is to see the things in them that they don’t see in themselves and help them rise to that level that you can see in them, whether that is putting them in a new role that’s challenging but they are completely able to do it, pointing out to them the things that they do incredibly well because many of us don’t recognize our own genius since it’s easy for us and we assume it’s not a big deal, or allowing them to be in situations where they might be in over their head and see how they handle them. It is to let them know that if they fail or make a mistake, you’ve got their backs.

 

When you do those three things as a leader and that is your mindset all about your people, you will build an incredible team. You will not own build an incredible team of individuals. You will start building a bench of leaders. That’s because as you’re doing this and supporting them, you are modeling for them that leadership mindset. It is all those things that will make them incredible at supporting and leading others like you are.

In the coming weeks, as you’re leading your teams, if you’re not already using these three things, I encourage you to add those to your leadership mindset. If there are some I’ve missed, go to the website WinningMindsetMasteryPodcast.com. At the very bottom, there is a button that says Ask April. You can not only ask me a question, but you can also give me feedback. I’d love to hear what things you have to add to this discussion. Here’s to your success.