Killer Leadership

Humans are more important than hardware.

Welcome to the Killer Leadership Blog, a place to discuss leadership fundamentals, lessons learned, and leadership challenges. After a career in the Special Forces, including four combat tours, and working as a consultant with customers from the United States and throughout the Middle East and Asia, I am struck by the absolute foundational truth to solving problems. Humans are more important than hardware. Every team, project, division, group, or company needs effective leadership to be successful. Hell, every family needs effective leadership. And so do you. Being good at this means being good at life.

Being a leader is a solemn role with one task - make every human being around you better than they were before.

The team around you at work or at home is your actual team. They aren't placeholders until your real team arrives. If there are problems with performance, quality, behaviors, or culture then you better get to work. It might help to define what we think being a leaders means, and what are the things a leader does. And solely to prevent you from wasting hours of your life, don't Google "define leadership." Let's strip it all the way down to the bare rock so we can build something here. Being a leader is a solemn role with one task - make every human being around you better than they were before. That's it. Your only job is to make everyone around you better. And as far as what a leader is, I would simply say that a leader is accountable.

All bad teams have the same single defining problem. A bad leader.