Who's Got Your Ear?

Everyone is leading something or someone, somewhere. How are you doing at using your responsibility to lead excellently? 

Whether you're leading a company, a family, or a moment in time—you're leading somebody...even if it's only yourself. The question is, where will you lead, and how will you do so?

Good leadership requires many attributes and qualities to be developed within that leader. However, there is a key factor from without that greatly affects their scope of leadership: who the leader chooses to surround themselves with.

Although Niccoló Machiavelli may not be the perfect example of a moralist, his treatise The Prince (though it promotes "the end justifying the means" for the sake of political success) has gained widespread fame. Amidst the pages of ruthless stratagem in the short book, there also lay great truths in the matter of advisors.

Machiavelli says there are three types of leaders, as defined by how they handle the advice they receive:

"One which comprehends by itself." This person is typically wise enough to make their own decisions, but is typically also wise enough to surround themselves with wise advisors and listen to their counsel—making them likely to succeed.

"Another which appreciates what others comprehend." Here is the person that may not necessarily be wise enough to make right decisions on their own, but they are prudent enough to surround themselves with wise advisors—causing them to have legitimate hope of being successful.

"A third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others." This is the tough one. The man/woman who isn't necessarily wise enough to regularly make good decisions, but also isn't prudent enough to hire wise counselors. In this case, the person may or may not be receiving intelligent entreaties, but they typically don't know any better—so, their decisions can be unpredictable and only mistakenly prudent.

So, which are you?

The intelligent one? The one who relies much on others? Or maybe the one who thinks they're intelligent, but are only crushing the people around them with their inconsistency and imprudence.

I'm not sure if it is possible to change categories, but I think it's worth a long, hard look at how you lead the people you're in charge of. Ask yourself difficult questions about how you do things, how you are perceived. And then, whatever you do, do your best to receive advice not just from the people that tell you what you want to hear, or people that will do what you say, but people that are wise enough to tell you the truth—when it's easy and when it hurts.

1. Place wise counsel around yourself—friends and mentors, advisors and confidants.

2. Listen well.

3. Test everything, hold onto the good, discard what's not.

If you do these, you can lead in a manner that helps those around you and is more successful than ever you dreamed.