Is everybody, or there's no such thing as everybody for anything, but are most people capable of being leaders?
Well, not only are most people capable of being leaders, people are required to be leaders.
Because unless you live in a cave somewhere alone, if you interact with other human beings at any point in your day, you're in a leadership position.
You have to use influence.
You have to sway their opinions about things.
You have to get them to, you know, whether it's getting someone to do a project at work or whether it's getting your family to get to dinner on time.
You have to use leadership to do these things properly.
So everyone is a leader.
And people are born with different levels of leadership capabilities.
Some people are born, you know, highly blessed with some incredible characteristics that make leadership easier for them.
No one's born with all of them, and we all have work to do.
Some people are born with less.
But what doesn't change is if you're in a leadership position, you can use these leadership strategies and tactics to make your leadership skills improve, and therefore you'll do a better job as a leader than your team, your family, your group, your business.
It'll do better.
So I'd like to bounce off.
A thought I have, and I tell everybody I interview, it is completely okay to say I don't agree with you, Dennis.
Okay?
Just telling you in advance.
Okay, well, I already don't agree with your criticism of my title.
I love it.
We'll get past that.
I love it.
I love it.
I knew you would be crushed.
I just had a sense.
Guys, Navy SEAL for 20 years.
I just suspected you'd be able to handle my reaction to the title.
Anyway, I admire you for it.
It's like Tom Sowell.
Well, Dennis, it is about basic economics.
Okay, fine.
That ends the issue.
If this book even comes close to his book, I'll be honored.
Well, it's very sweet of you.
It does come close.
It's a different arena, but it's a terrific book.
Okay, so I was just asked this.
I do a weekly fireside chat on PragerU and YouTube.
Somebody wrote in, what is the most important thing in being a leader, or something to that effect?
And so these are spontaneous answers, and my spontaneous answer was, you cannot want to be loved by the people you lead.
And that's true for a parent and children, a teacher and students, a talk show host and his audience, a politician and the voters.
And that was my response.
I developed it, but that was what it was.
What do you say to that?
So, I understand what you are trying to say.
What you are trying to say is that if you prioritize being liked or being loved with your family, if you prioritize the number one thing I want is for people to love me, if that's what your priority is, it's not going to work out well for you.
Because you're going to make confessions that you should make.
You're going to allow people to do things.
Look, here's a simple example.
You're a parent.
You want your kids to love you?
Great.
They want candy.
That's what children want.
If you love them and you want them to love you, cool.
You have all the candy that you can eat.
Not only are your kids sick, they're unhealthy, etc.
That's a really obvious example.
The same thing happens in the business place, right?
You've got a team.
You've got a team of salespeople.
And they've got to earn their money.
They're on commission.
But you want them to love you.
And they want to go home early.
Or they don't want to make that next call.
So since you want to be popular, you want to be loved, you let them go home.
You don't make them work.
Now they can't pay their bills.
So if you prioritize being loved, that's going to be a problem.
However...
The underpinning of being a good leader, the underpinning is you have to care about your people.
And you have to love your people.
And if you love them and you take care of them, and I've got a part in the book about this, you take care of them with discipline.
You take care of them by pushing them.
You take care of them by allowing them to take risk and sometimes fail.
That's what you have to do as a leader.
And if you do that, but the reason that you're doing it is because you love them and you care about them, they're going to love you and they're going to care about you back.
So I used to be, I was kind of famous inside the SEAL teams when it came to debriefing the SEALs when they were going through training operations.
And I would give them these completely Savage debriefs about the mistakes they made, about the errors they committed, about the slack that they allowed in their platoon.
Just brutal debriefs.
And yet, the feedback I got all the time, either directly when I would get done debriefing or when guys would come back from deployment, is they would say thank you.
They would say thank you, thank you.
They'd be taking notes.
And I could see in their eyes that they just wanted me to tell them what to do and how to improve.
And the reason that I was able to debrief them so sternly is because the guys in the SEAL teams that I was training, they knew that beyond everything else, the sole motivation for me being hard on them was because I loved those guys, I cared about them, and I wanted them to go on deployment to take care of the mission, take care of the men, and come back home to their families.
So when you care about people, that's the underpinning of leadership.