John Maxwell's #12 Law of Leadership: The Law of Empowerment

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0:35this is the Ed Myland Show 21 irrefutable laws of leadership series law 12 the law of empowerment look average leaders need to be needed I've seen this a lot in my career great leaders build people who don't need them forever welcome back to the special leadership series on John Maxwell's 21 irrefutable laws of leadership today's principle is the law of empowerment and this law is one of the biggest tests of a leader's security. Because empowerment sounds simple, but for many leaders, it's incredibly difficult. Why? Because empowerment requires trust. Look, if you're like me, you're probably a control freak, and it's very difficult to let go of things.

1:14But one of the things I've learned as a leader in business is one of my main jobs is to transfer belief and skill to people. The transfer of belief and skill is what makes a great leader. And once you've done that, you've got to give people space to improve and to grow and even make decisions in some cases. So it requires releasing control. It requires letting someone else carry responsibility. And it requires being secure enough to celebrate when someone else grows. One of the greatest mistakes leaders make is believing they're more valuable when everything depends on them. So they hold on to everything.

1:46They make every decision. They control every detail. Actually, they become the bottleneck. And then they wonder why the organization isn't growing. But here's the truth. If everything depends on you, you haven't built a team. And here's the other truth. you don't have a business. You just have a you thing where you control everything and nothing will ever get you free. You'll never be independent. What you've really built is dependency, whereas great leaders build independent people. And dependency makes a leader feel important temporarily, but it limits long-term growth. In leadership, control feels safe, but control does not scale.

2:20Empowerment scales. When you empower people, you give them the responsibility. You give them the belief. You give them the room and the space to make decisions and therefore to grow. And you give them the dignity of ownership. This doesn't mean you disappear. It means you develop. John uses the term to equip. You coach. You create standards. And then you trust people to rise. This connects deeply to what I teach in The Power of One More. One more opportunity can change someone's life. One more belief. One more moment where a leader says, I believe you're capable of more. I believe in you. Sometimes people don't become leaders because nobody ever empowered them to lead.

3:00They were managed. They were corrected. They were criticized. But they were never empowered. And one of the great gifts a leader can give someone is the gift of belief before they truly believe in themselves. You'll also hear me in my books talk about identity. Empowerment is one of the great ways leaders shape identity in others. When you give someone meaningful responsibility, you're communicating to them, Hey, I see leadership in you. I see capacity in you. I see something bigger in you than maybe even you see in yourself. That's the great gift great leaders have given me in my life. They've made me believe I was better than even I thought I was.

3:38Well, I can't believe that if you're controlling every single decision. Let me soar. Let me make some mistakes. Let me grow. Let me expand. And when that happens, people begin to rise to the identity you call out of them. That's leadership. Think about the best coach you've ever had. the best boss, the best mentor, the best parent. They didn't just tell you what to do. They made you feel capable of becoming more. They gave you a standard. They gave you accountability, but they also gave you belief. That is empowerment. And I think this matters so much today because so many people are over-managed and underdeveloped.

4:13They're told what to do, but not how to think. I got to tell you why we do this too. We don't have a long-term vision for our business. We're so caught up in the day-to-day of trying to make a profit, trying to hit our numbers. And what we do is we cause ourselves to stay in that cycle perpetually forever because we don't develop any expansion and any leadership. There's no transfer of belief or skills. So what you've done is you've given tasks but not ownership. Great leaders do it differently. They don't just ask, how can I get this done expeditiously? They ask, who can grow by doing this? That shift changes literally everything because now leadership is not just about production, It's about multiplication.

4:50With that, let's hear John Maxwell teach the foundation of this principle, the law of empowerment. Number 12, the law of empowerment. And the law of empowerment says only secure leaders give power to others. Only secure leaders give power to others. In your notes, the people's capacity to achieve is determined by their leaders' willingness and ability to empower. Let me illustrate. Every year I spend time with my nonprofit organization, Equip, traveling internationally. And as I travel to many countries, I teach thousands upon thousands of leaders. What I have noticed, especially in developing countries around the world, is I've noticed that the person in power, the person that has a leadership position, instead of empowering others and instead of sharing with others and instead of including others and developing a leadership team, the person in a leadership position, instead of raising up people, in developing countries most often, they try to push down people.

6:07Let me illustrate. Come on up here for a moment. My name's John. What's your name? David. David, come on up here beside me. Let me just illustrate this with David. By the way, David, I wanted to pick out somebody good looking. Want me to sit down? No, no, no. No, no, no. I just looked around and said, I got to get a good looking guy for this. Okay. Now, watch this, David. What I found is too many leaders, and by the way, I want to stop here for a moment, not only in developing countries, in America. I see this happen all the time. Leaders who have power and have position, taking somebody like David, let's say I'm the leader, I got the power, I got the position.

6:45Here's what I see happening all the time, where we take them and we try to push them down. Okay, come on David, cooperate. I'm sorry.

6:54David's theme song is I Shall Not Be Moved. So these leaders, they push them down. You follow me? And their whole thing is I got to keep pushing my people down. I got to push them down. By the way, have you noticed something? While I'm pushing David down, what's happening to me? I'm going down with him. That's the way it always works, friend. Listen, if you're a leader and you push people down, you just go down with them. It's only a matter of time. Just ask if I take David and I start developing him and I say, I'm going to lift him up and I'm going to get him up to a higher level. Now, what happens?

7:31But when I start lifting David up, what happens? I go up with him. Here's what I want you to understand as a leader. You either go up with your people or you go down with your people. And this idea of somehow I'm going to protect my position, I'm going to push people down, what we don't realize is it eventually is our downfall also. By the way, thanks, David. You did a great job, didn't you? Give him a hand. He did a great job. Okay. Now. David, you and I have been practicing that for months, and boy, it worked out really well. This episode is sponsored by Rho. A lot of people assume GLP-1s cost a fortune, and that assumption keeps them from even looking into treatment.

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9:58Head to Wayfair.com or shop the Wayfair app for all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. So you ask yourself the question. I ask myself this question all the time. Again, when I travel and I see this happening in other countries, I ask myself, why is it that the leader insists on somehow being way above his or her people and always is trying to kind of keep everybody, you know, I don't know, they have this kind of like, I don't know, the best way I explain it, almost like a king of the hill mentality. And I've got to be on top. Why is it that people fail to empower people and give them the energy and the permission and the environment that will help them to be growing and be great leaders themselves?

10:44I think there are several reasons we need to discuss quickly. One of the reasons I think we fail as leaders to empower others is insecurity. You show me an insecure leader and I'll show you somebody that will never empower anybody. In fact, let me tell you what's never happened. An insecure leader has never empowered anyone because they're too insecure. They're afraid that somebody else will get their job. What happens if I give somebody a little bit of empowerment and they do a better job than me? Whoa. And that insecurity constantly causes leaders to keep pushing people down. Let me just say this, then I'll move on real quickly because I'll start to show my bias and I don't want to do that.

11:32One of the worst days of your life is to be in any organization where you have to follow an insecure leader. Trust me. It's like walking handcuffed through a landmine. It's only a matter of time until they'll blow you and them up together. Insecurity. Insecure leaders do not empower other people. Another reason I think we fail to empower others is a desire for job security. I do know people who I don't think they're insecure. They just want to keep their job. They're saying, well, I don't know if I want to train and empower somebody. They may take my job away from me. Now, what I've always taught, especially my inner circle, who I've taught all to be leaders, I've always told them it's their job to work themselves out of a job.

12:23My thing is equip and train people to take your job. And let me tell you something. If you equip somebody to take your job and you train them, here's the way this works. If you work your way out of a job, I'll give you another one. I've had key inner circle members that have had seven or eight positions in a period of maybe 13, 14 years with me. I mean, they've gone from this one to another because they train and empower, and then they've done that, so they don't need to run that, so they go over and run another area. I have a wonderful friend of mine that's been with me for over 20 years, Dan Rylan.

12:50Little of that man, I bet you he has worked himself out of at least a dozen jobs in 20-plus years of being with me. You know what I say to my staff is, you work yourself out of a job, I'll give you another one. In fact, here's the way it works with me. If you can't work yourself out of a job,

13:12you're smart, aren't you? I'll take the one away from you. You'll lose the job if you can't train someone else to do the job. But I think sometimes we just don't want anybody else to take our job. Another reason I think we fail to empower people is a bad experience. In other words, I'll bet everyone in the studio, and I'll bet everyone listening to this leadership training tape, I'll bet everyone of us have had a time where we've trained somebody. I mean, you've worked hard, you've poured your life into them, you've trained them, and then it turned out bad. They didn't do a good, you know, they left the company, they left you, they hurt you, they backstabbed you, they did all kinds of, how many of you have ever had a bad experience trying to train someone?

13:55Raise your hand. Oh, yeah, 100 % in the studio. How many of you are sitting beside that person today? Now, see, you've learned. Now your hand doesn't go up anymore. You know better. You know better. Okay, now, a lot of times, just a bad experience. I've had that happen to me. I can remember as a young leader taking a very promising young guy, younger than me. I was already in my 20s, so he was really young. and pour my life into him for a couple, about three years, only to have him just mess up. And I remember I said to myself, I'm never going to do this again. I am never going to do this again.

14:32I've done training people. In fact, I thought when I hire people from now on, instead of pouring my life into them, I'm going to keep them at a distance. And for the next six months when I brought a couple people on my staff, I kept them at a distance. And one day I realized that if you don't allow a person to get close to you and if you don't pour your life into them, The good news is they probably won't hurt you, but the bad news is they'll never help you. They'll never be able to come alongside of you and truly alliance and partner with you. But a bad experience. A lot of times we just have bad experiences.

15:02I'm never going to do that again. And so, therefore, we fail to empower people. Number four, ego. Just ego. Just the fact, hey, a lot of times we don't empower everybody because we want all the credit. Isn't that true? We think, my goodness, I empower this team. They're going to get some of the credit, and I'd like to have it all. Hello? Huh? Number five, codependency. I think sometimes we are codependent with others. In other words, basically what we're saying is, I need you, and I want to keep you close to it. If I empower you, I might free you up to let you go. And I put in there, because it's a true statement, you can't lead people if you need people.

15:46Now, don't take that statement to the extreme. Don't go back and say, boy, I don't even like people. This is just, this is awesome. I have the first quality of being a great leader. No, no, no, no. If you need them. And the reason you can't lead them if you need them is if you truly need them in a codependent way, you'll never make the hard decisions because you need their approval too much. By the way, as I close out the law of empowerment, I just want to say to you that this has been a law that has been very important to me since I've turned 50 and now much older. I've come to the conclusion for me, now this is just for me, that my greatest joy and my greatest fulfillment is in adding value to others.

16:36And I can say at this stage of my life, other people's success brings me more joy than my own success. And I don't mean that wrong because I still like to hit the ball out of the park. And every once in a while I get the chance to hit the ball out of the park. But to train and teach someone else to do that, it's a greater joy. You know what? I kind of know what I can do. But when I pour my life into others and I see what they can do, it begins to compound as far as the return. It begins to instead of to add, it begins to multiply. And so I kind of close this law by saying that I have found that adding value to people is very important to me.

17:18And I basically try to guide my life so that every day I can positively take people to another level. And I found three things about adding value to people that is just absolutely huge. And the first thing I found about adding value to people is this, that you can only add value to people if you truly value people. If I don't value you as a leader, I'll manipulate you instead of motivate you. And it's never right. So the only way that I can ever add value to you is truly value you. And secondly, I only can add value to people when I know and relate to what they value. I've got to know and relate to what they value because I can't add value to them if I'm on a different page.

18:07I've got to know what their interests are and what their goals and mission and passion is. Those are important. So I can only add value to you if I know and relate to what you value. And thirdly, I can only add value to you and to others when I make myself more valuable. In other words, I've got to keep growing. Because if I don't keep growing, I cannot pass on to you what I'm learning. Because you cannot give what you do not have. So how do I stretch you? By stretching myself first. How do I add value to you? By adding value to myself first. How do I grow you? By growing myself first. By making myself more valuable.

18:51Then I can add value to you. and that's what the law of empowerment is all about taking people to a higher level than they would have ever gone on their own but because you willed it and gave permission to it you empower them so everybody john and i get asked often where you could see the two of us speak actually together and very often we do that for life surge which is a christian business event where you can You can come in looking for the spirit, and you also learn a bunch of things about business. And John and I are at many of those events actually at the same time, and we love speaking for them.

19:30Oh, we love doing it together. It's just if you come to Life Surgeons, you just get – I started to say double trouble, but hopefully you also get some double help. And Ed and I, we'd love to see you at one of our events. Absolutely. We'll see you there. If you haven't done it yet, click the link below. You'll need the 21-page workbook in your hands to track the rep for every law. Plus, that is the only way to get your questions in front of John and I for the Q &A sessions that we've already done and the ones that are coming up in a few weeks. Get the guide, join the list, and let's get back to the teaching.

20:02The highest level of leadership is not getting people to depend on you. It's helping people grow so much that they become leaders themselves. Insecure leaders control. Secure leaders empower. And the more secure you become in who you are, the more willing you are to help others become who they were born to be. The rep is to pick one person this week and intentionally empower them. Give them ownership, not just an assignment. Let them solve a problem. Let them make some decisions. Let them take a visible role. Then support them without bringing them down. Also, ask where your ego may be slowing down the growth of others.

20:40Sometimes the greatest act of leadership is stepping back enough for somebody else to step up. The goal is not to remain the hero. The goal is to build more heroes. not to be the king but to be the king maker not to be the queen to be a queen maker to be successful as a leader you must empower others the greatest things happen only when you give others the credit enlarging others makes you larger do some reflecting on how you can make things easier for you to give some authority over something important it can be something as simple as a family member in your house asking them to do a task or delegate tasks to employees then encouraging them to bring them up and then encouraging them and bringing them up to reproduce leaders, which will be the key for the next law.

21:26This is the Ed Myland Show.

21:33Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney+. What are you waiting for? Hop on. The must-see galactic adventure comes home on Disney+. This is the way. Our only chance is to work together. I like this kid. Always wear your seatbelt.