The psychological view of leadership—that leaders should understand individual differences and adapt to them—is incomplete; while respecting psychology is necessary, experience shows that understanding yourself better doesn't actually make you better at leadership, and the most effective approach is behavioral: identifying and mastering specific actions and routines that great leaders share.

Leadership is fundamentally about making situations and people better through strategic messages, decisions, actions, routines, and sometimes symbolism that move people to be different; it is not defined by position, authority, or title, so anyone can lead at any time anywhere, including young children, and the best teams are teams of leaders, not a leader with a team.

The core feedback behavior that admired leaders practice is starting with positive feedback that is as vivid, elaborate, and detailed as the negative feedback will be, and matching the number of positive remarks to negative remarks (roughly 1:1 or higher ratio), not just offering throwaway positives, so the relationship and the specific feedback moment are both in balance.

Leaders often promote and reward results-driven performers without checking whether those performers have followership—teams willing to follow them—and many highly promoted leaders are actually despised by their teams, which is why sustainable leadership requires both results and followership skills, not results alone.

When you find people with genuine followership skills, they report that followers feel differently around them—feel more engaged, feel differently about themselves, develop loyalty, believe that loyalty is reciprocated, and feel that the leader stands for them—creating a qualitatively different context for engagement.

When someone gets 15 years of positive performance reviews and then a new leader gives them their first honest, fair, and objective critical review, they often react as if the review is unfair or dishonest, because they've been conditioned to expect only superlatives and are unprepared to hear balanced or critical feedback.

Third-party praise (telling a third party about someone's excellence rather than telling the person directly) is more powerful than direct praise because: (1) it makes the person look good in front of someone else, (2) there's no 'but' attached (high-standard people often qualify praise with caveats), and (3) it signals higher sincerity—you wouldn't tell a third party if you didn't really believe it—and it eventually comes back to the person in a way that feels like genuine recognition.

A priority is different from an objective, goal, or KPI—it is something shifting all the time, representing your highest focus right now, and never your day job; the best leaders get people's short-term priorities right, and longer-term goals take care of themselves; most leaders are overly clear about long-term objectives and goals but under-focused on calibrating people's near-term priorities.

Motivation and inspiration are distinct concepts: motivation is any action that compels other action; inspiration is lighting the fire—inspiring people to want to do better, achieve, and excel. Most motivational things are not inspirational (e.g., threat of cold shoulder compels compliance but doesn't inspire), but most inspirational things are also motivational.

The Tiger Woods birdie shot at the 2005 Masters (hole 16, par 3, from rough to within 20 feet, ball rolls backward toward hole, stays on cup edge for 2.2 seconds before dropping) is cited as evidence that external enthusiasm can influence outcomes; a sportswriter present reported that the vibration from the crowd was so intense he could feel it in his thighs, and he wrote that the ball made the final revolution because of crowd enthusiasm, not physics alone.

When someone doesn't like a person—finds them hard to work with, arrogant, petulant—but the person produces good results and can't be removed, the leader still has to be a fan and find different behaviors to celebrate and different ways to celebrate them; leaders can't selectively decide who to inspire and who not to inspire; the job of leadership is to inspire everyone you lead.

Values are what leaders leave their children more than anything else; leaders should explicitly talk about values, act on them consistently, and live them transparently rather than leaving them mysterious or using slogans; family values should be explicit when children are young and formative (before they have peer influence and formal education), and while children can choose their own values later, early exposure shapes their independent values significantly.

Culture eats strategy for lunch (attributed to Peter Drucker); talent sets the table; without the right talent, you have nothing; if you want to influence an organization at the deepest level, you have to deal with talent first, and then culture has a large impact; organizational culture can be resistant to change because it likes the current outcomes (even dysfunctional ones) or believes new initiatives are fads that will be waited out.

The Admired Leadership Institute has developed a digital leadership course with 10 modules covering functions of leadership (feedback, change, time management, etc.), with 10 specific behavioral routines explained in each module; the course aims to have larger influence (thousands instead of hundreds of people) and preserve knowledge through digital format rather than just consulting; the approach is behavioral, not individual-difference or principle-based, distinguishing it from most other leadership training.

The best leaders—those who are admired in all contexts (family, community, workplace, worship, neighbors)—operate from a consistent set of core behaviors and routines that they practice everywhere, not behaviors they turn on and off for different situations, which is why admiration is universal across all their relationships.

People often resist organizational change not because the proposed solution is wrong but because they benefit from the current dysfunction; when you expose this—that people are benefiting from the problem—you can sometimes create openness to change, but people won't adopt solutions that require them to give up power, resources, or the benefits they're getting from the status quo.

The negativity effect—the psychological phenomenon that negative information carries more weight and impact than positive information—is why leaders naturally buffer feedback by starting with softening statements; but most leaders don't buffer enough, leaving relationships chronically out of balance with too much negative feedback relative to positive, which causes people to withdraw, shut down, and become defensive before feedback even arrives.

Some leaders withhold praise because they don't need it personally (intrinsic motivation is strong) or because they have high standards and want to withhold recognition until people achieve excellence; this causes them to have fewer praising opportunities and reduces their skill at praise, which is a behavior that can be learned and practiced.

There is a universal motivator that works across all cultures, genders, ages, and experiences: everyone wants the people they respect and admire to root for them—to be fans of them, to clap and cheer for their success, to say and show that they believe in them; this is universal and true across all people, and mastering the ability to be a genuine fan is the game-changer of motivation and inspiration.

One key fan behavior is keeping great news alive in time—not keeping it alive forever, but extending it longer than normal by documenting it, framing it, making it a screensaver, writing a letter someone can reread, celebrating it monthly for a year, naming a conference room after someone temporarily, or naming a sandwich after them for three weeks—only a fan would do this, and it inspires people more than any other single behavior.