In early August, I signed up to take a nine week leadership challenge hosted by Ryan Holiday from Daily Stoic. During week one, Ryan interviewed Randall Stutman, a Leadership Scientist from the Admired Leadership Institute. The Admired Leadership Institute’s mission is to understand what makes great leaders and to teach the uncommon behavioral routines of the world’s best leaders.

I pulled so much content from that interview that I decided to break it up into several posts separated by topic. In this post, I will share Randall’s thoughts on what makes a good leader. In later posts, I will share his thoughts on Coaching and Feedback, Talent Management, and Change Management.

What is Leadership?

A leader is a person who wants to work with others to solve problems that he or she can’t do alone. A person’s desire to lead should be based more on solving problems and helping others and not about the desire for power, control, and influence. The end game should always be about working with others to solve problems and improve situations.

During the interview, Ryan asked Randall who were on his G.O.A.T Leadership list. He replied with, “It is time to stop celebrating leaders and start celebrating their actions and behaviors.” He warned listeners not to put leaders on a pedestal or hero worship them because all leaders are people and all people are flawed in some way. Instead, we should focus on the things we can learn from leaders, from their actions and behaviors, and incorporate them into our daily lives.