The fact is, kindness isn’t always nice. It pushes others to do better; it asks them to try out things that they are uncertain they can accomplish; it requires them to engage in activities that they are not sure they will like. Another fact is this: Folks don’t always take kindly to kindness. Leaders, even great ones, cannot save everybody.

• Kind leaders are framers. They reinforce expectations for employees by establishing clear boundaries, standards of conduct, challenging goals, and organizational values.
• Kind leaders are interpreters. They tell the truth about how each worker and the entire company is doing. They help individuals adapt to change and make sense of their efforts.
• Kind leaders are enablers. They stimulate calculated “stretch” and risk-taking, without sheltering people from their own mistakes. They fight cynicism and facilitate growth.

• Compassion … Staying in touch with workers’ everyday challenges and problems.
• Integrity … Reliably acting on established values and keeping promises and confidences.
• Gratitude … Appreciating others for their essential help in keeping a business going.
• Authenticity … Being honest about being oneself and not playing for the crowd.
• Humility … Tempering optimism with realism and accepting responsibility for failures.
• Humor … Tapping the power of laughter to diminish anxieties and bolster group cohesion.

Heightened self-awareness, or lack of, appears to mystify some of society’s most prominent figures, from the corporate executive who unknowingly yet chronically berates his employees through abuses of power, to the physician who patronizes her patients thought her intellectual arrogance, to the politician who cannot and will not admit mistakes in judgment out of ego-preserving stubbornness.

Accomplished leaders say that experience is their best teacher. They learned their most meaningful and important leadership lessons—lessons that they’ve integrated into their own leadership style—through crucibles. These were critical events and experiences, times of testing and trial, failure more often than grand success, that grabbed them by the lapels and demanded to know “What do you stand for?” and “What are you going to do?” A situation arose that did not respect age, gender, generation, nationality, talent, or charisma; all it asked was that the person step up and be someone or do something they’d never been or done before.

People have a tendency to hold tight to wrong ideas, even when there is ample evidence to the contrary. Julius Caesar observed this two thousand years ago, when he wrote that men “willingly believe what they wish.” An example from my own schooling: when I was a medical student, we were taught that ulcers in the stomach were due to too much acid secretion. Ulcers were the result of acids—this was the established dogma. It was a concept that survived, even in the face of contrary evidence.

In 1960, a Japanese physician who had gastric ulcers published a biopsy of his stomach in a physiology textbook. If you look at the photograph in the text there are some little funny spiral shaped things around the site of the ulcer. My guess is that probably 10, 000 people looked at that picture over a period of more than 20 years. No one, though, seemed to take much notice of the little spirals.

Then in the 1980s this crazy doctor in Australia, Dr. Barry Marshall, wondered if perhaps stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria. But even a first year medical students could tell him why that was a dumb idea. As everybody knows, bacteria can’t grow in a high acid environment.

That’s always a tip off. Whenever they say “as everybody knows” beware what follows.

Dr. Marshall had this theory—this crazy idea—and he kept trying to culture bacteria out of stomach ulcers. He tried and tried and tried, and he failed and failed and failed. Finally, through persistence and some good luck, he was one day able to culture these bacteria—little spiral shaped bacteria.

He proved that garden variety stomach ulcers were due to bacteria, which today we treat—successfully —with antibiotics.

If you were to go back to that 1960 article of Dr. Ito from Japan, you will clearly see the spiral-shaped bacteria hiding in plain sight where everyone could see them. And yet, the belief that ulcers came from too much acid survived.

1. Courage is not the absence of fear — it's inspiring others to move beyond it
   "I can't pretend that I'm brave and that I can beat the whole world." But as a leader, you cannot let people know. "You must put up a front." He knew that he was a model for others, and that gave him the strength to triumph over his own fear.
2. Lead from the front — but don't leave your base behind
   For Mandela, refusing to negotiate was about tactics, not principles. Throughout his life, he has always made that distinction. His unwavering principle — the overthrow of apartheid and the achievement of one man, one vote — was immutable, but almost anything that helped him get to that goal he regarded as a tactic. He is the most pragmatic of idealists.
3. Lead from the back — and let others believe they are in front
   Mandela loved to reminisce about his boyhood and his lazy afternoons herding cattle. "You know," he would say, "you can only lead them from behind." He would then raise his eyebrows to make sure I got the analogy. The trick of leadership is allowing yourself to be led too. "It is wise," he said, "to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea."
4. Know your enemy — and learn about his favorite sport
   As far back as the 1960s, Mandela began studying Afrikaans, the language of the white South Africans who created apartheid. His comrades in the ANC teased him about it, but he wanted to understand the Afrikaner's worldview; he knew that one day he would be fighting them or negotiating with them, and either way, his destiny was tied to theirs. He even brushed up on his knowledge of rugby, the Afrikaners' beloved sport, so he would be able to compare notes on teams and players.
5. Keep your friends close — and your rivals even closer
   Mandela is a man of invincible charm — and he has often used that charm to even greater effect on his rivals than on his allies. He cherished loyalty, but he was never obsessed by it. After all, he used to say, "people act in their own interest." It was simply a fact of human nature, not a flaw or a defect. The flip side of being an optimist — and he is one — is trusting people too much. But Mandela recognized that the way to deal with those he didn't trust was to neutralize them with charm.
6. Appearances matter — and remember to smile
   When Mandela was running for the presidency in 1994, he knew that symbols mattered as much as substance. He was never a great public speaker, and people often tuned out what he was saying after the first few minutes. But more important was that dazzling, beatific, all-inclusive smile. For white South Africans, the smile symbolized Mandela's lack of bitterness and suggested that he was sympathetic to them. To black voters, it said, I am the happy warrior, and we will triumph.
7. Nothing is black or white
   Mandela is comfortable with contradiction. As a politician, he was a pragmatist who saw the world as infinitely nuanced. Every problem has many causes. Mandela's calculus was always, What is the end that I seek, and what is the most practical way to get there?
8. Quitting is leading too
   Knowing how to abandon a failed idea, task or relationship is often the most difficult kind of decision a leader has to make. He knows that leaders lead as much by what they choose not to do as what they do.

1. Living a Life of Undivided Integrity. Notwithstanding that integrity is in fact being undivided, he writes that while leaders do make mistakes, followers “do expect their leaders to admit and correct their mistakes, mend the cracks in their integrity, if you will. Left unchecked, eventually a lack of integrity erodes the trust that is needed between a leader and a follower.”



2. Always Demonstrate a Positive Attitude. People respond to optimism. Bad things happen. And when they do, you need to ask not “Why did this happen to me?” but “What’s next?” or “What good can come from this?” “You are choosing to believe that something good can come from negative circumstances and that the future will be better than the present.”



3. Consider Other People’s Interests as More Important Than Your Own. “Even more important than being interesting, is being interested.”



4. Don’t Settle For Anything Less Than Excellence. Widner encourages us to grow our influence by improving ourselves around seven areas of excellence: physical appearance, emotional health, intellectual growth, spiritual depth, relationships, financial success, and charitable giving. Excellence is in the details.

1. Relative to all the things I could be doing, is this something that will have the greatest impact on the most important goals?
2. Will this task improve results or effectiveness beyond what we are doing today?
3. Will anyone notice if this doesn’t get done?
4. If I ran into a contingency today and could only do two other tasks, what would I do? Would this task still be important?