Seven Lessons On Leadership From Dallin H. Oaks

Following are seven important leadership principles I have learned from my life’s experiences:

• Love is the first principle.  Its effect magnifies the effects of every other principle. Leaders who are loved and who love those they lead enhance the impact of their leadership and the duration of their influence.  

• Good leaders are not overly concerned with popularity, knowing that popularity follows good leadership–it does not produce it. 

• Good leaders make decisions that can be relied upon because they stick with them. 

• Good leaders are positive.  Optimism is infectious. People have confidence in and work best for leaders who view adversity as a challenging opportunity and who are positively and thoughtfully confident in the assigned task and the desire outcome.  

• Good leaders are clear in defining what is expected, able to express it in simple terms, and effective in communicating with those they lead. These three qualities are so interrelated that I cannot give examples that do not, in some measure, include all of them. 

• Good leaders will be calm and unflappable under the pressure that leaders cannot escape. Such poise steadies followers, whereas a leader’s panic or anxiety scatters and disable s them.  Sports fans see this poise in the demeanor of most successful coaches of team sports.  

• Finally, no single principle of leadership is more powerful in its effect on followers than a leader’s setting the right example.  It pervades all the foregoing principles.

Lets think together again, soon.

Dallin H. Oaks, Life’s Lessons Learned, (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2011), pp. 86-88.