The Ultimate Guide to Mastering Leadership

“All Leadership is influence.” — John Maxwell

Become a better leader!

This is your self-paced guide to improve your leadership skills better, faster, and easier.

You can think of this guide as a map of essential leadership knowledge.

I’m sharing what I’ve learned about leadership from 25 years of Microsoft experience leading teams, taking on big problems, and changing the world. If you can master the mindset, the skillset, and the toolset of leadership, you will become a better leader of the future.

To lead well, you need to lead yourself first.

The most important leadership skills start with self-leadership and from there you expand your sphere of influence.

On This Page

What is Leadership
Leadership Styles and Types
Getting Started with Leadership
Personal Leadership Skills
Team, Teaming, and Teamwork
Leadership Skills
Leadership How Tos
Leadership Checklist
Leadership Lessons
Leadership Quotes

Become a Better Leader of the Future

Become a better, more influential and visionary leader.

The goal of this leadership guide is to equip you with leadership skills so you can inspire and empower others to make great things happen.

You can become a better leader by practicing and applying effective leadership skills and essential leadership concepts.

Learn and master the art and science of leadership by walking through pragmatic and time-tested leadership frameworks.

Think of this leadership guide as your virtual coach to help you learn, explore, and advance your leadership skills and knowledge at your own pace, anywhere, anytime.

What is Leadership?

I think of leadership as influencing with a purpose. It’s not a title or position. As John Maxwell put it, leadership is influence:

“Leadership is influence – nothing more, nothing less.” — John Maxwell

Here are a few helpful definitions of leadership:

“Leadership is a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others, towards the achievement of a goal.” — Forbes
“In its simplest form, leadership is influencing other people to follow. Therefore, anyone who can influence people to follow them has leadership qualities.” — MindTools.com
“Leadership is the potential to influence behavior of others. It is also defined as the capacity to influence a group towards the realization of a goal. Leaders are required to develop future visions, and to motivate the organizational members to want to achieve the visions.” — Management Study Guide

Here are examples of how some leaders have defined leadership:

“Leadership is coordinating action to realize the future you care about.” — Rick Maguire, Futurity
“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” — Warren Bennis
“As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.” — Bill Gates
“The definition of leadership is to influence, inspire and help others become their best selves, building their skills and achieving goals along the way.” — Tony Robbins
“Leadership is a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others, towards the achievement of a goal.” — Kevin Kruse, CEO of LEADx.org

Leadership is “Creating the Future You Care About”

My favorite definition of leadership is by Rick Maguire of Futurity:

“Leadership is coordinating action to realize the future you care about.” — Rick Maguire, Futurity

Really, this is about highlighting the idea of intentional leadership. So we can think of leadership as influencing with purpose and a goal.

The goal is the vision or the end-in-mind, while purpose is WHY you do it.

How great is that when you can apply your leadership skills to shape and create the future you care about while realizing your potential and helping others realize theirs.

Leadership is “Influence with a Purpose”

I think of leadership as influencing with a purpose.

Otherwise, it’s just wandering with followers.

And that’s why vision, mission and values play such a key role in any leadership effort.

Leadership isn’t a title or a position.

That’s why somebody might be a good manager, but not necessarily be a great leader.

Ultimnately, as John Maxwell put it, “Leadership is influence.”

Management is Not Leadership

As Peter Drucker put it:

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

Here’s how Hannah Miller of Leaders explains what Peter Drucker meant:

“He means a good leader is responsible for casting a vision of a better future, strategizing on the organization’s direction, and motivating their teams to achieve the company’s overarching objective.

On the other hand, managers don’t need to be sources of inspiration.

Their function is ensuring the leader’s vision comes to fruition. They do this by training, planning, directing, delegating, and monitoring success.”

I would argue that managers do need to be a source of inspiration for their people.

I would also add that what Peter Drucker was highlighting a distinction between a leader’s focus on the future, vision, creating new things, new business models, and reimagining what to do next, versus a manager’s focus on the current business, the reinforcement of the current business model, current metrics, current skillsets, and creating and optimizing efficiencies.

“Run-the-Business” vs. “Change-the-Business” Leaders

Some people argue over whether there should be a distinction between managers and leaders, but I’ve found it helpful in the real world.

That said, I have also found an additional lens that might be more helpful to differentiate different kinds of leaders:

“Run-the-business” leader
“Change-the-business’ leader

Some leaders are better at “run-the-business”. They are good at leading and managing operations

Other leaders are better at “change-the-business”. They are betting at leading change and changing the business for the future.

Leadership Styles and Types

What is your leadership types or style? It helps to be flexible and adaptable depending on the situation.

Skilled leaders know when to use the right leadership style for the situation.

When learning leadership, it helps to have a general idea of some of the most common leadership styles and types:

Autocratic Leadership: In this leadership style, the leader makes decisions without input from the team. The leader decides.
Bureaucratic Leadership: In this leadership style, the leader makes decisions based on company and policies, even with input from the team.
Coach-Style Leadership: In this leadership style, the leader coaches the team by nurturing the individual strengths of each individual and using strategies to enable the team to work better together.
Democratic Leadership: In this leadership style, the leader makes decisions based on input from the team. The team decides.
Laissez-Faire Leadership: In this leadership style, the leader takes a hands-off approach and let’s the people do with little intervention.
Strategic Leadership: In this leadership style, the leader is guiding the way forward with strategy and foresight.
Transactional Leadership: In this leadership style, the leader rewards based on transactions and work performed.
Transformational Leadership: In this leadership style, the leader is driving change and transformation through strategy, direction, and empowerment.

Some styles work better than others based on the situation and the mix of people, so part of your leadership mastery will be developing your leadership flexibility.

The best leaders are those that exercise flexible leadership skills.

The Situational Leadership Model

One of the most important leadership skills is knowing when your team needs more directing versus needing more motivation and support.

Here is a visual of the Situational Leadership model:

The Situational Leadership II Model was developed by Ken Blanchard, John Carlos, and Alan Randolph.

The big idea behind the Situational Leadership Model is to balance your level of direction and your level of support based on what an individual needs and what a task calls for.

Situational Leadership helps leaders avoid micro-managing and it helps them better balance their efforts around providing direction and providing support.

I’ve seen a lot of mismatches between employees and managers where the manager did not pay attention to what the individual needed or what the task called for.

They would have saved themselves, their employees, and their career if they had developed their self-awareness and applied the Situational Leadership II model.

The Situational Leadership model is especially helpful for distributed teams and to help create a culture of empowerment and support.

If you master just this one leadership skill, you will be well ahead of many managers that are still stuck micromanaging which is hurts them and their team.

How To Get Better at Leadership

Below you will see an index of leadership concepts. You can accelerate learning leadership skills by learning leadership concepts.

Remind yourself that your ability to lead will come from:

Your experience and expertise
How well you practice leadership skills
How well you internalize and apply leadership concepts and models.

Here are some key concepts to keep in mind as you learn and master your leadership skills:

The key to better leadership is “empowerment”.
The fundamental mindset of leadership is embracing the belief that “leadership is influence”. If you take that approach to leadership, your leadership skills will take on deeper meaning and generate better results.
Your leadership skillset is ultimately a reflection of your leadership mindset.

Any leadership skill can be improved when you remember to practice your leadership mindset.

Getting Started with Leadership

This is your chance to start with the best-of-the-best leadership skills that will improve and amplify your leadership abilities.

I am incredibly thankful that I learned the core 5 practices and 10 commitments of leadership early in my career.

While they might seem easy to understand, and they are, it’s the applying, the doing, and the learning where true leadership shines.

This is the core starter set of knowledge that helped me start my leadership journey and build my leadership skills toolbox:

Leadership Mindsets, Models, and Frameworks

Your leadership skills need context so that you know when to apply them and how to apply them and why to apply them.

By learning leadership mindsets, models, and frameworks, you gain that context and insight.

Without a good leadership framework, you just have a bunch of random leadership skills.

You end up using the wrong tools for the job. But by applying leadership frameworks, suddenly your leadership skills are on fire.

These are the leadership mindsets, models, and frameworks that helped me to better understand and apply my leadership skills:

Vision, Mission, and Values

Leadership is nothing without meaningful work and missions that matter. Throughout work and life, you will be challenged to create clarity around the challenge before you.

You can handle any challenge by making work and life more meaningful through vision, mission, and values.

You will find over time that the leadership skill of Creative Vision is one of the most powerful tools that humans possess.

You will also find that jobs will come and go, but it’s your ability to focus on the mission that will be your scaffolding for work and life.

These are the leadership knowledge nuggets that helped me apply my leadership skills to more meaningful work:

Character & Styles

Knowledge is the most transient form of power. Character is one of the most powerful forms of power.

It’s ultimately your leadership philosophy and your leadership character and style that people will buy into.

If they buy into the vision, the mission and the values, but they don’t buy into your character or style, they will look for a new leader.

This is the best knowledge that helped me understand how to apply leadership skills in terms of character and styles:

Character– Who You are as a Leader

You can think of character as your personality. It’s the way you think, feel, and behave.

It’s your mental and moral traits that characterize you.

Here is the leadership knowledge that helped me learn more about character:

Leadership Style – How You Do Leadership, Your Way

Leadership style is one thing that can often limits leader or hold people back from realizing their leadership potential.
You can think of style as the particular manner or way that something is done, created, or performed.
So in terms of your leadership style, it’s your way of doing leadership.
I often hear colleagues complain about a particular person’s leadership style, which means they have a conflict in styles.
By paying attention to your style, and by adapting your style to those you lead and the situation you’re in, you gain leadership flexibility.
Your leadership agility will help you rise and thrive in more situations by adapting your style to suit the situation.

Personal Leadership Skills

All leadership starts with self-leadership. You need to lead yourself first in a way that build trust, rapport, and confidence in those that you lead.

Leadership is a journey in self-awareness and it’s a continuous journey of lifelong learning.

The most important person to first lead is yourself, and the quickest person you can change in any situation is yourself.

This is the core knowledge that helped me better understand how to apply leadership skills to improve my personal leadership:

Teams, Teaming, and Teamwork

You know the saying, “it takes teamwork to make the dream work.”

That’s true.

Your primary responsibility as a leader, beyond creating clarity, generating energy, and driving results, is to bring out the best in everyone on the team.

Your ability to bring out the best of everyone, as an inclusive leader, will be your most important leadership skill in the modern world.

Complex challenges require different cognitive styles and different abilities to solve them.

Diversity is an incredible advantage in the modern world.

You need to be inclusive if you want to create a team that embraces diversity.

This will be the hallmark, or your downfall, of your leadership success.

Leaders that don’t embrace diversity and inclusion will fall out of favor and won’t be effective in the modern world.

This is the core knowledge that helped me learn better leadership skills for teams and teamwork:

Leadership Skills for Mastering Leadership

This section will help you quickly build a powerful leadership toolbox with the right skills for the right job.

You never want to be the leader with a hammer that looks at everything as a nail.

You want to be the skilled leader that has a toolbox filled with leadership skills that you help you with the greatest leadership challenges you will face in work and life.

These are the sets of leadership skills that I found most helpful over 25 years at Microsoft, and beyond:

The Leadership Skill of Change

Managers “run the business”, while leaders “change the business”.

Your ability to lead and drive change with others will ultimately be a measure of your leadership competence.

If you think back to Rick Maguire’s definition of leadership, “Leadership is coordinating action to realize the future you care about”, then the Skill of Change is at the heart of effective leadership. Leadership is going places, making things happen, and finding a way forward.

Here is the leadership knowledge I found helpful for building the Skill of Change:

The Leadership Skill of Connection

As a leader, you need to balance your conviction and connection. If you have too much conviction, you can lose connection with the people you need to lead to make change happen.

If you lack conviction and over-focus on connection, then you won’t have what it takes to lead the big changes and the tough stuff.

When you balance connection and conviction, you better manage your stress and anxiety. This is how you improve your wellness, while taking on big challenges.

This is the leadership knowledge that I found helpful for learning the Skill of Connection:

The Leadership Skill of Courage

Will you stand strong when tested? As Susan Jeffers might say, courage means being able to feel the fear and do it anyway.

You can think of courage as the ability to do something that frightens you.

You can become an unstoppable force by building your courage.

You build the Leadership Skill of Courage by learning how to do the things that scare you. The mistake people tend to make here is they put the focus on themselves. When they learn how to focus on the problem or the challenge or the customer or the greater good, they will find and summon all sorts of courage they never knew they had.

Here is the key leadership knowledge I found useful for building the Leadership Skill of Courage:

The Leadership Skill of Culture Change

Culture is effectively the shared beliefs, values, and norms of a group. I also like how the NeuroLeadership Institute defines culture:

“Shared everyday habits.”

Change happens at the speed of culture.

As a leader, your ability to create, shape, and reinforce a positive, inclusive, and growth-oriented culture is the hallmark of success.

Here is the leadership knowledge that helped me learn and practice the Leadership Skill of Culture Change:

The Leadership Skill of Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

Emotional Intelligence is effectively your ability to recognize, understand, and manage your own emotions and the ability to
recognize, understand and influence the emotions of others.

The Leadership Skill of Emotional Intelligence is one of your most important skills for effective leadership.

You need the Leadership Skill of Emotional Intelligence to respond vs. react under stress, and to choose better behaviors (and thoughts are behaviors, too).

You will also need the Leadership Skill of Emotional Intelligence so you can read a room and establish rapport. The key to influence is to first establish rapport.

This is the key leadership knowledge I found helpful for learning how to practice the Leadership Skill of Emotional Intelligence:

The Leadership Skill of Influence

Leadership is influence. And, according to the dictionary, influence is the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, and the effect itself.

Influence is effectively the essence of leadership.

If you master the Leadership Skill of Influence, you are effectively mastering your ability to lead others toward the future you collectively care about.

Here is the knowledge I found most useful for practicing the Leadership Skill of Influence:

The Leadership Skill of Motivation and Inspiration

Who are the inspiring leaders in your life?

If you’re going to be a leader, then you need to know how to inspire and motivate people with skill.

The Leadership Skill of Motivation and the Skill of Inspiration are powerful ways to kindle and light the fire inside people to start a movement.

Great changes take great inspiration and ongoing motivation. If you can master the Skill of Motivation and the Skill of Inspiration, you make everybody’s job easier, including your own.

Here is the key leadership knowledge I found helpful for learning how to practice the Skill of Motivation and the Skill of Inspiration:

The Leadership Skill of Storytelling

The Leadership Skill of Storytelling is how you, as a leader, can inspire people to explore the art of the possible.

You can also use the Skill of Storytelling to win over stakeholders and to champion the work of the team.

Great things happen every day, but without a compelling story that speaks to the challenge, the change, and the impact, great work and great people can easily go unnoticed. On the flip side, the right story can breathe new life into your efforts and carry great work forward and much further with more ease.

Here is the key leadership knowledge that helped me learn how to practice the Leadership Skill of Storytelling:

The Leadership Skill of Strengths

According to Marcus Buckingham, your strengths are those “activities that make you feel strong.”

Simple enough.

Yet not enough leaders focus on strengths.

Too many people are spending too much time in their weaknesses, things that suck the life force out.

As a leader, you should be focusing on helping your team find their strengths and grow in their strengths.

Too many “leaders” don’t consciously focus on how to enable the genius in others by focusing on strengths.

Here is the key leadership knowledge that helped me practice the Leadership Skill of Strengths:

The Leadership Skill of Strategy

When I think of great leaders, I think of great strategists. They step into the future and use possibilities of the future to inform what to do today.

You can think of strategy as “difference”

I like the definition of strategy at Mindtools:

“Determining how we are going to win in the period ahead.”

I also like the definition of strategy by Joe Newsum: “Strategy is simply the goals you choose and the action you take to achieve those goals”.

This is the key leadership knowledge that helped me practice the Leadership Skill of Strategy:

The Leadership Skill of Vision & Creative Vision

Your mission answers “who are you?”

Your vision answers, “where do you want to go?”

Creative vision is a clear image of the future, based on your ability to imagine how the future could be very different.

As Napolean Hill put it long ago:

“Creative Vision is the success principle which is responsible for all of our plans, aims, and purposes.

It has been said that the imagination is the workshop wherein we fashion the purposes of our brain and the ideals of our soul.”

To be an effective leader, you need to be able to communicate the vision to inspire and enable others to co-create the future you care about.

This is the key leadership knowledge I found helpful for learning how to practice the Leadership Skill of Vision & Creative Vision:

Leadership How Tos

Here is a short set of leadership How Tos that I found helpful for practicing leadership skills:

How To Be a leader In Your Field
How To Communicate Without Conflict with Anyone
How To Consistently Build a Winning Team
How To Get Your Ideas Adopted through Imperfection
How To Inspire a Vision
How To Make Better Decisions Through Disagreement
How To Paint a Future Picture to Share Your Vision
How To Visualize Success
How To Visualize Success by Stepping into Your Future
How To Visualize with Skill

The Leadership Checklist

This is the ultimate leadership checklist to help you check your leadership skills and reinforce better leadership behaviors:

As a leader, I seek first to understand, and I listen to people until they feel heard (empathic listening.)
As a leader, I set the example others wish to emulate.
As a leader, I vary my leadership style to motivate when needed or direct based on the needs and abilities of the team.
As a leader, I vary my leadership style between people-focused and task-focused based on the situation I’m in.
As a leader, I continuously find ways to simplify.
As a leader, I focus on service to others.
As a leader, I allocate time for what’s important.
As a leader, I do what I say I will do.
As a leader, I create a compelling vision that inspires people to rally around.
As a leader, I take feedback and adapt in response.

View The Leadership Checklist >>

Great Leadership Lessons from Leaders

This is a set of curated leadership lessons from various leaders:

10 Great Leadership Lessons by Jim Kouzes
Q&A Follow-Up to 10 Leadership Lessons by Jim Kouzes
Great Lessons from Bill Gates
Great Lessons from Colin Powell
Great Lessons from Ken Blanchard
Great Lessons from John Wooden
Great Lessons from John Maxwell
Great Lessons from Mike Kropp
Great Lessons from Stephen Covey
Great Lessons from Steve Jobs

Leadership Quotes

I believe quotes are a great way to share and scale wisdom of the ages and modern sages.

Here are some of the best leadership quotes of all time to inspsire you for the future:

“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” — John C. Maxwell
“A real leader faces the music, even when he doesn’t like the tune.” – Anonymous
“All Leadership is influence.” — John Maxwell
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.” — General George Patton
“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” — Warren Bennis
“Managers help people see themselves as they are; Leaders help people to see themselves better than they are.” — Jim Rohn
“The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes.” — Tony Blair
“The price of greatness is responsibility.” — Winston Churchill
“When the effective leader is finished with his work, the people say it happened naturally.” — Lao Tzu

View All Great Quotes on Leadership

Call to Action

Learn the 5 Practices and 10 Commitments from the Leadership Challenge
Familiarize yourself with the leadership mindset, models, and frameworks
Practice your leadership by learning how to lead yourself better and then expanding your sphere of influence

The Leadership Page
Getting Started with Leadership
Best Leadership Books
Best Leadership Quotes
The Leadership Checklist

The Leadership Guide–Become the Greatest Leader You Can Be