important to work with them to guide them on what to do.

“I am always engaging with people on my team, finding out what they need to make them better at what they do, and what makes them happier. This lets us have an incredible level of overall team happiness and leads to long-term team members…

How do you get people to help you? You can’t get there alone. People have to help you and I do believe in karma. I believe in paybacks. You get people to help you by telling the truth; by being earnest. I'll take an earnest person over a hip person every day, because hip is short-term, earnest is long term.

Once you’ve engaged with an organization or a relationship or a community, you owe it to your team to start. To initiate. To be the one who makes something happen. To do less is to steal from them.

If you don't engage with people properly, you run the risk of being kidnapped. First I meet the community chief, the women's leader, the youth leaders.

The goal is understanding. To persuade someone, to motivate someone, to sell someone, you really need to understand that person.

As the leader, you have to make them work together.

Alignment, execution, and real collaboration don’t happen by accident.

You need to create friction early. You need to force interaction. You need to make sure every person understands how their work affects the entire system.

I would say that in order to reach the people you must feel as if you are part of the people. You must know what the people want, what they need, and what they feel. You must do a little self-analysis, study the university's statistics, and ask how many workers, how many peasants, how many men who make their living by their sweat eight hours a day are here in this university.

The only way to get people to do anything is to recognize their importance and thereby make them feel important. Every person's deepest lifelong desire is to be significant and to be recognized.

Understand: in this day and age, to reach people you must have access to their inner lives—their frustrations, aspirations, resentments. To do so, you must crush as much distance as possible between you and your audience.

You have to have some psychological insight, you have to know the people and you must work in a way that’s acceptable to them. There you must smile — never laugh, because that’s considered making fun. Smile, take your time, and never come bursting in with your own personality. You have to lie low. Of course you can push and perhaps raise your voice a notch, but like a sensitive emulsion, a sensitive plate. Approach gently, tenderly, and never intrude, never push. Otherwise, if you use your elbows, it will work against you. Above all, be human!

I think the main thing I do every show, and I guess most performers do this, is engaging the audience, but I like to engage the audience in a very direct way right off the bat by starting the show with giving them the choice to participate or not because that’s the choice. By choosing to participate or not, you’re participating. Do you know what I mean? And I can figure out what their level of participation’s going to be and where I can go into crowd.

Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.

I really believe in picking top notch people and then sitting down with them, and making expectations very, very clear and insisting that they involve their employees. You know the top managers are political and they come and go. If processes and systems are to change for the better permanently you have to involve the line staff, the career people, so that they have ownership in it. It is one thing for the top political people to sketch out, like the drawing of an office tower or skyscraper. You sketch it out on paper, but the actual details and the engineering are done by others. You have to enlist the career people to fill in the blanks, because if they have ownership they will believe in it and they will carry it through.