It is a leader’s job instead to take responsibility for the success of each member of his crew. It is the leader’s job to ensure that they are well trained and feel confident to perform their duties. To give them responsibility and hold them accountable to advance the mission.

The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of a leader is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen.

Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.

As far as possible the duty of a leader is to foresee dissatisfaction and to remedy injustice before complaints are made. To accomplish this he must maintain close contact with the men he controls. Let him go into the trenches if he is a general; let him arrive at the factory with his workmen now and then if he is the manager. He must have some imagination; an understanding of other men's lives is necessary to him, so that he may be able to protect those under him from unnecessary suffering. The secret of gaining their affection is to feel affection for them and to be able to do their jobs as well as they do them themselves. Men endure taking orders, and even like it, if the orders are given intelligently.

A key role for a leader is to support and mentor the next generation of leaders and create an effective team.

The role of the leader, then, is to paint a picture of that vision in such a way that those he or she is leading will embrace it and make it their own. In that way, all of the energies of the organization are focused on the same objective. That's when vision happens.

As a leader, it is my job to create an enabling environment to bring out the best in people. But one must also be alert to circumstances that may be affecting employees’ productivity and try and see how you can help them to be more effective at work.

“Another essential job of leaders is to size challenges right. To know how to size a challenge to an entire enterprise so that its hard enough that people have to leave the status quo, but just do-able enough so that you can score wins.

If you are a leader, the people are your work.

Being a leader, whether you are the CEO, the admiral, the general, the chairperson, or the director for an office or two, is difficult. As a leader you must always appear to be in command, even on those days when you struggle with the pressures of the job. You must be confident. You must be decisive. You must smile. You must laugh. You must engage with your employees and be thankful for their work. You must have the look of a person in charge. You must instill in your men and women a sense of pride that their leader can handle any problem.
As a leader you can't have a bad day. You must never look beaten, no matter the circumstance. If you sulk, if you hang your head, if you whine or complain about the leaders above you or the followers below you, then you will lose the respect of your men and women, and the attitude of despair will spread like wildfire.

A leader’s most important job is creating and constantly adjusting this strategic bridge between goals and objectives.

Idea • Being leader of a team, department or organisation should not mean you are CPS (Chief Problem Solver). If you are, you are working one or two pay grades below what you were hired to do. Idea • Your real job is to conceive and articulate a vision for where your team, department or organisation should be heading, and, with help from your people, to work out a detailed roadmap (strategy) for how to get there. Reflection • Ask yourself and others what things you can do that will get your ‘ship’ moving toward the vision, and what among those things fall inside your Zone of Mastery.

As a leader your first responsibility is to articulate a vision of where your team or organisation is going. What should the organisation look like, and be doing, in one year, two years, five years? What will we be like, and what will clients be saying about us? Having arrived at the vision, you and your people then need to work out an effective, detailed strategy, a roadmap for getting there.

Many leaders are in the first instance executives whose primary duty is to direct some enterprise or one of its departments or sub-units...
It remains true that in every leadership situation the leader has to possess enough grasp of the ways and means, the technology and processes by means of which the purposes are being realized, to give wise guidance to the directive effort as a whole...
In general the principle underlying success at the coordinative task has been found to be that every special and different point of view in the group affected by the major executive decisions should be fully represented by its own exponents when decisions are being reached. These special points of view are inevitably created by the differing outlooks which different jobs or functions inevitably foster. The more the leader can know at first hand about the technique employed by all his group, the wiser will be his grasp of all his problems...
But more and more the key to leadership lies in other directions. It lies in ability to make a team out of a group of individual workers, to foster a team spirit, to bring their efforts together into a unified total result, to make them see the significance of the particular task each one is doing in relation to the whole.