Want to find great leaders? Be as selective as a guitar maker looking for the right wood.

The following is an excerpt from his book, "THE LEADER'S GREATEST RETURN: Attracting, Developing, and Multiplying Leaders ."
In it, he writes that if you want to cultivate good leaders, you need to first know what one looks like.
You also have to tenaciously seek them out; never assume that they'll come straight to you.
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One of my favorite activities when I speak is answering specific questions from the leaders in the audience. Recently, at a conference put on by Chick-fil-A, someone asked how I developed good leaders. "First," I responded, "you need to know what a good leader looks like."

I know that may sound simplistic, but it's true. And I've found that most people have a difficult time describing what a good leader or good potential leader looks like. Leadership experts and authors James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner said , "Our images of who's a leader and who's not are all mixed up in our preconceived notions about what leadership is and isn't." How can people find something they can't identify?

As a speaker, I do a lot of traveling. And often my host will send a driver to pick me up from the airport. Over the years, I've found there are two types of people who look for me. The first stands near baggage claim, holding a sign or iPad showing my name. I have to go over and find that person and identify myself. The second type of person comes over and finds me as I step off the escalator and says, "Hi, Mr. Maxwell. I'm here to take you to your hotel."

I've never met either of these people, yet the second type is able to find me. How? They recognize me from a photograph they've found in one of my books or on a website. They took the time to be proactive and know who they're looking for.

As you prepare to develop leaders, which type of person do you want to be? Do you want to know what you're looking for in potential leaders and be able to find them? Or do you want to hold up a sign and hope somebody comes and finds you? It's your choice.

John C Maxwell headshot Courtesy of John C. Maxwell

For many years I've been friends with Bob Taylor, cofounder of Taylor Guitars. Bob makes some of the finest guitars in the world. What's his secret? He'll tell you it's the design and manufacturing process. He can make a guitar out of anything, and to prove it, he even once made a guitar out of scrap wood from an oak pallet. But that's not the norm. He uses the finest woods he can find, and buying them has become more and more difficult, as many of the best exotic woods are on the endangered species list or disappearing altogether. Bob said, "I'm living in the era where you cross the threshold of 'there's all the wood in the world' to 'there's not any more.'"

In an interview he gave to the New York Times more than 10 years ago, Bob said, "I used to buy Brazilian rosewood back in the 1970s at the lumber yard for $2 a square foot. Now it's impossible for us to make a guitar out of it and ship it outside the US. If we do get a little bit of it, it's extremely expensive. The cutting of it has all but halted. Adirondack spruce is unavailable. Mahogany was so plentiful it was a commodity. Now only specialty cutters are getting it and the prices have gone through the roof. All these things happened just in my lifetime."

That's been such a concern of his that he's dedicating the next 20 years of his life to initiatives to ensure that wood is sourced responsibly and to growing trees for the future not his future, but the future of others 60, 80, and 100 years from now. Bob said, "We no longer live in a world of new frontiers and of wasteful use of our natural resources."

Bob knows what he's looking for when it comes to potential guitar wood. If you want to be successful developing leaders, you need to know what potential leaders look like, and you need to be as tenacious as Bob Taylor is when's he's sourcing wood for guitars. Every person you bring onto your team will make you either better or worse. And every leader you develop will do the same. Maybe that's why Amazon founder Jeff Bezos remarked , "I'd rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person."

Excerpted from " The Leader's Greatest Return:Attracting, Developing, and Multiplying Leaders " by John C. Maxwell with permission of HarperCollins Leadership, an imprint of HarperCollins Focus LLC. Copyright John C. Maxwell, 2020.

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