Action What employees want most from their leaders is direction and meaning, trust and hope. Every good leader I have spoken with has had a willful determination to achieve a set of goals, a set of convictions, about what he or she wanted the organization to achieve. Every leader had a purpose. Remember what hockey great Wayne Gretzky says, It s not where the puck is that counts. It s where the puck will be.
Leaders have a bias toward action.
They have the capacity to convert purpose and vision into action. It just isn t enough to have the great vision people can trust. It has to be manifest in some external products and results. They step up and take their shots every day, perhaps knowing that you miss 100 percent of the shots you don t take, to borrow another line from ice-rink philosopher Gretsky. Strike hard and try everything, wrote Henry James.