There is a profound difference between having a title that makes you the boss and being a leader who just happens to have a title. People will tolerate the former and want to follow the latter eagerly.

The last place anyone should ever find out about a bad year is at the end. I recommend monthly one on one meeting specifically for performance and career review. There should be an agenda for this meeting that gets forwarded to your direct reports. The agenda should include a section for your direct reports concerns so you can prepare for them and not be caught off guard face to face.

If they see you crack, they know they have you and it takes time to build their confidence in you again.

These meetings are also your opportunity to check in on longstanding personal issues you may know they are dealing with. It gives you the privacy to let them talk. Always be wary of Human Resources’ guidelines for material discussed during these meetings and never let yourself forget you are a professional who will not lose their demeanor.

I hate to say it, but sometimes your direct reports will try to bait you into saying something in private they can use against you later. This also goes for running into them outside of the office.

Let me give you my personal experience. I was at the bar and had a few and some of my direct reports were there and I made the mistake of telling one of the women and I quote “If we didn’t work together, you would be someone I consider dating, but since we do, oh well.”

I never made any other mention to her again. I never asked her out and never even looked at her cross eyed. She was a strong performer. Her performance began to slip a year later and I nearly lost my job. I never drink around my direct reports and I never engage in social activities with them unless it is company sponsored. Even then I keep my professional mask on.

Never allow yourself to put into a position where they even feel the need to question your character. Once they start, they will never stop questioning it. In that same year, I had another direct report being overheard saying she was going to have my job.

When given the choice, I kept her. A year later she was singing my praises to my boss. It can be done, but notice I said “a year later” I forgot to mention all the hard work it took to repair that relationship. When I left the company, that woman was one of my star performers and we left on good terms.

Here is the point. If you screw up, own it and fix it, no matter what it takes. It just could create a better leader in you and a new leader to replace you if you leave.

Team meetings can be what makes or breaks their perception of you as a leader.

Is there an agenda?

Did they get that agenda the day of the meeting or a couple days before?

Have you rehearsed your delivery?

This is your chance to shine in front of them and continue to earn their respect. Every team I ever managed had one rebellious soul. This person is also what I like to call the “Mob Boss.”

Let me put it this way, is there one person that you know will be the first to stir the pot and raise as much descent as possible?

Here is how you beat them. Tailor your delivery to them. Prepare everything to answer the questions you know you don’t want to hear. Be prepared to not even blink and have the answer that will make the Mob Boss shut up and listen.

When the rest of them see you have their unofficial leader eating out of your hands, you win. They now have more respect for you and are now listening to you and not just waiting to see what the Mob Boss is going to say. I know it seems like a lot of work, but to be a leader takes a lot of work.

Also, think of it this way, by the time you implement everything in this guide and have it running for six weeks, I guarantee you will not be working half as hard as you are now to keep up and you will be leading the way. If it helps, remember I do this kind of thing for a living and I like to live well.

That brings up another good point. Do not be afraid to let them know what your qualifications are, but do not flaunt it. Here is some of the highlights from my resume.

Improved sales by eighty-percent creating an additional twenty million dollars in monthly sales revenue for the client.

Designed the operating model for the department.

Rewrote portions of Air Force technical manuals.

Managed three-hundred and fifty customer service and sales representatives and a team of twelve supervisors

I could go on, but I think you get the point. I have the experience being a leader and now as a consultant I train leaders. I know what I am talking about. It’s why this material comes across with the attitude it does. You see I have already paid my dues and proven myself repeatedly and now I am trying to help you avoid some of the mistakes I did make and make it further then I did.

I told you to tell them your own story, well, let me tell a little bit more of mine.

At age seventeen I went to basic training for the United States Air Force. I was trained to be an Electronics Communications Technician. I was trained to be a leader at the same time. To give you an idea of my character, let us go back to basic training.

I had been hospitalized for strep throat and had to be moved to a new group of guys due to being in the hospital for too long. Well long story short, my mom got worried and was calling the base. My TI’s pulled me in the office and told me to go call her. My response.

“Sargent Anonymous, are the rest of the guys going down too?”

“No.”

“Then why should I get to go?”

That was the first time I showed what a leader is by simply being a leader. I saw no reason for any special privilege and they ended up making me go call my mom.

When I was stationed in Oklahoma, I was the technical order supervisor and the office files clerk. I was also the lead trainer as I was two levels ahead of my rank in completed training tasks.

When they sent a team to judge us on how we did our jobs, my four man crew was recognized as the outstanding performers out of over a thousand. My shop, was the outstanding work center out of five squadrons. My flight was the outstanding flight. My squadron was the outstanding squadron and these are the people I learned from and with.

The team that judged us, told us they had to rewrite the criteria because we blew it out of the water. We rewrote sections of technical manuals that changed the way our business got done.

We made the Air Force change the way our business got done by our performance and tireless dedication to being the best at what we did.

When I worked at my first call center I was in trouble for something there was no training for or no documentation for. I responded by creating a training manual and the first Standard Operating Procedures the company had seen. I later went on to rewrite three sales scripts with client approval that boosted sales eighty-percent.

I modeled a redesign of a customer service call center operating model and took the worst performing team in the office with the lowest morale and turned them around with sustained performance. I helped to create a behavioral interview guide. I designed a reward and recognition program. I am leaving out a ton of stuff. Also realize there were many seventy-plus hour weeks during those years as I was developing this.

The point is this, I know my shit because I have worked it and seen it work.

It is my experience that gives me the confidence to speak very directly with you on this topic. I am direct because I want to make sure you understand the concepts that I’m taking time away from being to share with you.

Now, let me be the first to knock me off my high horse by telling you about some of my failures.

I failed a group of people once. I failed them by not having the strength to stand by my convictions. In the end there were about forty people who got screwed because I did not stand and fight for them.

I failed a couple hundred people during the summer when I sent them home early every day without pay so I could make my numbers.

I failed a guy once by overloading him and then had to fire him because of it.

The point is this, you will fail at times, but you cannot let those failures be what drives you. Simply take the lessons from those failures so you do not repeat the same mistakes again.

My high school principal told me once “I will give you a million second chances, but I will never give a third for the same thing. You are going to make mistakes but if you do not learn your lesson and make the same mistakes over again, I cannot help you, because you are not trying to help yourself.”

Wise man, I still refuse to call him by his first name to this day. I respect him too much. He earned that respect by knowing and caring about every single one of his students. That is the attitude a leader takes to any job. You care about the people around you and you know them as well as you can.