Example is always more efficacious than precept.
— Samuel Johnson
LEADERSHIP
WHAT THIS MEANS
People learn from what you do far more reliably than from what you tell them. Instruction competes with everything else in the room; behaviour is simply absorbed, especially by anyone who spends a lot of time near you. This is why advice you do not follow yourself lands as noise, and why the habits you never mention get copied anyway. Children, colleagues and juniors are all reading the same signal.
Pick one thing you have been telling someone to do and check whether you do it. If you do not, either start or stop saying it. The gap between the two is what they are actually learning.
A QUESTION TO SIT WITH
Who is copying what you do rather than what you say?
MORE IN LEADERSHIP & INFLUENCE
- Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity. It becomes cheap as it becomes vulgar, and will…
- No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet every one thinks himself sufficiently qualified…
- The mob have neither judgment nor principle,—ready to bawl at night for the reverse of what they desired in the morning.
Free, with nothing to buy inside it.