Podcast: Selfless Leadership—The First Leadership Characteristic for Meaningful Change

What does it take to successfully lead team-based continuous improvement? What qualities or characteristics increase the likelihood that your change management efforts will unite the workforce to collectively win?

Good questions. In this episode of Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement, podcast hosts John Dyer and Dr. Mohamed Saleh launch a series on the 10 characteristics of a good leader. Today’s characteristic: selfless leader.

The two continuous improvement experts set out to define a selfless leader. A short list of the qualities they identify include humility, a team over self mindset, and a focus on helping others succeed.

A selfless leader should “find the good,” Saleh adds. “Who could I thank today? Who could I catch in the act of excellence and say thank you.”

The two address why being a selfless leader is important to making transformational change, with Dyer introducing the idea of “enthusiastic productivity.”  

Organizations filled with enthusiastic productivity have “employees that are full of enthusiasm, they feel like they're being supported. They feel like they have a purpose. There's a sense of pride; there's a sense of accomplishment. They feel like they're part of a winning team,” Dyer says. “Those are the teams that can knock walls down for you. And I would venture to say [they] are probably …  at least 10 times more productive than the opposite— employees that look like the zombies from The Walking Dead when they come to work every day because they're beat down.”