Maddie Grant put up a stupendous post on the first day of the ASAE Annual Meeting in San Diego. She did a session in San Diego, and it was her first time speaking, and in preparation she discovered an equally super post from Chris Brogan that gave some guidelines for speakers (or bloggers):

If you are here to inspire and equip me, and you’ve built a house to rest beneath the promising North Star you hung in our sky, you must be responsible for a few things.

1. Do not deceive me, unless you tell me early in your speech that you intend to do so. You have my trust. Respect that.
2. Do not make the house for yourself. I admire that you have stature to stand on your stage and speak to me. But I have not come to hear how great you are. Be humble.
3. Equip me. Inspiration is not enough. If you give me only hope, I cannot eat hope.
4. Encourage me. Be willing to see me build my house from your speech and your example. And praise me for the house I build from your instruction.
5. Give the stage to me. In the end, we all want to hang stars before others. Even if they are small stars, on a small stage, or a blog somewhere out in the darkness. When you are done with your speech, your star, your house, invite me to the stage.

These are excellent points to live by when preparing to do a keynote address or workshop session at a conference. They are also excellent guidelines for blogging, which was Chris Brogan’s original point.

But I will add that they are excellent guidelines for leaders–more specifically, people in authority positions.

First: don’t deceive. Or, more generally, be transparent. When people get into positions of authority or responsibility, for some reason they feel the instant compulsion to NOT share information, to NOT just put things out there, to NOT express their opinion. It becomes too risky. Fine, play it safe, but your people won’t trust you. How’s that working for you?

Second: it’s not yours. It is not your organization. It is not your Board of Directors. It is not your chapter. It’s not even your session. Authority plus ownership equals ego. Remember Sun Tzu’s Art of War quote about leadership: under great leaders, when the work is done, the people will turn to each other and say "we did this ourselves."

Third: leadeship is about capacity building, not about leaders. We often look to leaders to inspire us, which is nice, but that is not leadership. Leadership is a systemic capacity, so people in authority need to be focusing their efforts on capacity building rather than inspiration. Or even worse, on fear. One of my favorite quotes this year: don’t tell me the canoe tipped over, tell me how to get to shore.

Fourth: at some point, you will have to realize that the real work of leadership is not in the corner office. Pay attention to what your people are doing! Encourage it. But first be aware of it. And if you say that you don’t have time, then you have some really big problems.

Fifth: share power. In the end, the more power YOU have, the less WE will accomplish. For anyone who doesn’t think Twitter has value, look at this gem I found from @joegerstandt:

we already have access to the information/ideas/knowledge needed…it comes down to power

if you want innovation/solutions/progress you have to diffuse power