Everything written below is highly influenced by my personal experience and talks that were given by the people I’m following.

What you will read here is my take on the leadership.

Protect Your Team

A good leader always protects his team from other teams and other leaders (higher management).

  • A failure of your team is your failure
  • A success of your team is their success

Support Your Team

What to do when one of your teammates decided to leave - support her, even if it’s hard for you. When you see that people cannot grow further in your company or in their position, if you cannot give them the chance to grow - support them, even encourage them to leave. You’ll get a loyal person in another company/team.

Loyalty

Don’t expect people to be loyal to your brand. People should be loyal to the team they belong to, not to the brand.

Same Values

The team and the leader should share the same values. Whenever you hire a new team member you should find out what she is ready for and what she’s not.
Try to hire people, not robots. The people who leave the workplace at 6pm sharp regardless of the current situation at work are as bad as the ones who put work before their kids or family.

Behavioral Patterns

People don’t change. They also behave the same at work as they do with their family. See how your teammates behave. If your teammate treats his family badly the same will happen at work. Don’t kid yourself.

Inspiration

You cannot inspire people. Your goal should be to hire inspired people. If you hire the ones who love what they do, they’ll already be inspired by themselves. The best thing you can do is to to not kill their inspiration.
Communicate honestly with them. They should know why do you think they shouldn’t do certain things. But bear in mind if you already tried something and failed it doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t work next time with different people.

Let Them Make Mistakes

You have to let them make their own mistakes. Mistakes are the best source of learning - that’s just a nature of learing. If you make all the decisions for them they won’t grow and will leave sooner rather than later. If you let them make their own mistakes they will grow faster by order of magnitude.

Let Them Show Off

Let your people the chance to show their accomplishments. If you see a team where only the leader is known for the work done, it means he is afraid of growing people stronger than him. A leader has to be sure that when he quit there are two people who can take his place and work better than him.

Listen

Whenever you have to make a decision, hear everyone’s opinion before you announce your own. If you announce your opinion/solution first and hear a better one afterwards, it might get hard for you to accept it. It can lead to an irrational decision just because your pride didn’t let you take someone else’s opinion before yours.

Gossip

Don’t allow or participate in any gossip inside of your team - it will tear your team apart. Even worse, when you have a confrontation between two strong personalities inside of your team - you’ll have to fire at least one of them.