“Good leadership always challenges people to rise to the occasion, become their best, and achieve more.”

A thought by John C. Maxwell from his book, Leadershift (p. 98). HarperCollins Leadership. Kindle Edition. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)

And that’s a very good thing to do.

John says, “Some people accept the challenge and help the team to win. Others don’t. As a leader, you have to manage the process that people go through. You can use the 25-50-25 principle to help you. I learned about it years ago when I attended a leadership roundtable in Los Angeles.

“Here’s how it goes: Whenever you cast vision and challenge people to become part of achieving an endeavor, they tend to fall into one of three groups. Typically, 25 percent of the people will support your efforts, 50 percent will be undecided, and 25 percent will resist change. Your job is to help the middle 50 percent join the first 25 percent. Here are tips for doing that and working with all three groups:

·      Understand that the resistant bottom 25 percent are not going to join you, no matter what you do. The greatest leader in the world could be leading them, and they would still resist change. Accept that.

·      Don’t waste your effort trying to make this bottom 25 percent happy. They are not going to get happy. Trying to placate them will only encourage their resistance.

·      Don’t give the bottom 25 percent a platform or credibility. If you believe you’re doing the right thing, why would you help them undermine that?

·      ​Try to keep the bottom 25 percent away from the 50 percent who have not yet made up their minds. As baseball manager Casey Stengel said, ‘The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate your guts away from the guys who haven’t made up their minds yet.’

·      ​Ask the 25 percent who support you to help positively influence the middle 50 percent who are undecided.

·      ​Give the supportive 25 percent credibility and a platform to speak. They will help you help the organization move forward.”

John then says, “Any movement you can create in the middle 50 percent toward your leadership and the vision is a win because it takes the organization in the right direction. Celebrate that and keep moving forward.”

And we all want to win, don’t we? 

Yes, yes!