 Have you given any thought to what your role is as a leader? The best time to do it is today. Welcome back, leaders, and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. Recently, we've been talking about all the traits and things that great leaders have in common. And one of those things that we can point to is that all great leaders have given some conscious thought to their role as a leader, and they let that role guide their daily decisions and actions. Taking some time to figure out your role as a leader is one of the key steps towards developing your leadership philosophy and leadership style. So what does taking some time to carefully consider your role as a leader do for you? Well, it gives you a framework that you can base your daily decisions and actions on as you're directing your team. Another added benefit is it gives your team an expectation of behavior and leadership that they can count on from you. For example, let's say you don't want to micromanage your team, but you also want to make sure that important things don't fall by the wayside. Some of the things that you can incorporate in your role as a leader are providing vision and guidance, empowering individuals on your team to operate at a high level, and focusing on results and not process. Now this may not be how you view your role as a leader, but let's take a look at a couple famous examples before we talk about some steps you can take to further define your leadership role. So our first real-life example is Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, and he views his job as a leader to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities and they feel as though they're having a meaningful impact and contributing to the good of society. Now he doesn't come right out and say this in that statement, but what it appears to me is that he believes his role is to develop his employees and empower them to have great ideas and also to implement those ideas to make the world a better place. He's not really focused on how things get done, but he's more focused on the talented people who get them done and the impact they make on society. The other example I have for you is Sir Richard Branson, head of Virgin, and he says the most important thing about running a company is to remember all the time what a company is. A company is simply a group of people. As a leader of people, you have to be a great listener, a great motivator, very good at praising and looking for the best in people. People are no different from flowers. If you water flowers, they flourish. If you praise people, they flourish, and that's a critical attribute of a leader. So again, Branson doesn't come out and say this explicitly, but his view of his role as a leader is very similar to Larry Page's. He's focused on the people who do things, not how they do them. And he's also focused on the personal and professional development of his employees to grow them and the leaders as well. So here's an exercise you can do to start to define your role as a leader. Start by thinking about your current job and how you're currently doing it and how you'd like to be doing it. Now write down the most important aspects of leadership that you do every day in your job. These could be enforcing standards, ensuring quality, or just making sure that people are working well together. Once you've done that, write down the things you'd like to be doing in your job. Maybe you don't want to be spending so much time ensuring quality, and would like to be delegating that and empowering others to do that, or developing their ability to do it so that you don't have to. Now check back and see how these leadership aspects relate to your core values and leadership traits that you defined earlier. Are there any conflicts between these and your newly defined role? Do you need to make any adjustments anywhere? Finally, once you've got the aspects of your role defined, both in the present and the way you'd like your role to be in the future, try to write that role down in a clear, concise statement in just a few sentences like the example we've shown here. I've got just one more tip for you once you have your role as a leader statement defined and written down. Post it up somewhere in your office or at your desk so that you can see it every day and have it remind you of the kind of leader you want to be. Really appreciate you taking the time to watch today and share with us what you think your role as a leader is in the comments. If you have any questions or are having a little trouble, feel free to contact us. We'll help you out. We're going to have a post later in the week that talks more about our role as leaders and the best way to get to that is to click on that globe off to the right that says subscribe. That'll bring all of our content direct to your inbox. Thanks again for watching and remember, the future is out there. Lead the way.