Seth Dobbs (he/him): Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast, where I share principles of leadership along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be. These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building organizations and in coaching others to become leaders themselves.

I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential for helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact. And I think of leadership as a journey. It’s one that looks different for everybody.

Your journey is going to be unique. It’s going to follow different paths than your peers, your bosses, your friends. That’s good. You’re not them. You should be pursuing your own path. But even so, while we are each on our own unique journey, there are core principles that can help guide you on this journey to ever improving your leadership skills.

And that’s regardless of whether you’re a seasoned leader, you’re new in the role, maybe even just starting to have aspirations or really anywhere in between. Now to be clear, this is not like a cookie cutter approach. It’s not a rote set of steps. It’s really guidance. It’s coaching. It’s a philosophy that allows you to authentically bring out your best in leadership.

Throughout these episodes, I’m going to address questions like, how do you prove your value? What do you do if you don’t have all the answers? How do you keep your team moving forward even when you’re not around? But for now, I want to start by giving a definition of leadership that will set the stage for all of the content I’m going to unpack throughout the rest of the episodes.

And that’s this, that leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. This definition sets up the three core principles of leadership. One, Leaders Provide Vision. This is the influence principle. Two, Leaders Resolve Problems, and this is the effectiveness principle.

Three, Leaders Create More Leaders, and this is the durability principle. Together, these three principles form the framework for better leadership, and I think it’s simple in concept but allows you to go deep and, and, and develop skills in so many different ways. And so I’ll provide a little more detail on each of these three for now.

The first principle, Leaders Provide Vision. This is the influence principle, and the idea here is that developing the skills to bring clarity in what you are trying to achieve and why you’re trying to achieve it will help you better influence and ultimately motivate people to amazing heights.

The second principle, Leaders Resolve Problems, is the effective principle. And the thinking here is that by fostering a spirit of facing reality and prioritizing challenges, you can really help build a healthy team that’s able to face adversity together and create amazing results. And the third principle, Leaders Create More Leaders.

And that’s the durability principle. And this is about creating an environment that centers on creating more leaders, not followers. And by doing this, you build a sustainable team that delivers durable results. So each episode is going to be designed to be around 15 minutes in length. Ideally give you a couple of aha moments, some insights, some takeaways.

Things you can apply immediately. Sometimes I’m going to talk about one of these three core principles and a little bit more about how to apply them. Sometimes I’m going to talk about enabling principles, sort of more granular concepts that help you really in navigating these three core principles and developing your skill set and sometimes other different ways of applying this thinking.

So I’ll be providing both philosophy and contextualizing that philosophy in actionable ways so you can really make small changes, make incremental improvements immediately. I’m often going to tell stories. Typically involving friends and colleagues, but I’m going to change names and some details to save embarrassment.

And I’ll also happily take feedback and questions from you and talk about those as well. I’ve been fortunate enough to help many people on their leadership journeys from people newly minted to seasoned executives. So whoever you may be on your journey, really looking forward to helping you as well.

So thanks for checking in to see what this podcast is all about. And next will be episode one, where I’m going to talk about vision, what it is and why it matters.