Mac Anderson, founder of Successories and (www.simpletruths.com), published a fabulous book called the “Essence of Leadership.” I challenge us to grade your performance last week on a 1-10 scale against each of these one dozen “secrets.” If we had enough nerve, we’d have a couple of our direct reports grade our performance too. You may go first.

• Leadership secret 1 — Develop a service attitude. “Service is the lifeblood of any organization. Everything flows from it and is nourished by it.” Customer service is not a department, it is an attitude.
• Leadership secret 2 — Love what you do. “Many things will catch your eye, but few will catch your heart.” Pursue those.
• Leadership secret 3 — Focus on priorities. “Focus on the critical few, not the insignificant many.”
• Leadership secret 4 — Understand the soft stuff. Mary Kay Ash once said “There are two things more powerful than money and sex. They are recognition and praise.”
• Leadership secret 5 — Build your personal and organizational brand. “In the race for quality there is no finish line.”
• Leadership secret 6 — Embrace humor and optimism. Helen Keller said “Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement.”
• Leadership secret 7 — Commit to excellence. According to Aristotle “Excellence is not an act, it is a habit.”
• Leadership secret 8 — Take risks. “Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb, That’s where the fruit is!” You will always miss 100 percent of the shots that you don’t take.
• Leadership secret 9 — Reinforce core values daily. Goethe wrote “Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.”
• Leadership secret 10 — Earn trust. According to Tom Peters “Trust, not technology, is the issue of the decade.”
• Leadership secret 11 — Take action. “You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
• Leadership secret 12 is to aim for the heart because “they don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.” We may not remember what someone says or does, but we never forget about how they made us feel.

How did you do? Can you clearly identify one or more actions you committed this past week in support of each of these dozen leadership secrets? We get another week to practice beginning tomorrow. Post Mac Anderson’s secrets where you can read and act on them every day. Those you lead will be most grateful — and so will your customers.

Charlie Dexter is a professor of applied business at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Tanana Valley Campus. He can be reached at 455-2837 or ffcnd@uaf.edu. This column is provided as a public service of the TVC Applied Business Department. Copies of this column can be found at www.CharlieDexter.com.