[piano intro] - Hello, I'm Nido Qubein, welcome to Side By Side.

My guest today is a world renowned leadership expert and best-selling author, too.

He's trained millions of achievers, advised global leaders, and shaped how we think about influence and impact.

Today, we meet Dr.

John Maxwell.

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- The Budd Group has been serving the Southeast for over 60 years.

Specializing in jaNidorial, landscape, and facility solutions, our trusted staff delivers exceptional customer satisfaction, comprehensive facility support with the Budd Group.

- Truist, we're here to help people, communities, and businesses thrive in North Carolina and beyond.

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♪ Truist, leaders in banking, unwavering in care.

♪ - John, welcome to "Side by Side."

Several years ago, you were on the show and you're a big hit and people wanna see you again, so I'm delighted you've agreed to be with me today.

- It's a delight.

- Everybody knows you've written an unbelievable number of books, 70 or 80 books.

They have sold 40, 50 million copies.

They're translated in dozens of languages.

I happen to know you have given 13,000 presentations in person to audiences coast to coast, border to border, and all over the world.

You are a well-known individual, you have really changed the definition of what it means to be an effective leader.

You speak about it with clarity and conviction, and I'm just glad to see you here today.

I just gotta ask you, how do you keep it up?

I mean, you're everywhere.

- I am.

- Every day you're somewhere.

- Well, I always say it's very simple, high energy and low IQ.

[laughter] - I think you got both.

- You got high IQ.

- I mean, think about it, Nido.

If you had low energy, you couldn't do it, and if you had high IQ, you wouldn't do it, okay?

But, you know, I do it because I love to do it.

I love people.

And there's nothing I love more than waking up in the morning and realizing that I'm gonna have an opportunity to add value to other people, because I value people.

And I know what happens when you put something in their life that brings change or is catalytic, perhaps, to some improvement in their life.

And I know that because I know people did that for me.

And I look back at books I read, people I heard speak, experiences that I had, and that's what really made me where I am today.

I'm very indebted.

You know, I kind of stand on the shoulders of a lot of people and books and experiences, and so that's why I do what I do, because perhaps I could do that same thing for someone else.

I had a mentor.

When I was in my 20s, I really didn't have any great desire to write a book, but I had a mentor named Les.

And we were having lunch one day, and I asked him, I said, "Les," he'd written six books, I said, "Why do you write books?"

And he said, "I write books to extend my influence beyond my personal touch.

I want to help people that I'll never see or know."

And the moment he said that, I mean, I kind of just leaped.

I reached over to him and said, "Nido," I said, "I am going to," that's what I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna write books.

And that's why I'm still writing books.

I never wrote books because I wanted to write books.

I wrote books because I wanted to help people and make a difference in their lives.

- Where does the inspiration for a book come from?

Do you think of an idea first?

Your books are on leadership, of course.

- Of course.

- So how can one write so many books on leadership, John?

- Well, I think, first of all, I have what I call my five essentials, and I tell people, whatever your giftedness is or whatever your core strength is, you need to very quickly determine, what do I need to do every day to enhance that?

And so for writing, every day I read, every day I think, every day I file, every day I ask questions, and every day I write.

And I do that every day.

And so I really, I mean, if you read every day, and if you think every day, you're gonna have ideas.

You're gonna ask questions every day.

I mean, people are gonna give you insight.

And so I think that what stimulates-- - So you're speaking about curiosity, right?

You're a very curious person.

- Very curious, very curious.

- How does one learn to be curious?

Yeah, well, when I realized that I wasn't, you know, when I started off, it's very interesting.

When I was in my freshman year of college, we took a test on creativity.

And I remember I was kind of on the bottom part of that group.

And I thought, "This is terrible.

Am I going to be a boring person all my life?"

And I went to my father and I said, "Dad, I didn't do very well on this creativity test."

And he said, "Well, if you'll read and ask questions and have a lot of new experiences, if you'll be curious to go do those things, you'll find in those things, things that will spark your creativity."

I found out that'd be really true.

And now today, I think I'm highly creative, but I'm highly creative, because every day I read, think, file, ask questions, and write.

In fact, I have really written 92 books.

And when you think about that, though, Nido, honestly, that's not a big deal.

You just have to be old.

- You have to live enough years.

- If you're not old, you can't write 92 books.

But I have 14 more books on the birth line that are basically saying, "Write me, write me."

I have 14 more books that I really do want to write, that I'm writing them now, but I mean, I want to get them out, because I'm constantly thinking and creating and trying to do things that will help people really get better.

- The fascinating thing about your work is that people know that you speak, and you write, and you record, but there's a whole other side of John Maxwell.

You have your philanthropic organization, and you go to these countries where the presidents or the kings ask you to come to develop their people in leadership.

- That's right.

- Tell us about that part, which I think most people are not very aware of that.

- Well, I don't think they are aware of it.

Thanks for asking the question.

I think that what we do for ourselves would be put in the category of success, but I think what we do for others would be put in a different category, and that's significance.

I crave a significant life.

I've been very blessed.

I think I have some success.

I don't know about you.

You have a lot of success in your book, but I know a lot of people that are very unhappy, but they're very successful, and I think it's because it's about them.

I just don't think we're going to find fulfillment if it's about us, and so I started a nonprofit organization to teach leadership around the world, and we did that.

We've trained six million leaders in every country of the world.

- Six million?

- Six million, yeah, in every country of the world.

We did it in a 19-year span from about 1997.

- You go to those countries.

- Oh, totally.

And you lead seminars and workshops.

- Oh, yeah.

Well, it's amazing.

We did it with basically volunteers.

We called them associate trainers, and we trained them, and they made a commitment to go twice a year for three years, six times, to different places of the world, and we would develop the audiences for them, and they would use my material and my mentoring, and they would teach it, and so we had 700 of them do that, and they, by the way, they paid $25,000 a year to be an associate trainer, and then they paid their way, so our organization didn't have to carry the weight of dollars.

I had to figure a way to make it scalable if you're going to reach that many people, and it was a great experience.

After we finished training leaders, I had kind of a eureka moment and that is they really learned good leadership skills, but I realized there was another part of developing leaders, and that's the values part, because when I talk about everything rising and falling on leadership, you know, what causes leadership to rise are good leadership skills and good values, and you cannot separate them or you can't substitute them.

I mean, I know people have great leadership skills, but they don't have good values, so what do they do?

They manipulate people.

I know people have just really good values, but they don't have leadership skills, and I say take them to lunch, but don't follow them because they don't even know where they're going to go themselves.

So we had done the leadership skills really good, but I felt that we had left the values a little bit light, and so I said what would happen if we would go to countries and teach values, and what would happen if we did it in small groups, and what would happen if we could get to Malcolm Gladwell's tipping point of getting 10% of the population in small groups learning values, because if you learn good values and then you live them, you become more valuable.

You become more valuable to yourself, your family, your community.

You can't miss being more valuable when you live out good values.

- How are values born?

Does one, for example, growing in this environment develop these values, somebody else grows in a different environment develop different values, whether it's religious values, societal values, whatever, and how do you then flex that?

How do you make that transition from one to the other?

- Yeah, it's a great question, and the way to do it is to reduce the values to what I call the God-given values.

Regardless of culture, if you go into that culture and you basically share the golden rule, treat others as you would like to be treated, most people buy into that.

In fact, what we do is we lay out about 45 what we call really good values, integrity, you know, just the things that, and then we let the people of the country pick out the 35 that they think most apply to them, things maybe they need.

So we give them ownership of those values, and then we put them in small groups, and we start with the top 10% of the seven streams of influence.

So government, education, business, you know, religion, media, arts, healthcare, et cetera.

We start with the top 10%, and we vet them and get buy-in that they will get around those tables and learn it because influence filters down.

If you can get the top 10%, then you can get the other 90.

Many organizations, especially non-profit, go to the bottom 10%.

And if you do that, that's a wonderful thing, but it'll never go up.

Influence has never filtered up.

So we start at the top.

We vet them.

About half the countries we go to, we only go by the invitation of the president of the country.

So we're now, right now, in eight countries.

But we have 27 countries that are in line where we've had invitations from prime ministers, presidents to come in.

And then we go for the 10%.

We've been in Guatemala now for 13 years.

They have 20 million people.

We have 3.4 million people now in small groups.

And basically, you bring transformation one table at a time.

And you just have to have patience and really be committed to it.

But it is incredibly fulfilling.

We're having a blast.

- You're known for so many good reasons.

But one of them, of course, is that you are an expert on leadership.

Define leadership for us.

- Well, I think leadership, I've defined it many, many years ago, is leadership is influence.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

Now, you have to understand, when I defined leadership, I did it at a time when leadership was position or title.

Go back 50 years.

And I'm a leader because I have a position of a leadership or I have a title.

And I began to look at that and say, that doesn't make a leader.

I know a lot of people have positions or titles, but they can't lead very well.

And then I know some people, they don't have any position at all, but they really influence people.

So I settled with a simple definition.

Leadership is influence.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

In the last 10 years, that definition has been rightfully kind of questioned because of social media.

And now you're on social media.

- Influence means something else.

- I've had thousands and millions following me.

- I'm an influencer.

- Yes.

And so therefore, they say, I must be a leader because I -- Look how many thumbs up I got last week.

Whatever.

- Yes.

- And so I've come back to them.

And what I say is this.

I'm not saying that leadership is people recognize you.

I'm saying people follow you.

And the way that you find out if you have the influence is ask for commitment.

You don't really know who's following you until you ask for commitment.

Commitment separates the players from the pretenders.

So now I basically say leadership still is influenced, but it's the ability to influence people to make some kind of actionable commitment act to get into the game with you.

That's when you know how good of a leader you are.

- Results rule.

- Yeah, totally.

- Yeah.

- Think they really do.

- Yeah.

- Not just, I saw you and I recognize you and you were famous for 10 seconds or whatever.

- So how does one develop his or her leadership skills?

- Well, first of all, you have to practice them, and you can't practice them until you know them.

So there's an awareness of what is leadership and what are leadership skills that you need to develop and put under your belt so that you can practice them.

I think that awareness is the first step.

You can't develop or you can't fix what you don't know.

So you sit down and say, okay, when I wrote the book, "The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership," I wanted them to understand that if you were a good leader, you get buy-in.

So you had the law of buy-in.

I wanted to understand that if you want to really do well, you have to develop an inner course of the law of inner circle.

So when I did the 21 laws, I didn't call them skills, but I basically said, "This is what I want to do."

This is what you really need to do to be able to lead very well.

And out of that, of course, then we develop skill sets for people and helping them.

But then you have to practice.

The issue is practice is where we grow.

Practice is where we learn.

And without practice, there's no -- how do you improve your skill set without going out and trying?

So we're heavy into -- I had somebody ask me the other day, he said, "Now, what is the best action to take?"

And I said, "Any action.

Just go act."

Because what happens is I think so many times is we say, "Well, I don't have it down yet," or, "I don't understand it quite yet, so I'm going to wait."

And you know as well, so I can't -- you can't wait your way to success.

You've got to work your way to success.

- So you're not suggesting someone is born a leader.

Leadership must be learned.

- Yes, but I would say that I think people -- there are people that are born that have what I would call leadership -- tendencies.

Just like I think people are born that have musical tendencies.

- So what is that tendency for leaders?

Is it type A personality?

Is it...?

- I don't think it's a type of personality, but I do think it is a type of charisma or influence that attracts people to you.

And what I tell people, the first thing that a leader needs to do is they need to get over themselves.

The first recognition or awareness -- The first recognition or awareness that a leader has to understand before they can develop any skill is it's not about me, Nido.

So if it's about me, I'm going to be very limited in my leadership.

It's about the people.

It's always about the people.

And so therefore we kind of have that focus towards them.

And I think there are people that are naturally born and gifted to like people and want to be around people.

It doesn't mean necessarily they're an extrovert, but it does mean that they like people.

But we -- I think -- I think that there are some people that are more natural in leadership than others.

But I don't think that's what makes a great leader at all.

I think that it's a learned skill.

And you can learn how to influence people by adding value to people.

In fact, I tell -- when you think of your university here and the age group, I tell youth all the time, if you really want to develop your leadership skills, start by adding intentionally value to people every day.

And that's how you gain influence.

And that's how you begin to have people begin to want to follow you.

So I think that -- I think that it's continually learning and growing.

I mean, I'm 78.

I'm still learning leadership.

But, you know, the more you know, the more you know you don't know.

And the more you know you don't know, the more you know you need to know.

School is never out for the pro, right?

No, never, never.

So you must -- so in your own mind, you must categorize effectiveness.

What I mean is, do you look at someone and say, that person possesses and therefore displays these three or four absolute leadership extraordinary levels of understanding?

Yeah.

Versus these people are good, but, you know, they're not really great leaders.

So my question is, what makes someone a great leader, a great influencer?

- Super question.

Well, one thing I say is that I think there's only one thing that all leaders have in common, regardless of culture, time, country, whatever.

I think the only thing that all leaders have in common is that they see more than others see, and they see before others see.

They see a bigger picture, and they see a little quicker.

And so now when you ask me qualities of great leadership, vision, the ability to see more, allows you to see more.

Allows you to do more, obviously.

To see it quickly.

In fact, what's interesting, when I started off as a leader, you really didn't have to see too much before.

You just had to see it bigger.

But today with social media and the speed of time, before is becoming, I think, has almost as much gravitas as more.

And so I think when you look at a person that is a great leader, I think they see a bigger picture.

I think they see a little bit more of the world.

I think they see the world.

I think they see it quicker.

And that allows them to get in the game faster.

You know, the fastest person doesn't really win the race is the one that gets started first.

And so getting started first is a tremendous advantage in this day.

And then I think, then I go to values.

And the reason I go to values is values ensures longevity in leadership.

If you lack good values, it's only a matter of time.

I always say if you're really right, time is on your side.

And if you're wrong, time is your biggest enemy.

And so if you have, like, good values, I think there is a sustaining and a consistency compounding effect in it that allows you to really go to greatness.

In fact, people ask me all the time, I say, well, how did you become, quote, the number one leadership guru or whatever that means?

And I always laugh.

I say it's very simple.

I outlived all the rest of them.

- [laughs] - I mean, you know.

- They're all gone, huh?

- Yeah, they die.

- And, you know, another one hit the dust.

Well, I was eight.

Now I'm seven.

You know, just hang in there.

[laughter] - There's some truth to some of that.

- Oh, there's a lot of truth in it.

No, I think there's a lot of truth there.

- John, I've heard you speak many times.

I marvel at your ability to connect with an audience often unknown to you, an audience you've never met before, you just introduced on the stage.

You have the capacity to connect with that audience so quickly, so authentically, and so memorably.

What is it about you that does that?

- Well, I think -- man, that's a great question.

I think that great communicators understand that their first responsibility is to find the people.

Once I find you, I can now connect with you.

- You mean find their heart, their need, their goals, aspirations.

- Yeah, yeah.

And so, in fact, I was just getting ready to speak to a large audience a few weeks ago in the green room, and a couple of other speakers were there.

And I'm five minutes out, and they asked me, they said, "What are you thinking about right now?"

And I said, "Well, I'm thinking about the people.

I'm thinking about the people."

- How are they feeling?

What fears do they have?

- Yeah, totally.

So let me -- I wrote in a book that I wrote a couple years ago called "The 16 Laws of Communication."

I talk about this.

So see if -- I'm going to try to do this in two minutes.

I ask myself four questions before I speak.

And it's -- all the questions are not about what I'm going to speak on.

They're all about the people I'm going to speak to.

That's a huge difference.

So I ask myself, "What do I want the people to see?

What do I want the people to know?

What do I want the people to feel?

And what do I want the people to do?"

Four questions.

Now, for me, what I want people to see when I speak is their possibilities.

I'm a possibility communicator.

I lift lids and say, "Hey, you can go to higher ground.

You don't have to stay where you are."

So everything -- anytime you hear a Maxwell speak or anytime you read a Maxwell book, it's got possibilities in there because I believe that all of us can be higher than what they think.

All of us can go higher.

I don't think any of us, quote, "have arrived."

Okay.

So I want them to see their possibilities.

What I want them to know is that they're valued.

If I can help them know while I talk to them that I value them as a person, I now make them an ally of everything I say.

So now it's not I have to prove the point.

It's I have to prove the point.

And they'll fight for it.

All because I value them.

So what I want them -- I want them to see the possibilities.

I want them to know I value them.

I want them to feel empowered.

When I'm done, they don't have to say I'm amazing, but I would like for them to say I'm amazing.

I want them to think, "I can go do this."

That's why when I teach... - I have what it takes to do this.

- That's exactly -- that's why -- so I never try to -- I never try to take something and make it so far out there.

That they think I can't get there.

I try to get closer to it.

So I want them to feel empowered.

And then what I want them to do is I want them to apply what I give them.

And because I love the leadership audience, I expect them not only to apply but multiply.

I want them to take it and then turn around and give it to others.

I think for me that's where great communication starts.

So I tell everybody, now, just ask those four questions.

You won't have the same answers as I do.

You won't have the same answers I have because you're different.

But I think once you settle those four answers, then everything you teach on goes through this grid and it just begins to work really well.

That's why most of the time -- not all the time, but most of the time when I start to talk, what I do, I say, "Hi, my name's John."

I'm your friend.

Yeah.

And somebody says, "Why do you do that?"

I say, "Because I'm their friend."

That's why I do that.

And the moment I say that, it's -- - You build that rapport.

- It really does.

- And they love you from the get-go.

John, I have to say to you, you have made our world a better place because you've invested your life in helping people grow.

And for that, I for one thank you for your leadership, your stewardship, your philanthropy, and your educational offerings for us all.

Thank you for being with me on "Side by Side."

- It's been my joy, always.

[bright music] ♪ - Funding for Side by Side with Nido Qubein is made possible by - Coca-Cola Consolidated makes and serves over 300 of the world's best brands and flavors locally from 13 facilities and 4,500 hardworking teammates.

We are Coca-Cola Consolidated, your local bottler.

- The Budd Group has been serving the Southeast for over 60 years.

Specializing in jaNidorial, landscape, and facility solutions, our trusted staff delivers exceptional food, exceptional customer satisfaction, comprehensive facility support with the Budd Group.

- Truist.

We're here to help people, communities, and businesses thrive in North Carolina and beyond.

The commitment of our teammates makes the difference every day.

Truist.

Leaders in banking.

Unwavering in care.