Why the Right Leader Can Change Everything
January 8, 2026
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Your title is temporary but your impact on others is lasting.
More leaders are asked to deliver immediate results than ever before. It’s accepted wisdom that achieving better results requires doing things differently than a team did before. Because most people understand:
The price you pay for doing what everyone else does is getting what everyone else gets.
It would be insanity to keep doing the same things repeatedly and expecting different results. So what most organizations do when hiring or promoting is they select hard-driving, results-oriented professionals to lead teams. While this logic makes sense, there is an element many of these newly elected leaders forget, and it’s a massive mistake. If you take nothing else away from this column, remember this:
Your leadership is temporary, but your impact on others is lasting.
It’s not just about what you do to help deliver immediate results; it’s also about how you do it. Because it’s often how people experience your leadership that they will remember. They won’t remember hitting your 1st quarter numbers in 2024 or optimizing your internal processes last week, but they will remember how you made them feel while doing it.
Great leaders deliver results. It might not be immediate, but results of some kind eventually improve. However, most people confuse the real purpose of leadership. On a recent episode of the John Eades Podcast, Ping Identity’s Pete Angstadt said:
"The best leaders are focused on developing future leaders. When you have more leaders in an organization."
Too often, managers think the purpose of their work is to create followers. To get their direct reports to fall in line and do what they say when they are supposed to do it.
While team alignment and execution are critical, this mindset misses the mark. If managers focused more on developing leadership skills in team members, such as inspiring, casting vision, being coachable, and having character, the performance would improve because each person would take more ownership of their actions and help hold each other accountable. Never forget:
A player-led team will consistently outperform a coach-led team.
In the Accelerate Leadership Program, I define a leader this way: Someone whose actions inspire, empower, and serve in order to elevate others.
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When you have an entire team that is inspiring, empowering, and serving to elevate others around you, you would be hard-pressed for performance not to improve.
Your words and actions today have a more significant impact tomorrow on others than you think they do. Take this inspiring story as an example:
In 1975, a young man who was struggling with what to do with his life returned home from college.
One afternoon, he was hanging out at his mother’s beauty salon when a respected elderly woman visited the shop.
She sat, saw the young man, and couldn’t take her eyes off him. Every time he looked in the mirror, he saw her behind him, looking right at him.
The woman saw something in the teenager… something he could not yet see in himself.
Eventually, she spoke what was on her mind.
The woman said, “You know, young man, you are going to travel the world and speak or preach to millions of people.”
Then, she wrote those words on a blue envelope and handed it to him. Her words spoke to his troubled heart, so he graciously accepted the envelope and signed it. Then, he put it in his wallet to carry it with him.
That young man was the actor Denzel Washington. Denzel has been quoted many times saying that the woman’s words really encouraged him when he was starting out as an actor and had him continue to keep going even in the face of great adversity.
It’s possible the older woman knew exactly what she was doing that day, but more importantly, it teaches every leader a fundamental principle:
Your actions today impact others tomorrow
I am not saying don’t focus on delivering short-term results as a leader. Absolutely lock in on building and developing a culture that produces the proper habits and behaviors to deliver sustained results. However, don’t forget about the long-term impact you can have on the people’s lives you come into contact with. Remember, your leadership is temporary, but your impact is lasting.
Someone else is going to have your title one day. So, focus less on your title and focus more on having a positive impact on others.
This week, I spent time with Kevin A. Henry, a world-class leader at the PulteGroup. He said something in our meeting that required me to take my phone out and write it down. He said, “If you are a good steward of what you have been put in charge of, you will get put in charge of more.”
If all you do is deliver short-term results at the expense of leaving bodies in your wake, you won’t be put in charge of more. If you deliver short-term results but have astronomically high voluntary turnover and low employee engagement, you won’t be put in charge of more later.
Deliver results, but remember the impact you have on other people. That impact means more in the long run.
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About the Author John Eades is the CEO of LearnLoft, and creator of the Accelerate Leadership Program. He was named one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices. John is also the author of Building the Best: 8 Proven Leadership Principles to Elevate Others to Success. You can follow him on Instagram @johngeades.
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