Episode 364 · Apr 15, 2021

Leadership Values and Competency: A Framework for Real Impact

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George Wright III of The Daily Mastermind sat down one morning, journal in hand, to share thoughts that had been on his mind after studying leadership principles. What emerged is one of the clearest breakdowns of what it actually takes to lead well: a combination of competency and values, and three powerful questions that reveal whether your leadership is truly working.

This is not a theoretical conversation. George speaks from years of personal mentoring, running mastermind groups, and watching what separates leaders who create lasting impact from those who simply hit targets and move on.

Why Leadership Requires Both Competency and Values

Most conversations about leadership focus on skills: results, proficiencies, execution. George makes the case that this is incomplete. Real leadership requires two things working together. The first is competency. You have to be genuinely good at what you do. The second is values, and this is where most people fall short, not because they lack values, but because they never made values a foundation.

"Values are really a foundation of what it is that you're going to be building your life upon."

You can be extremely competent with poor values and never become a great leader. You can have great values but be incompetent and never get anything accomplished. Both elements are non-negotiable. The problem is that in business especially, people spend years sharpening skills and almost no time examining what they actually stand for.

The Three Questions Every Person Under Your Leadership Is Already Asking

Whether you lead a team, run a mastermind, manage a household, or mentor someone one-on-one, the people in your sphere are quietly asking three questions. George shared these after reflecting on how they apply across every kind of influence, from small group settings to large organizations.

The first question is: Do you care about me? People are not primarily interested in your credentials or your track record. They want to know you have their interests at heart. As George puts it, there is a saying worth keeping close:

"People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."

The second question is: Can you help me? This is where competency comes back in. Caring without capability leaves people inspired but stuck. You have to be able to actually move the needle for the people you lead.

The third question, and arguably the most important, is: Can I trust you? Trust is not given freely. It is earned through consistency, authenticity, and vulnerability over time. If someone answers yes to all three, they will go all-in for you, contribute fully to the group, and grow in ways that benefit everyone around them.

How to Apply These Questions in Every Area of Your Life

George encourages you to take these three questions out of a professional context and run them through every dimension of your life. Ask them about your relationships at work. Ask them about how you show up for your family. Ask them about the friendships you invest in.

In each case, your honest answers will show you where you are already leading well and where you have room to grow. These questions are not just benchmarks for other people to evaluate you by. They are diagnostic tools for your own self-assessment.

Goal-Oriented vs. Value-Oriented: A Critical Distinction

One of the most thought-provoking points George raises is the difference between being goal-oriented and being value-oriented. Both approaches can produce results. But they produce very different kinds of lives.

A goal-oriented mindset drives you to hit benchmarks. You set a finish line, you cross it, and then what? If you hit it, the feeling can be shallow. If you miss it, it can feel like failure. The cycle is finite.

A value-oriented mindset operates differently. Your values are always with you. They inform every decision, every relationship, every choice about how to spend your time. You still pursue goals, but you exceed them in ways you could not have planned for.

"When you're value-oriented, you continually grow. When you're goal-oriented, you're hitting finish lines."

George's challenge is clear: shift your orientation from goals as the primary driver to values as the primary driver. Let your values set the direction, and let your goals be the markers along the path rather than the destination itself.

Why Small Group Settings Accelerate Leadership Growth

George has seen firsthand how mastermind groups and small roundtables can be among the most effective environments for leadership development. When you bring people together with shared purpose, the three questions above get answered quickly. You either demonstrate that you care, can help, and can be trusted, or the group does not hold together.

These settings create the kind of accountability and authentic connection that solo growth rarely achieves. If you are not in a group like this, George's encouragement is to find one or build one. The impact compounds.

Action Steps

Audit your current leadership by honestly asking: Do the people I lead believe I care about them, can help them, and can be trusted?
Write down your top five personal values today. If you cannot name them quickly, that is a signal worth paying attention to.
Identify one area of your life where you have been goal-oriented and ask what a value-oriented approach would look like instead.
Join or start a mastermind or small group built around genuine growth, not just networking.
Commit to one specific action this week that builds trust with someone in your personal or professional sphere.

Leadership is not a title or a position. It is a daily practice of showing up with both competency and values, answering the three questions the people around you are already asking, and choosing growth over the shallow satisfaction of hitting finish lines. As George says often, it is never too late to start living the life you were meant to live.

READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to The Daily Mastermind. My name is George Wright III. If this is your first time joining us, I appreciate you listening to The Daily Mastermind and I look forward to sharing some thoughts with you today. Today, well, let's start out with the quote of the day out of The Daily Mastermind mobile app. The quote of the day is, success is not the key to happiness. happiness is the key to success. Actually, I really agree with that quote, and I think it's something that if you think about, will really help you to direct your life and your values. You know, happiness and success come in the little things. For example, I had partners of mine today show up to the office and bring me a big apple fritter. How awesome is that? You know, I don't eat sugar very often, but today I gobbled that thing down pretty quick. So it is the little things that make you happy in life, and you've got to slow down, and you've got to be able to appreciate and be grateful for the little things like relationships and successes that you have. Now, today I want to talk to you a little bit about leadership. And, you know, some days I just share with you thoughts that I happen to be studying or reviewing myself, and this morning I was listening to some information and a podcast with John Maxwell, where he was talking about leadership. He's pretty much one of the foremost leaders on leadership. And I know that on my podcast and with my partner Robert in our mastermind and mentoring, we talk a lot about leadership because it's such a key factor in everything that you do. But I had a few thoughts I wrote down today. And so I wanted to just kind of share those thoughts with you and maybe give you some things to think about, maybe some things to apply better in your business or in your personal life, family, relationships, whatever it is. You know, John kind of mentioned today, and he talked about how leadership is a combination of two things. The first is your competency. You have to be good at what you're doing, obviously, in order to be a leader. And the second is your values. And I thought that was a really unique thing to bring out. unique in the sense that we don talk a lot about that with combination of leadership I know that with the experience of mentoring the personal mentoring I received from my partner Robert you know, he talks about your values right off the bat. And it kind of reminded me that so many times values become a conversation you have down the road, but values are really a foundation of what it is that you're going to be building your life upon. You know, these values are a key factor that you can't separate from competency and leadership. I mean, you could be extremely competent and not have good values and you're not going to be a great leader. Or you could have great values and really be incompetent and you're never going to get anything accomplished either. So they're both things that you have to look at. And I think a lot of times we focus so much on competency and skills and results and proficiencies that we forget about the fact that our values are very important. And I think I'm going to share a much more in-depth podcast on values at another time. But I thought it was really important to just remind you that there is a huge importance of having values along with your competency and leadership. Now, John also talked about creating impact in your life by putting together roundtables. You know, I like to look at these and maybe call them a little bit more applicable masterminds because I think a mastermind is something where you can work together with individuals. Roundtables are good, but I think it's important that you have purpose around these roundtables or mastermind groups because you want to create things like this in your life in order to get better, right, to grow, but also to create impact and help others grow. And these roundtables or mastermind groups that he was talking about, he mentioned a very unique thing that I liked, which is that most leaders, and he talked about how he used this same topic when he was addressing it for a couple of hours to the United Nations. So these three main questions that people inside a mastermind or inside your leadership or inside your roundtable or people under your influence are going to be asking. There's three main questions that people are going to be asking. And if you can answer these questions yes then you going to have a very productive group You going to have a very productive influence You going to have a very productive and valuable leadership style So let me give you those kind of three questions. The first one is people that are inside your influence, whether you're leading them, managing them inside a mastermind, a roundtable, or anything, they're going to ask, do you care about me? Because people don't want to know what you know. They want to know if you care, right? And there's a saying that I've heard many times in my life, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. So number one, do you care about me? Number two, can you help me? People that are inside this Mastermind Roundtable or in your Influencer Leadership want to know if you can help them. And the third one, and probably the most important one, is can I trust you? And, you know, if you can answer those questions that you care about them, that you can help them, and they can trust you, well then these individuals are going to really do a lot to be able to create results in their life to contribute to the word of the team to contribute towards you know your relationship but whatever it is do you care about me can i can you help me and can i trust you those are questions that people probably ask in every area of life but if you can answer those in the affirmative you can make a serious impact on people that you're with that you're leading that you're working with, and especially in a small group setting, if you have a small mastermind. And I've had a few of those where, you know, I hope that people have felt that about the groups that we've had. And that is that, you know, we do care, you know, we can help you and you can trust us. But most of those things are going to be earned through your actions because people aren't going to gain trust unless they create vulnerability and authenticity and they can work with you in that capacity. So I'd like you to ask yourself these, you know, core questions about yourself. Do you care about people? Do you feel like you help people and can they trust you? And I want you to ask these core questions in each area of your life, okay? You've got to ask these questions about the people you work with in business, in your family, your personal life, your relationships, because all three of these questions are important and critical to be a leader, but they also critical and important for you to have a fulfilling life and a life of impact because creating impact will allow you to be more fulfilled And so those three questions are ones that I think I like to pose to you today to kind of think about And then the last thought I want to leave you with is another one that I kind of wrote some notes on today as we were studying, and that is a question, are you goal-oriented or value-oriented? So there's this common topic of values with regards to leadership and effectiveness and success in life. But the question is, are you goal-oriented or are you value-oriented? Because goals without values will allow you to hit your benchmarks throughout your life. I've had that happen a lot where you hit goals just because you set goals. But if you hit those goals without values, then they're going to be more unfulfilling and they're going to create less impact. However, values, if you're value-oriented, value-driven, you're still going to be able to hit your goals, but you're going to exceed and grow in ways that you can ever imagine. So I ask you that question again. Are you goal-oriented or value-oriented? And I would hope that you would gear yourself towards value and value-oriented goals because that's going to give you huge leadership edge on everyone and everything in your life. but it's also going to give you much more fulfillment and impact. And you're going to find that when you're value-oriented, you continually grow. When you're goal-oriented, you're hitting finish lines, you're hitting deadlines. And if you don't hit them, it's shallow. If you hit them, then you're done, right? But value orientation gives you constant growth and constant ability to be able to improve your life. So I hope those are some good thoughts for you. Those are just things I had kind of journaled about this morning before I got into the office. And I hope you have an amazing day today. Think carefully on some of these things and how you can show up as a better leader in your life and in your business. And I look forward to hearing any feedback from you that you may have. Hit me up on The Daily Mastermind on Instagram or Facebook or just email me. I always give out my personal email. It's george at g3worldwide.com. Look forward to hearing from you. Like and subscribe the podcast and share it with anybody that you know. And certainly it would mean the world to me, so I appreciate it. Have a great day, and I will talk with you tomorrow. Thank you.