While a very simple act on the face of it, none is more important. If you fail to demonstrate this act to your people be that family, employees, customers and the like you will succumb to the potential of negative results. No matter how good your talk is, if you don’t match it with your walk, you will earn no respect and find it increasingly difficult to get results.

Setting an Example is where you show your values. When you demonstrate values, and that your character has integrity, that is, if who you are the same person all the time then you will accomplish far more than you might imagine. For this kind of leader, they have those actions returned in kind and in results.

It may be more difficult under some circumstances to set a positive example, but that shouldn’t stop you! Setting an Example is where your actions are centric to your values.

When you constantly set an  example, you will get the results you want as a leader.

Last weekend I heard a story regarding a new match official who was in a position of having to use knowledge and experience against a backdrop of potential consequences.  This was the situation.  It was this match official’s second game that he had refereed; it was the second half with approximately 20 minutes to go and the score was 12/10.  A scrum was packed and a player was left injured on the ground with an unknown but significant enough injury to stop the game on the basis that it could have been a serious neck or back injury. On to the field come well-meaning managers, who want to pick him up and take him out of play so the game can continue. The match official, who had recently attended a duty of care seminar, said that they were not to move him and that he would phone for an ambulance,  which he did, but the ambulance would be at least 20 minutes.  Do you move the player knowing the risk?  If there were no other players around you wouldn’t move him but there were cries of “let’s continue the game.”   The game was more important to the players than the player was. The managers started to move the player; the match official told them that if they physically moved the player that he would leave the ground.  Consequently he called off the game and left the ground.  The ambulance arrived; the player was taken to hospital for observation and it was discovered that he had sustained a back injury.

We all have a duty of care to not only know the circumstances but also the consequences.  When you make decisions based on a duty of care then the consequences will have far less exposure to risk.

The match official did the right thing, as he was the only one who showed a duty of care.  It is not only paramount in business but in all walks of life. The consequences of not respecting duty of care could have been quite dire for this particular player.

I watch people negotiate on a number of different paths of their wants to save money and to get a good deal.  That is not only because they value their money, but they also realise that to get money takes time.  You hear people say “I have worked hard to achieve this, it has taken me a long time”.  That is a statement in reflection of the time it has taken to create wealth, to purchase something that means a lot to an individual.

Sometimes however people get that concerned about money that they lose the capacity to judge its value.  In essence they lose the meaning of time.  There is one clear message to realise is that money can be re-earned, time cannot.  How much time people spend on negotiating and dealing in direct proportion to the result that they have achieved in time can sometimes be wasted money 

How valuable your time is when you are using it to build wealth will only be determined by whether you believe you are better at creating wealth than you are at defending the wealth that you have got. 

Time is a much greater asset than money.  The only thing I know is that money can’t buy time.