Leading from the Front

What is the difference between a leader and a boss?

We’ve all seen the poster that demonstrates this difference at some point in our lives: the “boss” being carried and barking orders, contrasted with the “leader” who is in the trenches, pulling alongside the rest of the team.

There are some clichés that, while true, have become so commonplace and overused that they’ve almost lost their meaning. The core of this message, to me, is that you are not what you say—you are what you do.

How often have we seen this image, but the boss who displays it is, well, still a boss? Their actions do not align with the vision they are trying to create. To me, this is why these clichés become clichés and lose their meaning—because they are just words.

Words can be powerful, but only when they are backed by actions. Otherwise, they just feel empty.

It’s the actions behind our words that truly matter. This is the concept of leading from the front.

The best leaders understand that a vision becomes truly clear to a team not only through communication (words), but through the actions the team sees the leader take every single day. That’s what brings the vision to life.

Sal Di Stefano from The Mind Pump Podcast (highly recommend it if you haven’t given it a listen) described this perfectly. Sal has been in the fitness industry for decades and has done pretty much every job in the space you can think of.

He worked his way up from a personal trainer in a big-box commercial gym to owning and operating his own gym. There’s A TON that goes into owning a gym—one of them being that it must be cleaned pretty much all the time.

So, at close every day, Sal described how his team needed to do a deep clean of the gym before heading out. Everyone had a task to complete, including the absolute worst—cleaning the toilets and bathrooms.

Now remember, Sal owns this gym. But he described what his job almost always was during this clean-up: cleaning the toilets.

The owner of the gym was the first one to go into the bathroom, get on his knees, and scrub toilets. He described this as “leading from the front.”

If his team never saw him doing the dirty work, he would be seen as “above” doing some of the work the business needed. What message does that send to his team?

The best leaders can send powerful messages without any words at all—only actions. This message being: “No one is above the dirty work, and there isn’t anything we won’t do to push this business forward.”

Leading from the front is how you build a team that feels like a team. One where everyone (including the owner or founder) knows that the next person is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve the mission.

The best leaders don’t demand obedience—they inspire and help the team see and feel the vision as clearly as they do. And that isn’t done through words—it’s done through actions.

We are not what we say.
We are what we do.

Have a great week,
GTY