Leadership is an incredibly important skill for many areas of life, but thankfully there are ways you can learn to improve you leadership skills if you’re not a ‘natural born leader’.

Take Stalin for instance. Now Stalin wasn’t always a popular guy as you know and it only takes one naysayer to spread feelings of discontent through your followers. The problem is that by punishing this trouble maker you will only turn more of your followers against you. If you ignore him then he will spread his message of doubt. If you isolate him you may quell the problem, but it will only alienate him and create a fullblown enemy. What to do then? Stalin solved the problem with a trick he called Transformismo. Here you go against expectation and actually promote your doubter to a position of importance. This will initially buy you back some respect. It will also take up his time dealing with his new responsibilities. He will find himself busy promoting your message and over time he will become a supporter and sympathiser. It will also keep him close and away from others where he could be a bad influence. This is what’s meant by keeping your enemies close. Soon they won’t be enemies anymore but valuable allies. If only Yoda had given Anakin some trust and respect, instead of isolating him, Darth Vader may never have been born…

An example of how I’ve used this to my advantage was when I set up a forum for an old website. I knew my mates would join and take the piss and so rather than try to hide the forum and risk them discovering it I made them moderators on the site. They were touched by the display of confidence and rather than try to ruin it they actually became promoters of the site and valuable members of the forum.

Another important ability for a leader is to be able to be able to sway an audience; to rally the troops and to convince them of your argument. There are several keys to good persuasion. In what seems like a counter intuitive point, a persuasive argument will actually contain facts that go against the point you are trying to make. For example, if I were trying to sell you a miracle hair growth formula I would say ‘I can guarantee that it will make your hair grow back over the course of a few weeks. I don’t know whether it’s right for you though sir as it does have a tendency to make you a bit itchy at night… it’s more for extreme cases. It really depends on how much you feel you need hair.’ That is a good way to convince the poor sap to buy the hair growth formulae because he will not see a motive for you to tell him the second piece of information and the fact that you don’t even recommend he buy it means that you should have no reason to lie to him about its effectiveness. Additionally if all of your points support your argument then you will sound biased.

Mack LeMouse

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