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When Idealists are good communicators, they are terrific motivators, because they fill you with the same excitement that they feel themselves. If your team is up against the wall and needs a door-die effort, Idealists are great. Idealists can run into problems, however. What if their ideas suck? What if the clarity and beauty they perceive in the idea Deciding What Kind of Leader to Be 31 isn’t apparent to anyone else? Idealists can become nags when the idea becomes the only thing they care about.

He hired a man to murder Sheila. His sense of himself was that he shouldn’t be a hardware tycoon with a raft of stores. He saw himself as being more the kind of fellow who greets customers and rings up purchases—a non-leader. Rather than go up against his sense of his own identity, he had his spouse murdered. If that sounds like the plot of the movie Fargo, it’s because the movie was based on that story. Now, few of us are going to reject the call to leadership as violently as Donald. But it underscores the power of how we think about ourselves, and how we let that power hold us back.

Ask them what their worries are, and do your best to assure them that their concerns are important to you. Meeting the Team 23 Don’t make promises you can’t keep. This is an error firsttime leaders often stumble into—promising to cover every bet in order to get people’s support. It’s one thing to promise people you’ll look into matters they suggest, but it’s quite another to offer blanket guarantees that you’ll solve problems x, y, and z. Doing so sets you up for two opposite, equally bad things: sucking up to your team and breaking your word.