What’s the best management advice you’ve ever received?

ByDavid Paul Carter

The 2016 Fortune 500 List was published this month. Fortune also surveyed the CEOs of the 500 list, asking them “What’s the best management advice you’ve ever received?”

Their answers were succinct and illuminating. They highlighted six categories of insights with simple, yet often difficult to follow words of sage advice.

The “be ruthless in setting priorities” spoke most loudly to me. I see so many companies that could literally break their bonds of “stuckness” if they executed on this simple, but not easy to do discipline.

Here are the six categories of insight with an example of each. You can check out the full set of answers here.

1. The most frequent theme was to focus on building the right team: “You are no better than your team.”
2. Listen was a frequent category: “Lead with questions, not answers.”
3. The need to be ruthless in setting priorities was also a popular topic: “ Focus on one or two top priorities.”
4. Pacing was on the minds of many: “Start small, fail fast, scale quickly.”
5. The importance of values in an age of transparency was another recurrent theme: “Tell the truth.”
6. And then there were a few random chestnuts: “Leadership is action, not position.”

Do you think anything is missing? Do you have some advice to share? Send me an email, or comment below with the best management advice you ever received, and I’ll post the best in a future blog.

Contact me for help applying these principles within your business.