On Friday, CNBC’s Becky Quick reported that multibillionaire oracle and investor Warren Buffett did not have plans to invest in Facebook, which is set for an initial public stock offering later this month. Oh, it’s not because he doesn’t like Facebook, nor does he think the social media platform is a bunch of hype. In fact, he said he thinks that what’s happening at Facebook is “extraordinary”. “People get excited when a company does that well,” he said, “And they should.”

No – the reason he’s decided not to invest in Facebook, or similar companies is because, as he admits, he doesn’t understand the social media sector of technology. No dummy, he’d no doubt understand it perfectly well if he’d studied it, but he’s just chosen to become an expert in other kinds of businesses. And Warren Buffett didn’t become one of the wealthiest people in the world by investing in things he didn’t fully understand.

His comments echo those of former Fidelity Magellan Fund manager Peter Lynch, who wrote in his book Beating the Street that investors ought not put their money into anything they can’t explain with a crayon. Literally. We think that’s excellent advice.

The same holds true for the willingness of people to “invest” themselves in your organization. If people don’t understand what we’re all about well enough to be able to describe it with a crayon, literally – a crayon – then they can’t, and therefore won’t put themselves into their work with the kind of Commitment we need.

Here’s an assignment: Go out and get a box crayons. Then, in your next staff or team meeting, give everyone a plain sheet of white paper, and one of the wax implements, and ask them to portray, using only that crayon, what your organization (or team) is all about. Use the results as a springboard for a meaningful discussion about what your organization is, in fact, all about. If your team struggles a bit more than you’d like, or if you’re not particularly happy with what you see, strive to solidify that understanding of what you’re all about over a reasonable time, say, six months or so. Then come back and revisit the discussion with your team.

Richard Hadden is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by virtue of a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He and Bill Catlette are the authors of the popular “Contented Cows” leadership book series, and Rebooting Leadership. Their newest book, Contented Cows STILL Give Better Milk, is due to be released by John Wiley & Sons on July 3, but is available for pre-sale now. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.

In our line of work, we deal with lots of lists. Fortune’s annual list of the 100 Best Places to Work; their Most Admired List; Glassdoor’s Best Places to Launch a Career, and the like. We’ve even got a few lists of our own, including our latest list of “Contented Cow” companies, highlighted in our upcoming new book, Contented Cows STILL Give Better Milk.

But perhaps the most perplexing (to me) list to come out lately is Time’s list of 100 Most Influential People in the World. No harm to Time, but I think their definition of “influential” and mine differ. In my book, someone who’s influential is someone who has a substantial effect on the behavior and thinking of others, for good or ill. By that standard, the Time list largely misses the mark.

Topping the list is New York Knicks basketball player Jeremy Lin.  Immensely talented and uber-famous, he has a great story, and by all accounts is a great and admirable guy. I like him a lot, and I think much of the world admires and respects him. But I question “worldwide influence.” I just don’t know that he’s substantially changed the world’s behavior or way of thinking.

I was surprised that, of the 100 people on the list, this news junkie and reasonably “world-aware” writer has never heard of 74 of them. Sure, there are some really good picks on the list. Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose swing vote has often determined the law of the land in the U.S.; world leaders Obama, Merkel, and Netanyahu; the mega-wealthy Alice Walton and Warren Buffet. But Kristen Wiig? Please. She makes me laugh on Saturday Night Live, and I think she’s really good at her job, so I respect and admire her. But influence? One of the most influential people in the world? I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.

Maybe influence is easier to relate to at the personal level than on a worldwide scale. If that’s the case, I can think of four groups that are among the real “Most Influential People” in the world: Parents, Teachers, Mentors, and Bosses. The first two are so obvious that I won’t take up blogspace elaborating.

Lots of you are probably “mentors unaware”. Your mentee has never called you a mentor, but you’re a mentor nonetheless. He or she looks up to you, watches what you do, and emulates you to a degree. That’s influence. Others have entered into formal mentoring relationships at work, and still others have volunteered to serve as a mentor to a young person, perhaps through the school system or a community organization. THAT’s influence.

But think about it. If you’re somebody’s boss at work, their leader, manager, supervisor, whatever term you want to use, you have, like it or not, tremendous potential to exert influence over the people you lead, if for no other reason than the fact that they spend a huge proportion of their waking hours under your leadership. You can affect their behavior, their thinking, indeed the entire trajectory of their professional life. That’s a daunting responsibility by any measure, and I fear that too many bosses fail to recognize the influence they have over the people who call them “boss”.

If you’re somebody’s boss, stop and think, soon, about how you affect the behavior and thinking of those you lead. If you want to sleep well at night, make a conscious decision to be an influence for good on the people you lead.

You may not be much of a basketball player, or lead great industrial nations, but you could very well be the “Most Influential Person” in someone’s life. Make the best of it.

Richard Hadden is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by virtue of a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He and Bill Catlette are the authors of the popular “Contented Cows” leadership book series, and Rebooting Leadership. Their newest book, Contented Cows STILL Give Better Milk, is due to be released by John Wiley & Sons on July 3, but is available for pre-sale now. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.

This weekend, in the afterglow of Valentine’s Day, at least 24 couples will walk down the aisle, tie the knot, and be married, at the same time and place, in the Mexican city of Tijuana. What makes these weddings remarkable is that they’ll not be taking place in a church, a judge’s chambers, or on a nearby Pacific beach, but instead at the Plantronics headset factory where at least one member of each couple works.

Mass weddings in a headset factory? There’s got to be more to that story. And there is.

One of the more fascinating adventures I’ve had lately was a visit earlier this month to Plamex, the Mexican division of Plantronics, which operates a large manufacturing facility and R&D center just south of the US-Mexico border. As part of the research for our new book, Contented Cows STILL Give Better Milk, (oh, did we mention we were writing a new book?), Alejandro Bustamante, president of Plamex, graciously invited me to visit the company, which earned the Number One spot on The Great Place to Work Institute’s ranking of Best Places to Work in Mexico. Folks, in terms of great workplaces, Plamex is the Google of Mexico.

Although I spent the entire day at the plant, it didn’t take me long to see why the company came in at number one – or to see the benefits it reaps by adopting a strategy that focuses on its associates. Over the last few years, the company’s output, quality, profitability, and workplace brand have all soared.

“The job of a leader,” Alejandro told me, “is to create the atmosphere to get the results we want.” When I asked him to explain how Plamex had achieved such distinction as an outstanding workplace, he had a ready answer.

“There are three things we want for every one of our 2,286 associates here. [That’s right, he knows the number, off the top of his head.] First, we want to give everyone the respect they deserve. Second, we want to help them develop. And third – and this is probably the most important – we want to improve the quality of their lives, and the lives of their families. When you do those things, you get their very best. And that’s what we need – their very best.”

One of the most remarkable parts of the Plamex culture, and one that illustrates the importance of family at Plamex, is their unconventional practice of hosting employee group weddings onsite. We’ve all heard of onsite childcare, gyms, and even dry cleaning. But weddings? Here’s the backstory.

Until recently, Mexican couples desiring a marriage license were required to produce their original birth certificates, which could only be obtained by making a pilgrimage to the town of their birth. As 80% of Plamex’s workforce is from the interior of Mexico, and not from Tijuana, this presented a logistical nightmare for most. As a result, many couples who wanted to marry, simply couldn’t. To help with the problem, Plamex began granting associates time off to retrieve their documentation, and a number of employees made use of the privilege. The company didn’t have to do this, but they did, because, as Alejandro told me, “When you do something that helps your associates, they remember that, and it has a positive impact on their work.”

With so many “engaged employees” (double meaning intentional), Alejandro decided it might be nice to actually host a mass wedding, uniting the couples right there in the plant. He negotiated a special discounted license fee with local authorities, and even convinced a judge to mass produce the nuptials for the price of a single wedding (It is a factory, after all). Plamex associates provided the food, music, and decorations, and Alejandro opened the factory’s capacious dining hall for the festivities.

After the first group wedding a number of years ago, which was an unqualified success, two teenagers, a brother and sister, came up to him and said, “Mr. Bustamante, thank you so much for doing this. We are so proud that our parents are now able to be married.”

“That’s all it took,” Alejandro told me, “and I knew we were doing a good thing.”

Plamex lobbied the Mexican government to change the law, and now, getting a marriage license no longer requires a trek home. Still, the weddings were such a hit that the practice continues. Every year around Valentine’s Day, the company hosts a mass wedding of some 20 to 30 couples, at least one member of which is a Plamex associate. Total cost to Plamex for each event: about $300. This practice, along with so many others that make up the way of life at Plamex, helps fulfill the organization’s goal of optimizing business outcomes by first demonstrating in tangible ways that they truly care about workers.

Here’s our challenge to you – and it doesn’t necessarily involve hosting onsite weddings. Ask yourself – What am I doing, (not just thinking), as a leader, to show that I care about the people I lead? It needn’t be expensive, nor time-consuming. But it should be genuine. If you come up with something that you think would be helpful to share with others, please let us know, and we will – anonymously, or with attribution – your choice.

If you can’t think of anything, may we make a suggestion? Find out one thing – just one – that gets in the way of your people being as productive, fulfilled, and successful as they could be, and help them make the problem go away. At Plamex, it was a cumbersome law that kept loving couples from getting married. In your case, it’s probably something else. Maybe it’s a policy, a practice, an obsolete piece of equipment, or just a worn-out way of thinking about the role of people in the workplace. Whatever it is – ditch it, dump it, replace it. Then step back, and watch what it does to their engagement – as in employee engagement, that is.

Richard Hadden is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by virtue of a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He and Bill Catlette are the authors of the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk, (a new version of which will be released in June of 2012), and Contented Cows MOOve Faster, and  Rebooting Leadership. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.

This weekend I was honored to have sung at the funeral of a man in our church. I didn’t know him well, but I knew him, and what I always saw was an upbeat, friendly, kind, and warm guy, whose interest always seemed projected outward – toward others – not inward. I was surprised to learn he was in his 80′s. I would have thought much younger.

What was not a surprise was a story the minister told about Lloyd, to the large congregation assembled to celebrate and honor his long life. During Lloyd’s last hospital stay, the minister was visiting him one morning when a middle-aged male nurse popped his head into the room and asked, almost without waiting to hear a reply, if Lloyd needed anything.

“Yes,” said Lloyd, “I do. I need to talk to you. Do you have a minute?” Not really, but he’d make time. Lloyd, whose cancer was draining the life from him, told the nurse, through a genuine smile, that he had chosen to return to this particular hospital for his continued treatments primarily because of the outstanding nursing care he had received on earlier visits. This nurse, however, Lloyd was sorry to say, had not lived up to his high expectations. “You’re inattentive and brusque, and too rough. I’m an old man, in lots of pain, and you sometimes handle me like I’m a football player in here for knee surgery.

“Often, you’ve forgotten to do things you said you’d do. And I have to tell you that last night, you were talking loudly, all night, at your station right outside my room, and it kept me awake.”

Lloyd, an electrical engineer with an MBA, had served in senior leadership roles in the Bell System. He told the nurse that he stood out from his co-workers, and not in a good way, and not because he was one of the few male nurses there. But because he simply didn’t do his job as well as the others did theirs.

“I’ll be going into hospice care in a few days, and the way you do your job won’t really make much more difference to me. But it will to all the others who come in here after me. And it’ll make a difference to the people you work with.

“You don’t need to change a lot,” Lloyd told the guy, “but I think if you’d slow down a little, listen a little better, be a little gentler in your approach, and follow through better on your commitments to your patients, you’d go from being a good nurse, to a great one. Will you try to do that? Not just for me, but for you?”

The minister made the point that although Lloyd had been clear in giving the nurse some unsolicited performance feedback, he had done it in such a kind and caring way, that at least the nurse had stopped, and listened.

The leadership consultant in me observed from the story that Lloyd had followed, to the letter, the fundamentals of effective feedback. He’d been clear. He didn’t muddle the message with weasel words. He didn’t dance around the issue. Nor did he bash the guy over the head with it. Perhaps he was bringing his engineering education to bear on the conversation. He knew that too much pressure would cause the system to break, but that too little would be fruitless.

Lloyd provided clear and reasonable expectations, specific performance observations, and definable suggestions for specific behavior change. And he wrapped it all in a genuine sense of caring for the object of his feedback. That is the definition of a good performance coach.

After the service, the minister and I were talking. I told him I enjoyed hearing the story of the nurse. A sheepish look came over his face as he said, “Thanks. But I would never have told that story if I’d known the nurse was going to be in the congregation. I didn’t see him until later in the eulogy, and besides, he looks different in a suit and tie.”

And sometimes we, as leaders, fail to give needed feedback because we’re afraid they won’t like us anymore.

Richard Hadden is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by virtue of a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He and Bill are the authors of the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk, and Contented Cows MOOve Faster, and the brand new book Rebooting Leadership. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.

Steve Jobs’s resignation as CEO of Apple is a good reminder for leaders everywhere, and at every level, to ponder the question, “What will happen when I leave?”, whether “leaving” means quitting, retiring, getting promoted, being fired or laid off, or dying. And it’s not a question reserved only for legendary founding CEO’s of mammoth multinational corporations. It’s a question for every manager, leaders of teams large and small.

“What could happen when, for whatever reason, you leave?”

Three distinct possibilities exist:

1. Things will fall apart (a lot, or maybe just a little). In its August 26, 2011 issue, USA Today reported University of Illinois Professor Heitor Almeida’s claim that “companies with founding CEO’s tend to outperform and have 10% to 20% higher valuations than firms without”, and that “firms that lose their founder CEO often struggle, as was the case at Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Charles Schwab and Apple itself after Jobs left the first time in 1985.”

I’d be willing to bet that being a “founding” leader has less to do with this phenomenon than being a strong or iconic one. GE’s Jack Welch comes to mind.

The organization (team, branch, department, division, corporation – whatever) whose success is so closely tied to the personage of its leader at any given moment that it can’t survive that leader’s departure isn’t really all that great an organization, is it?

2. The business or team will survive, and even thrive. Leaders who build an organization around more durable principles than themselves often have the pleasure of looking back and seeing the success that came from the foundation they laid, and the work they did.

Southwest Airlines has done just fine since the retirement of co-founder Herb Kelleher as CEO. No one could be happier about that than Herb.

I could give a million other examples. I’ll give one. A manufacturer client of mine had a plant in the midwest that had endured a long history of labor problems, undoubtedly owing to a succession of plant managers who thought they were there to manage machines and production, not to lead people. The union was pretty much in charge of this particular facility, the only one of the company’s plants that was losing money. A new sheriff came to town, in the person of a new plant manager, and within 3 years, the labor troubles had subsided, the union had been deemed by the workers to no longer provide added value, and the plant was making money.

The new plant manager had fundamentally changed the leadership style in the whole factory, and his style had legs. Sadly, in his fifth year at the plant, he died unexpectedly. That was 2004. I still keep up with the HR manager at the plant, who tells me that the place is humming along nicely, and performing profitably on the foundation built by the late, greatly admired plant manager.

3. They’ll follow you where you go. This one may be the most personally rewarding, and is becoming more commonplace. We find ourselves in an age in which people are less and less tied to their organization – their employer – and perhaps more connected to individuals leaders – those who are seen as conduits to individual development and the chance to do meaningful work. For skilled leaders on the move, this may be the way to not so much leave a legacy, as to take one with you.

Many organizations espouse a desire to be an employer of choice. Our research has shown that to be a profitable course. But how realistic is it today, in a world where institutional trust is at a low point, and the “deal” in the workplace has been turned on its head?

Perhaps a greater aspiration is, on an individual level, to become a “leader of choice”. That might help answer the question, “What will happen when YOU leave?”

Richard Hadden is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by virtue of a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He and Bill are the authors of the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk, and Contented Cows MOOve Faster, and the brand new book Rebooting Leadership. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.