Some patients ask me how they might best lead their sports teams or school clubs. I start by telling them how I learned the beginning of the answer the hard way.

When I was 13 years old, I organized a school newspaper entitled The Etc. Gazette. This story takes place so many years ago that we duplicated this newspaper using a ditto machine in the days before photocopiers. This duplication process produced purplish copies and was the origin of our use of the word "ditto," which means "the same thing again."

Fortunately, the lessons of this story remain valid today. I convinced a few of my friends to serve as reporters for this newspaper, and we started off enthusiastically. Over the next few months, each of the reporters quit. I remember distinctly the day the last reporter quit. He said, "You can't get us to cooperate by telling us what to do. You need to listen to our ideas."

That was one of my earliest lessons in good leadership.

1. Effective leadership involves encouraging your followers to achieve to the best of their abilities and allowing them the freedom to pursue their own interests.

A good leader suggests various options that would help move a project forward based on the leader's vision, perhaps after a brainstorming session with the team. It gives each team member the freedom of choice regarding how they will contribute.

When I became the news editor of my college newspaper, I applied the lesson I learned in junior high school. Our newspaper typically had a staff of 3-5 reporters. By delegating the responsibility of choosing story ideas to our reporters, expressing gratitude for their work, and treating them with kindness, I grew our news division to 30 reporters that year.

As a young physician, I encountered more negative examples of what a leader should not do. I was researching at a major east coast hospital as a pediatric pulmonologist. I also had an opportunity at that hospital to see a few patients........

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