Edoc team members recently went to the Executive Breakfast Club in Chicago. It’s a morning breakfast event that brings together business leaders looking to evoke, expand, and exemplify the principles of transformational leadership.

This breakfast in particular featured a candid Q&A session with John Venhuizen, President and Chief Executive Officer of Ace Hardware.

He said part of the passion he has for work is about the people he has the opportunity to work with: “It’s usually not so much what you do, it’s who you do it with,” he told the packed room.

John also had a lot to say about the power of leadership in small business, which resonated with me. “I think everything rides and falls with leadership,” he told us.

John said he—and Ace Hardware—works to have a shared, precise definition of leadership. He says they didn’t come up with these words themselves, but there are 3 parts to their current definition that they use and share:

1. Leadership is taking people where they could not have gotten on their own.

“[This] immediately says it’s about people, not only about you. By definition, leadership is about others. It’s about influencing someone else. And if you’re not doing that, all the other crap about leadership is just that,” he said. If it wasn’t for your influence, if you weren’t part of the equation, the team or the person, or the group, wouldn’t be able to get to a certain place without you. “Those are some high stakes,” he added.

2. Leaders rally people to a better future.

Leadership isn’t just about going “somewhere” together, it’s about advancement and growth and improvement, he said: “’We’re here but there’s a better place…You want to be inspired to go somewhere because there’s a better ‘something’ out there. I think it’s incumbent on a leader to get people to feel that way. And if you’re not, do you really mean anything? Or have you just got a fancy title?” he said.

3. Leaders galvanize people to want to do what must be done.

“There’s this sense of ‘ought-ness’ [as you you ‘ought’ to do it]. We can’t help but go do this together,” explained John.

The best leaders make you feel the right thing is to be on their team, joined in on the effort for something better.

It’s safe to say that after John spoke, many of the leaders who attended were reflecting on questions he suggested that we consider:

• Am I really leading?
• Are people going where we want to go as an organization?
• Are my people excited and fired up about it?
• Do they feel they are part of the equation—on the quest for a better future?
• Do they know where you are going, why you are going there and what they can do to advance the cause?

I don’t know about you, but hearing certainly spurs me to become a better leader.