Advice from Emerson Spartz, founder of Spartz Media, and Scott Gerber, founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council.

Humble leaders are in charge, yet open to asking for help. They’re human, but respected.

Leaders who value humility are the ones other people want to follow.

This was a lesson I observed while listening to Denes Kemény, president and head coach of the Hungarian national water polo team, speak at a recent leadership conference in Budapest. Under Kemény’s leadership, the national team has won three Olympic gold medals. Water polo, as I learned, is Hungary’s claim to sports dominance and that makes Kemény a national icon, the equivalent of Duke basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski.

While Hungary is now a democracy and embraces free market economics, vestiges of autocracy remain prevalent in many organizations. The person at the top is the chief decision-maker; distributive decision-making is not the norm. And in this regard, Hungary is not unique. Such top down leadership is standard practice in most governmental organizations both abroad and here in the United States.

So when a leader who as revered as Kemény speaks, as he did, of the leader’s need to be humble, listeners take notice. He talked movingly about his appointment as a manager of the team, but said he was not the team’s leader until he had proven that he was worthy of being trusted and followed. Humility is integral to the development of that earned trust.

Humility, as I have said many times, is not something taught in business schools but it may be one of the most powerful attributes a leader can utilize. But leaders who do not readily accept it may not always be to blame.

What is important to understand is that very often leaders fear humility. I find this is especially true in autocracies where a leader is expected to “know it all and do it all.” A leader who is not in total command of facts as well as the levers of power may be viewed as one not worthy of respect. So leaders who act with excessive bravado, even when in over their heads, are doing what is expected of them.

Sadly they view humility as a sign of weakness. They fail to understand that the humble leader is one who can open the door to improved levels of followership. Humility is integral to “Level 5″ leadership, a term that Jim Collins uses in his seminal book, Good to Great, to describe those leaders who not only guide but inspire their organizations to achieve superior results.

Keep in mind, a humble leader is fully in charge. She doesn’t back down from challenges or fear adversity. She is the one to whom others defer when tough decisions must be made. She is respected. What distinguishes her is perhaps a sense of openness. She is candid, and self-aware. That is, she knows what she can do, and what she can’t. Humble leaders surround themselves with people who are encouraged to speak up, especially when they have alternative points of view. Humble leaders are so self-assured that they are willing to seek help when necessary as well as to step up to big challenges that arise.

When a leader expresses humility it opens the door for greater levels of understanding and productivity. “Do you wish to rise?” asked St. Augustine. “Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.”

Humble leaders are those that others not only want to follow but enjoy following because of strong leadership as well as strong humanity.

With smart planning, you can create sales spikes throughout the year. Here’s how one store does it.

The retail world’s biggest challenge is the calendar. No matter what your business, you probably know that the period between “Black Friday” (the day after Thanksgiving) and Christmas Day is a retailer’s most important sales window.

So how can retail businesses redistribute their revenue spikes? During the annual shareholder’s meeting for Berkshire Hathaway, held earlier this month in Omaha, I spoke with Adrienne Fay, director of marketing and advertising for Borsheim’s–a Berkshire-owned jeweler and one of the most successful single-location jewelry stores in the U.S.

She passed along some of the insights that have helped Borsheim’s create a “second Christmas”–a separate sales spike that comes alongside the annual Berkshire meeting.

Leverage real-world events. Go beyond spring or fall sales: Annual festivals, sporting events and celebrations can all bring people (read: shoppers) together. Omaha has the Berkshire Hathaway meeting; Louisville, Kentucky, has the Derby; Indianapolis has the Indy 500, and Lincoln, Nebraska, has every Cornhuskers home game. These special events boost normal traffic for short windows. Use those other events as your springboards for maximizing retail revenues.

Get your staffing right. Borsheim’s figured out early that even a few minutes of extra waiting for service or checkout had a big impact on total revenues. Make sure you are staffed for speed; your customer’s buying attention is a precious commodity. Don’t be “penny wise and pound foolish” by not having enough staff on hand.

Plan for security. People need to be safe, with environments controlled and your inventory secure. Make certain you have planned for the safety of people and assets.

Watch the weather. Events are strongly impacted by weather. Make certain you don’t leave everything up to luck: Have outdoor tents and space for people to be inside during bad weather moments.

Create comforts. Monitor the temperature and crowds, and be sure you can provide food, drink, and restrooms. Details matter; you want to encourage people to take their time.

Be creative. Sales prices and promotions may not be enough to keep people on site, so think theatrically to get people to stay longer and return frequently. At Borsheim’s, Warren Buffett himself plays ping-pong in the store against an Olympic champion. Be creative to pull the attention from the event itself to the shopping event.

Plan carefully. To smooth out the rough spots in the retail calendar, build your annual plan around these secondary sales opportunities. If you build a very active model for maximizing each event, you can change your revenue trajectory.

Fay told me that Borsheim’s “second Christmas” is bigger than their regular Christmas selling season. That is unheard of in the jewelry business.

After having seen the event, however, it is easy to see why that is true–because the company designs it that way, with every detail buttoned down to make the event a retail revenue maximizer.

Since when does a mea culpa deserve praise? JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon shows how low the leadership bar can go.

If you watch certain financial news shows you’d think that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is a genius. Even after a $2 billion dollar loss at his company due to risky, trading “stupidity” (his words), many who have opined on this situation framed the negative news with similar caveats:

“If there is one guy you want at the head of this, it’s Jamie Dimon.”

Or, “Jamie Dimon is the smartest financial guy out there right now and he’ll get this fixed.”

This incident is just the latest example of how the current business culture has quietly lowered our expectations of leadership.

The lowering of the bar

There’s something to be said about a leader who can self-confidently offer up a “straight talk” version of a mea culpa. Our culture especially likes to identify these kinds of executives as special, because they’re not afraid to take it on the chin. And sure enough, Dimon acknowledged that the bank made a “terrible, egregious mistake.”

But there’s a serious problem when a CEO’s self-confidence becomes more important and valuable than a real analysis of his company’s competence. The praise Mr. Dimon has received as a straight-talker sheds light on the troubling fact that many people are willing to look past actions and judge CEOs positively if they believe their intentions and information are honest.

Is this because the American public has come to expect leaders to respond with evasiveness, denials, and finger pointing instead of transparency? Is the bar so low that simply admitting a screw-up earns a CEO an A+ for performance?

Look past the salesmanship

Real operational leadership is not about confidence and presentation skills. While those may make executives feel better, that’s really just salesmanship.

Disciplined leadership in a company requires deep culture-, people-, and process-building to bring about higher performance. And performance, by the way, should go well beyond profitability and include not just mitigation of risk but also ethical and responsible business standards to which all employees are held. Ethical and responsible business should extend outside of the organization itself and be aligned into places such as supply chains and partnerships.

The new bar

American CEOs need to be seen as vital contributors to their businesses and the society in which they function. They must regain their position as stewards of the public trust. It’s time to raise the bar to a place where the baseline for CEOs starts with transparency, honesty, and technical expertise. These qualities should no longer receive praise as “special;” they should be the barrier to entry for any CEO.

In the case of JPMorgan Chase, I’m sure now the debate around banking regulation and what to do next will heat up. It’s my belief that we cannot look simply at regulations but must also address the culture of expectations for our business leadership.

As the CEO of my own business, I hope for the sake of business culture that Mr. Dimon doesn’t just use words to tell the world that everything is going to be alright. I hope he demonstrates proper operational leadership in order to do the hard work of ensuring that his culture is transparent, ethical, and quick to remove destructive personalities, policies and actions that put the public at risk. If he can set that example, then perhaps we’re one step closer to a leadership culture in which responsible actions speak louder than promises or words.

It won’t get you anywhere to gloss over the challenges of a new business venture. Three reasons why.

Every day business leaders launch challenging, often risky, initiatives. We do so because that’s how to get ahead, innovate, and stretch the organization. But let’s be honest: These projects are always tough, full of unknowns, and highly demanding of the people who will (or won’t) make them successful.

So what do most leaders do when they’re about to launch an aggressive project? They pretend it’s easy. In their desire to allay fears and encourage optimism, they come out with lame phrases like: “This will be fun,” or “It’ll be fantastic when we get there,” or “This could be the making of us.”

This is all very well intentioned but it’s wrong. Why?

It’s not true.

Unless the people working for you are idiots (in which case you have bigger problems) they all know that the project is going to be really, really hard. They can see at least some of the risks and pitfalls, and they’re probably nervous. When you act as if the whole thing is going to be one great picnic, you imply that it’s easy–so you’re either too stupid to see the problems or you’re lying. Both are bad. It’s far better to be honest about just how difficult and scary the project is. That way you can inspire people to grow and develop–something everyone wants to do. And it makes you look like you know what you’re doing.

The project might not pan out.

If you’re building software to an aggressive schedule, you won’t be the first company to miss your ship date. If you’re trying to invent a new product or launch something brand new, just about everything can go wrong. At the very least, the work is going to be difficult. But if you describe it as a cinch, and then it inevitably does get hard, everyone feels stupid and inadequate. They can’t even pull off this simple assignment.

You waste an opportunity.

When you acknowledge upfront that a project is going to be very taxing, completing it will represent a huge achievement, one that can and should be celebrated. But if you position it as “business as usual,” how are your collaborators going to be able to feel the magnitude of their success? Stretch goals are inspiring and rewarding because, when they’re met, everyone can be proud. Illuminate the challenge at the outset and you offer the chance of excitement and reward.

Big challenges–the ones that stretch but don’t destroy people–build businesses and reputation. But they can also boost morale and engagement if you’re frank about how tough, but exciting they’re going to be. Nobody was ever inspired to climb Everest on the grounds that it was a walk in the park.

Trust is an essential part of strong leadership. Developing it requires time, patience–and coaching.

Do you trust the people who report to you?

While every leader faces this question, too often the question is framed within the context of right vs. wrong. That is, do you trust your employees to make honest and ethical decisions? In my experience the question of trust should more often be about managerial competence than personal morality.

The trust issue is even more important these days as organizations strive to grow with leaner staffs and fewer resources. The margin for error is slim to none.

Here’s an example of what I mean. You notice that a team that reports to one of our direct reports is having difficulty getting a project done on time and on budget. You speak to your direct report–the team’s boss–but he seems unable to spot the problem. He is too trusting of his team and lets the members do whatever they want to do. Because the team has always performed well in the past he assumes they will figure out how to get their project back on track. The boss has become too trusting, while you as his boss are losing trust in his leadership as well as the capability of the team.

There is no right and wrong in a moral sense here. It is an issue of managerial poor-performance. Too often I have seen managers let such issues slide because they do not want to confront their people or because they “trust” they will get the job done.

Neither is a good solution. A better alternative is a coaching session, and here are some recommendations for how to conduct one.

Get the whole story. Invite your direct report to tell you his side of the story. This is especially true when things go wrong. Sometimes the manager is clueless; he may be so wrapped up in details that he has lost the bigger picture. For example, he may think he is shepherding the project when it reality he is juggling details and not completing the whole task.

Make suggestions. Ask what the manager will do to rectify the situation. One executive I know makes it a point to teach his people how to ask the right questions at the right time. Such questions are those that challenge assumptions, not in a hostile manner, but in ways that encourage open and honest discussion. Such questions open the mind to alternate ways of thinking.

Gain agreement. Insist on a plan of action. Make certain that it includes specific assignments as well as metrics and milestones, where appropriate. Specificity is essential when it comes to performance improvement.

These action steps, as long as they are backed with strong follow-up, will work but your job as manager is not over. You need to remain vigilant about how your direct report is managing his team. Importantly, you need to find a way to engage this team in ways that enable them to succeed without intense supervision. This means building a value system in which people hold one another accountable for results. When teammates do this, they keep each other engaged. They reinforce their sense of purpose by getting the job done right.

Trust is a bond between individuals or between teams and their supervisors. It can never be expected, nor imposed. It is earned through example and reinforced through success as well as recognition. Vigilance to trust is an essential component of leadership.

Surprise: New figures out of the Census Bureau show that the rate at which Americans are starting new businesses is at a record low.

With Facebook’s billion-dollar acquisition of Instagram and impending IPO things sure seem fizzy in Silicon Valley, leading to a whole lot of speculation about whether we’re in a tech bubble. There are compelling arguments on both sides of the debate, but there’s one thing no one can argue with—cold, hard data. And the Census Bureau just released a bunch on start-ups in America.

What’s the headline takeaway? The formation of new businesses has actually fallen to record lows. Start-up mania and the stated ambitions of many to escape their cubicles and found their own ventures aside, Americans overall are starting far few new businesses. New firms made up 13% of all businesses in the 1980s, then fell to just less than 11% in 2006. Now the percentage has dipped sharply with young firms representing just 8% of businesses in 2010, the most recent available data.

That’s bad news for job seekers as well as entrepreneurs, with entrepreneurs creating 40% of all new jobs in the 80s but only 30% recently. “New firm formation has waned since the 1980s. If we are to achieve and sustain a hearty recovery, policymakers, educators and organizations that help entrepreneurs commercialize their technologies must be willing to address every obstacle that stands in the way of new business formation,” said Robert E. Litan, vice president of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation.

The decline in the formation of new businesses may be bad for the economy, but the economy is also clearly bad for the formation of new businesses. States in the West, Southwest and West that were hardest hit by the collapse in the housing market and subsequent recession has seen the steepest declines in the number of new business being formed.

These figures highlight the fact that despite the high-profile rises of the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and the increasingly loud buzz surrounding flashy, fast-growing tech start-ups, meat-and-potatoes small businesses spread throughout the country aren’t being created nearly as often as they once were. Policy wonks and business leaders need to argue out what should be done about that, but for entrepreneurs the takeaway is more immediate—get out there and start more businesses!

Is this decrease in firm formation just due to the terrible economy? What’s your diagnosis?

Linda Jeschofnig’s Hands-On Labs became a fast-growing, multi-million dollar business by selling science kits to high school and college students.

As applications for the 2012 Inc. 500|5000 arrive, we thought it would be worthwhile to shine a spotlight on some of the companies that are vying to appear on our ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. (For more information and to apply, go to here.) One that caught our eye was Englewood, Colorad-based Hands-On Labs.

News of ambitious online distance learning initiatives has dominated headlines recently. But years before professors and entrepreneurs began offering Stanford and MIT courses for free online, Linda Jeschofnig was promoting distance learning, albeit offline.

Since 2000, Jeschofnig’s Hands-On Labs has been selling LabPaqs, science kits that allow high school and college students to conduct experiments and receive course credit from home. And in recent years, the company has more than doubled its revenue from $2.3 million in 2008 to $5.5 million in 2011.

Jeschofnig’s idea for LabPaqs began in 1993 when her husband Peter was working as a chemistry professor at Colorado Mountain College. He was approached by the school to teach a distance learning chemistry course via video, but wanted a way for students to be able to carry out the experiments themselves rather than just watch him.

“We firmly believe in the importance of doing science to learn science and the necessity of tactile experimentation,” Jeschofnig says.

So she, a former CPA, took her husband’s courses, familiarized herself with the field, and began devising a product that enabled safe, hands-on experimentation from remote locations.

The first product, called a Chem Kit, was rolled out in 1994 and was so successful that Linda says students who used it learned more than those in traditional classroom settings.

“When a student is doing their lab work at home, they have to do every step of every lab themselves,” she says. “It’s not a passive experience. Our students tend to do a bit better than those who are taking their labs on campus.”

As distance learning grew during the late ’90s, the Jeschofnigs used their connections in the education sector to make kits specialized to other science disciplines. And in 2000, she turned her products into Hands-On Labs, a business she ran singlehandedly from home.

Sending hazardous materials like hydrochloric acid and cobalt nitrate made finding a manufacturer and liability insurance difficult. But once those obstacles were overcome, Hands-On Labs underwent explosive year-to-year growth selling mixable chemicals and dissectible animal eyes.

In 2002, Hands-On Labs had $8,600 in sales. Two years later, that number had risen to $316,000. By 2005, sales nearly doubled to $600,000.

The company grew so quickly that Linda was forced to retire from teaching business in 2005 so she could devoted herself to the company full-time. The following year her company recorded more than $1 million in sales.

Employment has risen from four workers in 2007 to 48 today, and Linda projects $7.3 million in sales this year.

Linda is not worried about advancement in online distance learning education hurting her business. If anything, she is expecting it to foster continued growth.

“To genuinely learn science concepts, you have to experience them,” she says.