Introduction
As a leadership teacher and consultant—and as a scratch golfer—one of my most interesting—and favorite—clients is TaylorMade-adidas Golf, the world's leading manufacturer of performance golf equipment.
If you play golf, or at least follow the PGA Tour, you have probably heard of TaylorMade's Performance Center in Carlsbad, California—it's known as “The Kingdom.”
Each winter, many of the world's finest professional golfers visit The Kingdom, usually with their coaches in tow, ostensibly to get precisely fitted for professional-grade metal-woods, irons, wedges, and putters. And The Kingdom offers the latest, state-of-the-art equipment—high-speed digital cameras, launch monitors, lasers, and computers—to do just that. For that task, it is the best (and certainly the most beautiful) such facility on Earth.
But there is another story to The Kingdom—one that I learned only with insider access to watch and study these PGA and LPGA pros and their coaches in action. And what I learned there is the revelation that led to the writing of this book.
You see, these golfers are the very best in their field—professional, play-for-money, dog-eat-dog competitive golf. They are the sports equivalent of Fortune 500 CEOs. The best in their business. And often, when they arrive at The Kingdom, they are frustrated or perplexed with their recent performance. Something has gone wrong with their game, and it is showing up in their scores. This problem may represent only one or two strokes per round—but at the world-class level at which these athletes play this game, that can be the difference between victory and finishing out of the money. A year or two of these kinds of problems and they will lose their playing privileges on the professional Tour and their livelihood will have disappeared.
Inevitably, these players have their own ideas about what they are doing wrong when they arrive—and just as inevitably, those theories are misplaced.
Now, you might imagine (as I initially did) that the first thing these Tour pros and their coaches would do is to head into the lab, hook up to the test equipment, and begin measuring every detail of that golfer's swing and ball flight. But you would be wrong. In fact, what typically happens is just the opposite—and is the lowest-tech first step imaginable: golfer and coach begin by heading out to the range to hit some practice balls.
The first time I saw this I was so astonished that I found an excuse to hang around the range as well, hoping to eavesdrop on this fascinating coaching conversation. And what I heard was truly eye-opening.
What I had expected was that coach and golfer would focus on the problem at hand, analyzing and then correcting, on the spot, the errors the player believed were responsible. Instead, even when the player wanted to address “the problem” as he or she imagined it, invariably the coach politely and deceptively ignored that line of thought and instead insisted that the golfer begin with the most basic fundamentals of grip, stance, posture, ball position, and aim. I had expected to hear pearls of great wisdom; what I heard instead was the same kind of elementary instruction taking place at that moment on municipal golf courses around the country.
What was going on here? These were some of the greatest golfers on the planet, being taught by the most celebrated swing coaches alive. Why were they focusing on fundamentals that these champion golfers must have first heard when they were nine years old? Why, if the golfer thought he or she needed a slight change to their equipment, didn't they just head into the test center and have something fabricated?
But the more I listened, the more I understood what was really going on. I began to appreciate that no matter how talented and successful the golfer, and no matter how strong their opinion about what had gone wrong, most were in fact ill-suited to diagnose their own performance. Why? Human nature. Even the best performers, in any field, will slowly—and imperceptibly—stray away from the fundamentals of their craft. This drift is almost always invisible to them. The human nature part is that losing precision in the fundamentals is exactly the last thing most accomplished people would imagine or will accept as the cause. Instead, left to their own devices, they look elsewhere—mostly to much more complex theories of the cause—and pursue fixes that often do more harm than good. They can't imagine that the cause of the current breakdown could be something so simple, and right in front of them. They can't imagine that they couldn't see it if it were.
Great coaches understand this. They know that the path to a solution often starts with a revisit to those fundamentals—and only then can the confusion be untangled and the problem is properly identified, isolated, and attacked. I can't tell you how many times I've watched these professional golfers, after an hour of a supervised, disciplined return to the basics, begin to hit the ball as well as they ever have, and predictably turn to their coach and say, “That was it. You're a genius.”
Sometimes that solution is as simple as where the ball is placed in relation to the player's feet—an inch or less change that the player, too close to the problem, couldn't see. Sometimes it actually is the length, weight, or lie angle of the club—and then, and only then, the golfer and coach finally enter The Kingdom for some equipment tweaks by the equipment gurus.
As I watched this small miracle occur again and again, it struck me that I was seeing a universal truth—one that could be readily applied to the world of business management and leadership. For thirty years now, we have been inundated with endless new fads and theories about how to be a good leader. In the process, most of us have been exposed numerous times—if only under different names and in piecemeal—to all of the essential truths about leadership.
But, like those world-class golfers, even the best leaders can and do stray from those fundamentals over time—and then regularly misdiagnose the cause of the problems. They need some outside help—a fresh set of eyes—but few know it. And, like athletes, organizational leaders often struggle to see or admit their own failures. They subconsciously believe they can't reveal a weakness in their game, or that the costs to their career and their companies are too great. From there, fear sets in, they turn up the heat on themselves, and they are not inclined to look to coaches or other mentors. Instead, they push on, redoubling their efforts, denying or ignoring the results—and, like those golfers, risk amplifying their errors rather than resolving them. Like the golfer's challenge, these mistakes often occur as a small group of related errors, and then there's a domino effect: one thing leads to another, and this set of issues conspires to confound and confuse the player. It is not obvious how to untangle this new strain of problem born of several fundamentals that are out of tune. At this point, self-diagnosis is a disaster waiting to happen. To paraphrase Albert Einstein's famous quote, we can't solve a problem using the same thinking that created it. Tragically, some leaders, like some golfers, never escape their own thinking and thus don't seek outside support in the midst of this kind of complex, self-generated mess. They are then blindly trapped in a maddening, sometimes desperate effort to find the game they once knew they had.
There is a reason that Ben Hogan's Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf remains a perennial best seller more than five decades after it was written. It is the book that serious golfers regularly revisit to walk and rewalk them through the fundamentals of their sport—the fundamentals that the finest ball striker in the history of the game knew were the essentials to great results.
I've written Unusually Excellent to be that book for business and organizational leadership. I know, from my coaching practice with leaders at all levels, that professional managers in all fields—whether they are just starting out, in the middle of their careers, or facing the legacy they will leave behind—need to revisit the fundamentals of their own leadership practices regularly and systematically, just as athletes do. I've written this book to be the expert coach at their side, watching them work, realigning them back to their center—which made them successful in the past, but from which they have inevitably and insidiously strayed. At this level, there are no tricks, no fads, no conceits, only the enduring touchstones of great leadership.
It is only by returning to these essentials, and newly committing to them again, that we can travel that “last mile” from being good leaders to becoming great ones. The path to that kind of greatness, to becoming an unusually excellent leader, begins right here in the pages that follow—in the Nine Essentials of leadership that can become your private coach. A coach who is always available to remind you and walk you through the fundamentals.
The Five W's (and One H) of Leadership
This is a book for leaders, not about them. It is about the practice of leadership over the course of a long career, not the theory of leadership learned over a weekend. It is not about the introduction of clever new notions of leadership, but about the reassertion of proven precepts. Finally, it is not an introduction to leadership, but an operating manual for all of those who are already engaged as leaders, at any level, whether at the beginning, middle, or end of their careers.
This book is the product of a quarter-century of work as a leader in companies of various sizes, from start-ups to Fortune 100 firms; and over a decade as an investor and board member evaluating and supporting leaders, as a leadership coach to CEOs, and finally as a university professor specializing in the study of leadership. During this time, I have worked in depth with more than a hundred senior leaders, most of them CEOs, and have spent more than ten thousand hours in practice on the subject of organizational leadership.
What all this experience has taught me—and what I hope imbues every page of this book—is that real practitioners of great leadership are successful by mastering a very specific set of essential rules and practices and behaving according to those fundamentals day after day in whatever way the environment or circumstances demand. None of these principles are new—on the contrary, they may be as old as leadership itself—but they are regularly forgotten. And even when they are remembered, they must be constantly tested and updated or they lose their power.
To excel as a leader, you not only must know what these essentials look like, but you must also understand
- How those essentials combine logically in an overall model of leadership
- Why those essentials are so important—and have always been important—in the making of great leaders
- What are the underlying principles of human nature and human interaction they direct and amplify
- When these essentials are to be applied, both situation-specific and over the course of a professional career
- Who are the subjects of these essentials—that is, the people being led—and how their needs are best met and their performance maximized
- Where these essentials are best applied to achieve the maximum impact upon productivity, morale, force multiplication, profit—and, ultimately, reputation
The unfolding of these core principles—there are nine of them—and how they relate to one another form the heart of this book. Though often forgotten or lost in the noise, these core principles, these essentials, never change. Indeed, we can find their echoes in the stories of “unusually excellent” leaders, real and fictional, throughout history—from Odysseus to Henry V to Eisenhower—but they must be regularly rewritten to reflect the changes in context brought by culture, technology, and competition.
My goal in this book is not to teach you these essential skills per se, but to remind you of them. I say “remind” because the odds are very high that you've heard all of them before—but they were buried in the latest leadership or management fad program, or given insufficient attention compared to some other popular “truth”—or worst of all, declared obsolete, or at least anachronistic, in the modern world.
They are nothing of the sort. Rather, they are core human truths tested, refined, and purified in the fires and crucibles of war, empire, survival, and athletic competition. Not only are these principles not obsolete, they may in fact never be obsolete—not as long as we are human beings being led by other human beings. Rather, the real question, the puzzle for each of us to solve, is this: How do we apply these essentials to the unique leadership situation in which we find ourselves?
I'm going to present these nine essential leadership skills—cogently, memorably, and, for the first time, all in one place, in logical harmony with each other. And I'm going to attack each of those lessons from different directions: case studies, psychology, anecdotes and stories, empirical evidence and logical analysis—in the belief that one or more of these will resonate with you and embed this content permanently into the way you manage your career. Finally, I'm going to put these nine diverse rules into their larger context by providing a logical, and unforgettable, taxonomy of leadership—so that you not only understand each of these essentials, but understand how they interact with each other to produce a complete model of applied leadership over the course of a full career.
Can I guarantee that, at this point in your career, you will fully understand or appreciate every concept presented in the pages to come? No. However, I'm reminded of the old adage—“We don't see things as they are, but rather as we are.” You will read this book from where you are in your life as a leader—right now. And you can read it again a year or five years from now, or the night before an important all-hands or offsite meeting with your team—and allow yourself the opportunity to tune-up all the things you know but just needed a friendly reminder of to sharpen your memory in ways that enable your best work. Becoming aware of the subtle difference between you at your best and you at your normal is sometimes exactly what the situation calls for, and can make the difference between something ordinary and something extraordinary.
That said, even the young junior manager in his or her first leadership job will come away from this book having at least been exposed to all of the nine essentials of leadership, positioned in a framework that will resonate with their logical understanding and experience of the world—and will have them in hand when needed. As for the veteran manager, many of the lessons in this book will be a reinforcement of what he or she already knows, perhaps articulated in a powerful new way not seen before. For the veteran, however, the final section of the book will address topics—reputation, legacy, and consequences—that are rarely even spoken of, much less put into the pages of a book. These are the quiet conversations that, until now, successful men and women typically have only with themselves, a trusted mentor, or a spouse. I've decided to take them head-on. And because many veteran leaders only discover—to their dismay—that building a reputation starts at the beginning of a career, not at its end, this book serves as a timely heads-up to young leaders as well.
Leaders Lead
Besides a tendency to ignore the proven lessons of the past, fad leadership theories also usually treat leadership as a kind of tool kit, a grab-bag of predetermined moves that magically appear at the right moment to fit the right problem and can be executed mechanistically.
Nothing could be further from the truth. As I'm going to show you, true leadership is an organic process, as much the product of character as of technique. It doesn't exist in discrete moments, but is made manifest over the course of a career of leading people. And it isn't a single concept, but a phenomenological field—that is, it is composed of actions, ideas, emotions, cultural forces, history, and expectations that exist together in a system. Yes, understanding leadership is a systems understanding—nothing happens in a silo.
You also can't just pull out “leadership technique number four” and swing it at a random problem. For one thing, the theoretical solution is almost always a poor fit to the messy real-life problem you face. Moreover, leaders lead: you can't just pick up a tool and expect it to work on its own; you have to learn how to apply it. To assume that an ambitious manager can attend a seminar on employee motivation and then go back and effectively implement those ideas, is like handing a 4-iron to someone who has never played golf but has watched it on TV, and expecting him or her to hit the ball cleanly through an opening in the trees back to the fairway.
Finally, management challenges, crises—and even opportunities—are not distinct events. There is rarely a precise moment when one can be said to begin; and they are rarely ever fully solved. Instead, they often emerge (as you only discover later) slowly and surreptitiously—until they suddenly burst on the scene, demanding a solution. By the same token, their resolution is almost always incomplete—and what remains unsolved sows the seeds of the next set of challenges, crises, and opportunities.
My belief, confirmed over decades of working with some of the world's top business leaders, is that leadership is enduring, dynamic, and simple in theory but complex in execution; that it is a lifelong or career-long journey of mastery; and that, like other deeply personal commitments of service, there is no particular destination, no end zone or finish line. It is the learning—and the satisfaction in knowing that you are more skilled and effective this year than you were last, and so on, looking forward—that keeps this a game worth playing, and makes the time you'll spend leading a worthy and noble use of your time and energy, and worth the opportunity cost of the alternatives in front of you.
It is in recognition of this continuum that I tend to stay away from using the notion of nine “rules” of leadership and instead use terms like “essentials” and “principles”—because this time-tested wisdom only serves as the ground on which a host of other factors must be deployed to construct short-term solutions and long-term strategies. Put another way, the Nine Essentials of this book are only a framework—albeit a tested and effective one—on which to hang all of the other situational and timely factors that constitute great leadership. These principles are the base from which leaders can tap all of their other faculties, experiences, intuition, and resources to help the organization move forward at the maximum safe rate of speed. However, to get these wrong, or to not honor their place in the solution, is to fall for the temptation of what simply won't work.
The Three Games of Leadership
As you're already discovering—mainly because I tend to use athletic metaphors—I am a huge sports fan and student of athletic excellence. And as the TaylorMade story suggests, as much as I admire great athletes and what they can do, I'm equally impressed by the best coaches and managers.
Just as sports—with its clearly defined rules, competition, heroics, and winners and losers—is a proxy for the larger world, coaching is a specific instance of leadership. Years of preparation, of recruiting, team-building, and training, can go out the window with a handful of poorly planned or poorly executed plays; and the most carefully crafted strategy can be voided by an injury just moments after the game begins.
Great coaches have an astounding skill for dealing with wide spectra of time and experience. When they are building the team, their perspective can extend years into the future. Yet during a game their decisions are made in real time and the impact is measured in minutes or seconds. Similarly, they go many months on a very predictable schedule running workouts and holding meetings—only to find themselves in the chaos of a game, enduring the most unpredictable and stressful work imaginable. And, let us not forget, they constantly live with the knowledge that, though the odds are against their ever being victorious, their customers (fans) expect them to win every game, and they are haunted by the realization that one mistake could end their careers and fortunes.
Coaches and managers are thus continuously tested in the crucible of leadership. As such, to survive, they need to maintain, literally, the ultimate “view of the field.” This expanded view enables them to parse, plan, and prioritize their time, their energy, and their actions in preparation for each game, during the game, and in the game's aftermath.
This means that for them—and for you—there isn't just one, but three fields of play occurring simultaneously as you lead your organization. I believe it is absolutely essential that, as a leader, you are always mindful of these three distinct domains of leadership skills and appreciate that you continuously attend to each.
That's why there are three major sections of this book.
Part One, Credibility, is a matter of character. Leaders are at all times engaged in the process of establishing or earning, affirming or restoring, ruining or fixing, dismantling or cementing their right to lead—their leadership equity, their organizational loyalty.
Ultimately, this right can be exercised only if you have established your credibility with those you ask to follow you—and (if necessary) with those who confer on you the role of leader. On the one hand, although the authority to lead is a structural consequence of hierarchical or positional power granted legally or by decree, over time it is wholly inadequate to achieve the results to which most leaders aspire; the most talented people are never led by authority, and the best effort of the entire organization is at risk in a context of command and control. Credibility, on the other hand, is the sinew that binds teams to leaders, individually and collectively, and ultimately prepares both for the unavoidable tough times that will inevitably strain this relationship.
Credibility can be established by almost anyone for a short period of time. But it can be sustained only if those you lead genuinely trust you—and earning and maintaining that trust ultimately comes down to one thing: your character as a person and as a leader. In the end, as the ancients have taught us for millennia, character is destiny.
Part Two, Competence, is a matter of skill. Leaders are expected to be highly skilled regarding the tasks, processes, conversations, and judgments that create the intended results. The assets and techniques at the leader's disposal are people, strategies, and the management of execution. We expect our leaders to deploy these assets and use these tools skillfully—and in return we offer them our time and talents. And we hold our leaders accountable for their ability to create and increase the value of the enterprise—or at least that part of the organization they lead.
Credibility is the starting line, the “ante” into the game of leadership. However, as an example, we would never allow a doctor to treat us if we did not believe that he or she was, first and foremost, professionally competent, regardless of our affinity for him or her personally. Ultimately, and contrary to common wisdom, that competence trumps how authentic, trustworthy, or compelling we perceive that person to be. Leaders who are real winners attract followers with their credibility; they keep them on the team with their competence. It is only on the field, in the thick of the game, that we also begin to separate how we feel about a leader emotionally and how we experience that leader professionally. In other words, this is where we gain respect for a leader's skills, competencies, and ability to lead the processes and decisions that guide the organization's resources in executing today's operations and tomorrow's strategies. Popularity is nice; respect is essential.
Part Three, Consequences, is the impact we have as leaders on the careers and lives of those we lead. As followers, we are guided by the personal values of our leaders to gradually build an organizational culture—a system of behaviors and rewards aligned with values—that reflects and supports the deepest beliefs of the leader. A leader is always affecting his or her credibility in obvious and subtle ways; so too is that leader also constantly building their inescapable reputation through their actions. It is the outcomes and the subsequent stories of day-to-day real life in the organization that form our opinions and establish our regard for our leaders.
This organizational culture, its accumulation of legends, folklore, and prejudices, leads to legacy—those ideals and values by which we remember our leaders. A leader's legacy is larger than the leader, and in turn creates still more stories and folklore within the organization. Think of the impact of Jack Welch and David Packard as leaders, and how their legacy and the values they established continued to grow long after they passed the baton to their successors.
If leaders can lead in the moment, face-to face with the issues of the day, yet simultaneously hold a deep respect and appreciation for how their actions will be recorded, interpreted, and remembered after they are gone, they will have much more regard for the impact of their decisions, communications, and actions—especially those that have real consequences to the people around them.
The Necessary Nine
Credibility is a matter of character, and earns the right to lead. Competence is a matter of skill, and earns respect. And consequence is a matter of values, and earns reputation. These are the three overarching categories for the nine essentials of leadership. Within each category lie three essential precepts, each linked conceptually to the two others. Here is the full model, as it will be used in this book:
I'll bet that at some time in your education or your career you have seen every one of these essentials. But I'll also bet you've never seen them arrayed like this—nor realized how all of them interact to create a powerful synthesis that is greater than the sum of all of them.
It is this higher plane of leadership—the one that emerges from the virtuous cycle of all of these essentials working together in a consistent manner, over the course of a career—that creates what I've come to call—and have entitled this book—Unusually Excellent leadership.
These Unusually Excellent leaders are rare—perhaps one or two in a hundred. But that doesn't mean you can't be one of them. Talent and aptitude matter, of course. So do timing and opportunity. But I'm convinced that what keeps good leaders from becoming great ones is often just a matter of either not appreciating the need for all of these essentials to be in place, and showing up in their day-to-day leadership behaviors—or, more tragically, realizing it too late. To learn, we must realize and accept what we don't know and begin to seek that knowledge at that moment.
How many talented leaders have lost their credibility early in their careers and borne that stigma ever after? How many executives have proven themselves gifted at execution but not at strategy, and have pulled their organizations down for lack of a plan? And how many otherwise capable leaders have failed to get their organizations to follow because they failed to communicate well enough to enlist them?
You don't have to share that fate. You can be that one in a hundred, that unusually excellent leader. Look again at that chart of leadership essentials. They may be difficult, but they aren't complicated—and there are only nine of them. And I'm here to show you how to achieve each of them.
Every day you waste as a leader not perfecting these nine essentials only makes their accomplishment that much more difficult. So there's no better time to begin than now.
So let's get started. Grab your clubs and let's head out to the range.
