Leaders: Try a Look in the Mirror

This is a shout-out to two of my favorite authors, whom I have yet to meet, and to my new friend Rob,* a leadership expert in his own right. These three men have taught me a few lessons I think you'll find of value as well.

The authors are Jim Collins of Good to Great fame, and John Maxwell, scribe of the mega-bestselling The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. If you haven't read these two books... um, let me encourage you to do so. Maybe they'll even change your career as they have mine.

I've been a student of leadership literally my whole life. My father was an accomplished executive turned management consultant and an extraordinarily charismatic figure, who began tutoring me in leadership from as early as I can remember. If it seems odd to you for a father to coach his 3-year-old son on the ways of the leader while fishing for sunnies, it was perfectly natural to my Dad. It's just what we talked about.

So fast forward about thirty-five years. The little fisherman grew up to found his own company, a private language school in Boston that sent teachers to some of the most respected area businesses. And, using a lot of the lessons picked up from those talks with his father plus many more besides, the company was thriving. We brought in a professional CFO who helped us value it at $10 million, and we prepared to sell part of it in order to finance even-more rapid growth.

...And instead of going through with it, Jane and I moved to Florida, and I focused my energy on my speaking career and nonprofit interests. We left the school on autopilot, and roughly eighteen months later we wrapped up our last class, graduated our last group of students, and... that's it. No more Coiné Language School.

I want to thank Jim Collins for that decision. You see, in reading Good to Great, I realized I was a Level 4 leader: effective, good even, but not the Level 5 I needed to be in order to bring our company into the Fortune 500 some day.

I needed to improve myself if I was ever going to get where I truly wanted to go. And running a small business 100 hours a week wasn't going to give me the latitude to reflect and grow as I required. I was already burning myself out, and I had only just begun.

That's my lesson from Jim Collins, one any leader needs to embrace. Are you a Level 5 leader? Because if you're not, you've got some work to do. (See why you need to read his book?)

I'm currently rereading John Maxwell's classic for a small book club I joined, and so I'm learning all sorts of vital lessons from him, many more than just the 21 he claims on the cover. But here's the most important one I'm taking away from his book at the moment: he didn't really begin to master leadership until he was fifty. Sure, he practiced leadership all his life, as I have. But he wasn't the expert we all needed him to be until he'd been leading in a professional sense for about thirty years.

That's a relief. I'm 43, and all my life I've put myself under tremendous pressure to be excellent now. But I've got seven years if I want to match the best in the business. John Maxwell's openness and insight has given me the gift of going a bit easier on myself. Ahhh. It feels nice.

All of which brings us to Rob. Rob is exactly my age, but unlike me, he's pursued a career of sales and leadership within enterprise organizations. He is vice president of one such company now, with a solid reputation and some talented followers and other leaders on his team. And the thing about Rob is, this man lives and breathes applied psychology. What I need to observe and ponder, Rob can take a quick glimpse at and nail cold. My impression is that he's been working at this for a long time, but he's a natural nevertheless.

Rob has been kind enough to help me hone my skills - yes, even business authors need career-coaches. And after only a short while working together, he pegged me as an authoritarian. Not a Nazi, mind you, but perhaps still too much of a top-down, my-way-or-the-highway leader. (The way I manifest this now is something like this: "Based on what I've learned from the best in the business world, this is my advice. Take it or leave it.")

Busted! Guilty as charged.

I can't stand authoritarian leadership in others; I've been railing against it in print and in front of audiences for years now. Top-down leadership is 20th Century, it's inefficient, and it's bad karma: it isn't Savvy Capitalism at all. So it's time I redoubled my efforts to leave that part of myself behind.

What can you learn about your own career as a leader from this post? A couple of things, I think.

1. Read Good to Great, and really focus on Collins' treatment of the five levels of leadership. As part of this exercise, it is imperative that you evaluate yourself according to this scale. What level would you say you find yourself at now?

2. Give yourself some time. Even if you're over 50, that wasn't John Maxwell's point. You shouldn't wait to become a leader - leadership is something that requires constant doing. But don't be so hard on yourself. Give yourself time.

3. Look at yourself frankly, and probably uncomfortably. We don't truly learn until we move far out of our comfort zone. Unfortunately, we humans are also famous for self-deceit. So do what I did, and ask a friend you respect what (s)he thinks of your leadership style. Chances are, you aren't going to find as remarkable a mentor as I've found in Rob. But any wise eye is better than just your own.

Let me know how you do. Or if you've already gone through this process, how did it go for you? My guess is, at least in my own case, this is a process I'm likely to repeat and refine forever. ...Though hopefully it will get less painful with repetition.

*"Rob" is a pseudonym.