Everything Rises and Falls on Leadership
Leadership is Influence. Nothing more and nothing less.
Self-Expression is the Essence of Leadership.
Leadership is a CHOICE.
Leadership is a SERVICE.
Leadership is an ART.
Ownership:
Jocko Willink wrote a book called extreme ownership. The takeaway - take responsibility for everything that impacts you or your team’s mission. John Maxwell, another famous leadership coach in his book 21 Laws of Leadership states that “everything rises and falls on leadership.” This first tenet enforces the value of taking ownership and not passing off blame. This forces an underlying belief that “if it’s going to be - it’s up to me” which in turn requires us to reject passivity and think differently about solving problems. A great example of this is the following:
The head coach of the Bobcats asked his assistant LB coach to teach a new defensive play. After 3 weeks, the player had still not learned it and the head coach asked the assistant why not. “Coach, he must be stupid or something. I told him every day for 3 weeks what he was doing wrong and he still keeps messing up the same thing. The head coach replied, “you must be stupid if you told him the same thing every day and expected a different outcome.”
It is important to realize that not all things are within our control, but they are within our ‘sphere of influence’. Leaders take ownership of their own growth and development. John Maxwell himself says that we all have a ‘leadership lid’. The law of the lid states that your team or organization will never be greater than your ability to lead. So, from a scale from 1-10, if you are a 6, your team will never be more than a 6.
All the great coaches are on the same page - great teams have great player leaders who take OWNERSHIP of influencing the team to be better every single day and are relentless in developing theirselves.
Influence:
Leadership is influence. Nothing more. Nothing less. Influence is defined as “the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something.” So, your ability to lead is directly tied to your ability to change the behaviors of others. Here is an example:
Johnny is the team captain of the football team that is in the middle of pre-season two-a-days. The team has a standard of sprinting in between drills and encouraging one another during drills, a standard that is not always acted on by the players. He decides to change their behavior first by doing it himself and modeling the way. This affects the behaviors of 4-5 of the other players over the course of the week. The following week, in the huddle, he starts communicating the purpose behind these standards and tells them he expects them to abide by them. This gets another 10-12 players. Finally, to get the rest of the team during the final week of pre-season, he gets some of the other team captains together, and they agree that anyone who does not uphold this standard will have 50 pushups. This decision gets the rest of the team on board.
This example is how an influential player leveraged a number of sources of influence to change behavior that the team believed would make them more successful in the long term. One framework that is very useful to understand this better is from Joseph Grenny of Vital Smarts who identified 6 primary sources of influence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHHIPNKKuXM&t=194s
There are a thousand ways to influence and you need to have the wisdom to know what is necessary in the current situation. Ultimately, understand your strengths and leverage those skills and knowledge to build an environment of high-performance.
Self-Expression
Warren Bennis wrote in his book titled “On Becoming a Leader” that self-expression is the essence of leadership. Self-expression is self-knowledge of who you are, what you want, what your strengths and weaknesses are, skills and talents, how to employ them properly, and know how to communicate them to others in a way that connects with them. A process far easier said than done. The key is awareness - of both yourself and the way the world works. There are two ways to obtain this:
Reflection
Experience
True understanding comes from reflecting on your experience, and the three exercises are useful in this process:
Journaling
Mentorship
Masterminds
Ultimately, the goal should not to become a leader. The goal should be to understand ourselves. The best leaders do not set out to lead but to express themselves fully and freely in the pursuit of something meaningful to them and others. The difference is important as it is the difference between being driven, and seeking power, as too many people do today, and leading, as few people do. The better we understand ourselves and have clarity to our calling in life, the more influential we can be.
Choice
Leadership is a choice. We all have the ability to lead. It is true that some have a higher ‘leadership lid’ than you naturally, but almost 100% of leadership is nurture. You can create yourself to be a great leader if you so choose. This is because you have:
Inherent value
Unique and learned skills or talents
The ability to learn
Science has shown that every single person in the world tries to influence at least 6 people every day. So, regardless if you know it or not, you are trying to influence every day.
Regardless if you are named the manager of an organization or a team captain of a sports team, you make hundreds of decisions per day that is influencing others around you for better or for worse. Those that are intentional about these choices prioritize team over self over the course of time will almost always be seen and recognized formally as a leader of their team.
Service
“The servant-leader is servant first, it begins with a natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first, as opposed to, wanting power, influence, fame, or wealth.” - Robert Greenleaf
As noted earlier, the right motivations exist in the greatest of leaders. Leadership is about serving others and a larger purpose that is bigger than you. A hierarchy of value has to exist:
The team/organization
Your teammates
You
Any other hierarchy won’t work well. When done right, it is difficult but rewarding. It required an immense amount of energy and time that others are not willing to give and to do things that others are not willing to do. For example, as a captain or manager, you have to get outside of your comfort zone almost ALL of the time. This looks like having the courage to have crucial conversations and hold others accountable. Be the first one to arrive and the last one to leave. Literally give energy out to others through encouragement and communication.
What is amazing, though, is that the law of the boomerang exists where the more you give, the more you ultimately get in return. The journey of leadership is hard but rewarding in the end.
Art
Leadership is an art. You and virtually every situation or person you come across is UNIQUE. Just like art, it can be hard to explain but it can easily demonstrated. Just like you a piece of art. When you are in front of a great piece of art, you can FEEL it.
My reason for putting this as the last tenet is that there are hundreds of theories of leadership that have been authored. There are certain principles that we can take as a way to learn how to improve our leadership (such as these tenets), but ultimately, there is no magic style of leadership. Just look at some of the different coaches and managers below and think about how different they are from each other:
Bellichick vs PJ Fleck
Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates
Tony Dungy vs Mike Ditka
Phil Knight vs Brad Stevens
Leadership to an extraordinary degree is a performance art. It is as much about the objective decisions that you make as it is about the emotions, feelings, and inspiration that you provide to others. And it is this that is the art, something that is hard to teach and only something that you can exert through your ability and willingness to express yourself fully.