Ultimate leadership? Be a good person, become a greater person.
Is Leadership a list of behaviours and skills or a phased evolution? Looking at my own journey, I could see 3 phases so far…
Phase 1: “Be the hardest working person in the room”. That sentence is not mine, it belongs to The Rock, but I hope Dwayne does not mind me borrowing it. At the beginning of my career, I worked hard at “making myself”. I didn’t have a silver lined start but I had intelligence and stamina and that gave me an edge. I am a competitive person, and I’ve been always compelled at excelling at everything. I was valedictorian in most of my classes, I played basketball at competitive level and I have had consistent high scores at work. Every time I’ve done something, I’ve gone for the win. This is the phase when at times I thought I was invincible, when I won many awards and saw my career advance faster than expected. It was also the time when failures hurt me so deeply that I would loose sleep, cry on my way back from work and be a zombie to my family if I was worried about some project.
As thankful as I am for that start… It was later on that I understood that this approach would not take me to phase 2.
The learnings I got from phase 1 were:
- Work Life Balance matters. My kids matter, my husband matters, my body matters… having time to cherish my family and friends and to do sport is a must.
- Companies don’t owe you anything. If you missed your baby’s first steps because you were travelling, is your own fault. Don’t try to put that into some kind of mental bank. Its never your boss or the company’s fault and you’ll never be paid for that, nor it will earn you a promotion.
- You are only as good as your last campaign. Keep evolving, don’t have past awards in display… they would only tell you that you were good at that particular time.
Phase 2: “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.” This one is from Michael Jordan. Perhaps I was great at some stuff but I didn’t get closer to greatness until I fully understood that I was going to be as good as my team. So, in that following stage I learned what it meant to lead “from behind”. I became very protective of my team and I devoted most of my time at ensuring that my department was able to progress and that my people were happy.
The learnings from this phase were:
- If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, take others with you. Let go, if you need to control everything… you’ll loose control for sure.
- Progress is better than perfection. I am a perfectionist, so I needed to learn managing myself at giving enough space for teams to move forward.
- Corporate progression is not a ladder, looks more like a monkey gym. You’ll need to make some side steps for your own learning, maybe even change companies, challenge yourself to improve.
- Give the why, ensure the what… but let the how to your team. Be clear on the goal but bend on the plan to give room for others to build with you.
- Learn and unlearn constantly. Now you that you are tasked to make greatness on others, it is key for you to be at the forefront. Keep hungry.
Phase 3: “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything”. Okay, this one is from Colin Kaepernick and it was made famous by Nike… this line inspires me at so many levels. It gives me courage when I feel weak, it grounds me, it makes me believe that I can make change, it humbles me and it makes me want to fight. It makes me wish to be a better person and it liberates me from the fear of failure.
I still don’t have the learnings on this one yet. But I can say that this is fuelling my day, I am now in a position where I can impact big and small things and that is an amazing gift. We can all make change. Small things could be each and everyone of our daily interactions… a leader’s impact on people’s wellbeing is massive and that’s the daily pressure that must be hosted in your heart. Bigger things matter too, because they are the ones that can truly change the world. Making big changes to big things is the ultimate goal of leadership. From company culture to planet impact. The sum of changes can steer us all into a better collective place, a revolution can start from the top but also from the bottom, is the sum of actions what will ultimately create the change: the greatness of everyone can make impact at a greater scale and a leader can light that fire.
However, if you want to task yourself with a big change in something big… the bigger impact hardly ever comes risk free. This is why this step feels more intimate, it needs to connect with your inner-courage and must matter a lot to you because it may mean “risking everything”. If you see leadership as a force for good, don’t stop until you feel the fear. My kids have been in competitive ski for years and the terror of watching them launch themselves at an impossible speed no matter the mountain conditions, has giving me amazing learnings. If they wanted to make a good timing, they needed to forgo self preservation for that minute or two. Greatness requires courage. So, if you are going to take that ultimate leadership step… may be worth making it worth it. Making it for goodness sake may just be the fire needed to make phase 3 count.
