CHAPTER FIVE
THE DISCIPLINE OF COMPETENCE

“Leaders are people we as followers want to regard with awe as the fullest flowering of our own possibilities.”

—Gail Sheehy

Top leaders and successful people in every area of life are those who have committed to excellence in their chosen fields. They have developed the discipline of always doing a good job, no matter how much longer it takes, or how difficult it turns out to be. The payoff is that happy, successful people are recognized as very good at what they do.

Perhaps the most important part of your personality, and the foundation of your happiness, is determined by your level of self-esteem. Your self-esteem is defined as “how much you like yourself.” It is how much you consider yourself to be valuable and important that determines the quality of your inner life. The more you like yourself, the more confidence you have. The more you like yourself, the more you will like others, and the more they will like you and be open to being influenced by you. The more you like yourself, the bigger goals you will set, and the more you will persist in the achievement of those goals.

Your level of self-esteem is the control valve on your performance. It determines how happy and effective you are in every part of your life.

The Roots of Low Self-Esteem

Many people, as the result of destructive criticism and a lack of unconditional love in childhood, grow up with low levels of self-esteem and self-confidence. These deficits hurt their happiness and performance in adult life. Louise Hay wrote, “The root of most unhappiness is the feeling that ‘I’m not good enough.’” It is deep feelings of inadequacy and inferiority that hold people back more than any other factors.

Fortunately, the flipside to this inadequacy on the coin of self-esteem is called “self-efficacy,” or how competent and capable you feel you are in a particular area. The good news is that the better you become at any skill, the more you like yourself. And the more you like yourself, the better you perform and the more effective or efficacious you become at whatever you do.

Resolve to Be the Best

One of the most important decisions you make in your career is to “be the best” at what you do. Resolve to do your work in an excellent fashion. Decide today to be in the top 10 percent in your industry, both personally and in your business.

When I was in my twenties, an older executive told me one day about the 80/20 rule. He said that the top 20 percent of people in any field earn 80 percent of the money in that field. I had never heard this “Pareto Principle” before. The idea both encouraged and discouraged me. It encouraged me because it was motivational and aspirational. It made me want to get into the top 20 percent myself. But this revelation also discouraged me. I had not graduated from high school and had worked at laboring jobs for several years. I had never really been very good at anything.

Then I learned two things that changed my life. First, I learned that everyone in the top 20 percent had started in the bottom 20 percent. I learned that everyone who is good in any field was once poor in that field.

The second thing I learned was that all business skills are learnable. You can learn any skill you need to learn to achieve any business goal you can set for yourself or your company. No limits. Remember, leaders are made and not born. And they are self-made, through work on themselves, through personal development. Your job is to set excellence in your field as your goal, and then to work toward it until you achieve it.

Here is another discovery: anything less than a commitment to excellence is an acceptance of mediocrity. It seems that mediocrity—being in the bottom 80 percent of people or companies in any field—is the “default setting” on most individuals and organizations. Mediocre performance takes place automatically in the absence of a 100 percent do-or-die commitment to excellent performance of your work.

Leaders Commit to Excellence

One of the greatest motivators in the world of work is the commitment to excellence by the top people in any organization. Companies that are recognized as quality leaders in their fields attract and keep the best people. Excellent companies have high morale. People like to brag that they work for a company that is known for excellent products and excellent services.

As the leader, getting everyone to commit to excellence, as well as leading by your own example of excellent work habits, is one of the most powerful and important contributions you can make. The starting point in developing the discipline of competence, of excellence, is for you to select the specific areas and tasks where excellence is most important in generating higher sales and profitability.

Fortunately, determining this starting point is not complicated. You can break each job, including your own, down into about five to seven key result areas, seldom more. You can then give yourself a grade of 1 to 10 in each area to determine how good you or others are at the most important things you do. Evaluating where you are is the starting point of personal and business improvement.

The admission of weakness in a key result area is actually a sign of strength. It is only when you can admit that you are not sufficiently good in a particular skill area that you can begin to improve in that area. It is only then that you can learn how to make the most valuable contribution possible to your business. It is only when you admit that you could be better that you can learn and grow toward the fulfillment of your true potential.

Learn New Skills, Improve the Old

Peter Drucker wrote, “The only skill that will be important in the twenty-first century will be the skill of learning new skills. All else will eventually become obsolete.”

In their book, Competing for the Future, Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad pointed out that every business is built on core competencies, as is the career of every executive. They defined core competency as a skill that the individual or organization did especially well in comparison to others and was essential to the success of the business. The key question they asked was, “What core competencies in skill and execution will you have to have in five years to be a leader in your industry?”

Whatever your answer to that question, you should begin immediately to develop, hire, or buy these competencies before your competitors do.

Strive for Personal Excellence

Striving for excellence is necessary for both the company and for you as an individual. Core competencies are the foundation of business success and of business and personal excellence. The axiom today is, “Whatever got you to where you are today is not enough to keep you there.” Whatever the reasons for your success today, you will have to be doing things much better one year from now if you want to survive, much less grow in your industry.

Start with yourself. Ask the key question that can most help you move ahead: “What one skill, if I was absolutely excellent at it, consistently, would enable me to make the greatest possible contribution to my business?” Ask this question of yourself regularly. Encourage each person who reports to you to ask and answer this question. Then ask it of your company overall: “What one skill or competence, if we were absolutely excellent at it, would most help us increase our sales and profitability?”

“Our only real competitive advantage is our ability to learn and apply new skills faster than our competitors.”

—quotation from a top executive

“Excellence is not a destination; it is a way of life.”

—Aristotle

“The quality of your life will be determined by your commitment to excellence, regardless of your chosen field.”

—Vince Lombardi

Resolve today to be the best at what you do personally, and then resolve to be the best in every area of the business that is important to your customers. Nothing will be more effective in helping you to rise to the top of your field and to become an excellent leader than for you to develop a reputation for excellence in everything you do.

Continuous Learning Opens Every Door

The key to the development of competence is continuous learning: your commitment to keeping current in your field, and devoting time every day, every week, to maintaining and upgrading your knowledge and skills. A simple three-part formula can help you get on top and stay ahead of the other people in your field. It involves reading, listening, and taking additional courses and training.

Read Daily

First, make a decision to read in your chosen field for 30 to 60 minutes each day, preferably in the morning. It is said that reading is to the mind as exercise is to the body. By reading 30–60 minutes each day, along with underlining and making notes while thinking of how you might use this new information, you actually strengthen your mind and increase your intelligence. Reading one book per month will put you in the top 1 percent of business people working today. Reading 30–60 minutes per day will translate into about one book per week, or about 50 books per year. To earn a PhD at a leading university requires that you read and synthesize the content of 30 to 50 books, which means that reading 30–60 minutes each day actually earns for you the equivalent of a PhD in your field each year.

Here is a question: Do you think that by continually upgrading your skills in this manner, by earning the equivalent of a PhD each year, you would greatly affect your ability to get results and improve your income?

Over the years, I have given this advice to many thousands of people. Without exception, the people who take this advice come back and tell me that it has transformed their lives. They have gone from rags to riches; from junior employees to presidents of their organizations; or from struggling to great financial success by the simple exercise of reading and learning and growing each and every day throughout their careers.

Listen to Educational Audio Programs

The second part of continuous learning is for you to listen to educational audio programs as you move around. Instead of listening to music as many people do, download audio courses produced by experts in your field and listen to them whenever you have spare moments. For many years I advocated listening to audio programs in your car, and I still do. But today, most people listen to audio on their iPhones or MP3 players, and you can do the same. According to the University of Southern California, by listening to educational audio programs as you drive from place to place, you can get the educational equivalent of almost full-time attendance at the university.

An even greater benefit comes from audio learning, however. When you take an academic course at a university, most of what you learn is theoretical and difficult to apply to the real world. When you listen to an audio program, much of what you hear on the recording is proven, practical, and immediately actionable. And if it is not, you either jump forward in the program or discontinue it altogether. You don’t waste a minute learning anything you cannot use immediately to improve your life or work.

Take Seminars and Workshops

The third area in which you can engage in continuous learning is attending seminars and workshops given by experts in your field. You can learn more in one or two days from an expert than you might learn by yourself in 10 or 20 years, if at all. Jim Rohn said, “It’s not the cost of the book or the course that counts, it’s the cost of not having that information that you must consider.”

Deliberate Practice

In Geoff Colvin’s best-selling book Talent Is Overrated (2010), he reports on the research studying the people who eventually got to the top of Fortune 500 corporations. The researchers began by assuming that these superstars were people who, from an early age, were clearly more intelligent and ambitious than the average person.

What they found was quite the contrary. Everyone seems to start off very much the same at the beginning of their working lifetime. But the people who got to the top of their fields used a method that the researchers called “deliberate practice.” At each stage of their careers, they would identify the one skill that could help them the most at that time; they would then focus single-mindedly on developing that skill. They would read the books, listen to the audio programs, and take the courses necessary to master that skill. They would keep working in this area until people started to compliment them on how good they were. At this stage they would then move on to the development of the next skill that could help them the most at that time. They did not try to learn 100 things at once. They learned their craft of management and leadership one skill at a time. And you can do the same.

Continually ask yourself, “What one skill, if I was absolutely excellent at it, consistently, would enable me to make the greatest contribution to my company?” If you don’t know the answer to this question, go and ask your boss. Ask your coworkers. Ask your friends and mentors. But you must know the answer, and you must be working on it all the time until you master that skill.

One Skill Away

Sometimes you may be only one skill from a major breakthrough in your career. Sometimes you may be only one skill away from dramatically improving the quality of your life, your work, and your business. Earl Nightingale said, “Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or ideal.”

When you set a goal to become excellent in a particular skill area, and you begin working toward that goal each day; as you experience success, you experience a continuous feeling of happiness and personal growth. The very act of learning becomes self-motivating. It makes you happy.

Nido Qubein, president of High Point University, says that, “It is competence that leads to confidence.” The better you feel you are at doing your job, the greater your sense of forward motion, and the more positive and confident you become to apply your skills to get even better results.

Leaders are learners. They never stop learning and growing in their fields. They are hungry for new information. They are ambitious to become excellent at what they do. Continuous learning is the foundation of competence, both as a person and as a leader.

Action Exercises

1. Make a decision today to dedicate yourself to lifelong learning. Work on yourself as if your future depended on it, because it does.

2. Identify the one skill that, if you were absolutely excellent at it, would most help you in your current position, and make a plan to develop that skill.

3. Ask successful people around you for recommendations for the best business books they have read recently, and then either buy, order, or download that book immediately.

4. Set aside a certain time each day to read, study, and upgrade your knowledge and skill in your field, then discipline yourself to do it each day.

5. Encourage your staff to identify the key skill areas where they need to learn and grow, and then provide the time and resources they need to develop those skills.

6. Listen to educational audio programs rather than music from now on; download them onto your smartphone so you have them instantly available.

7. Resolve to attend two or more seminars or workshops on key subjects in your field each year. Then apply what you learn immediately when you return.