Introduction
They were words I would never forget: “John, I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing, I didn’t know where we were going, and I certainly didn’t know how I was helping us get there.” Years later, I still replay this moment often. It serves as a poignant reminder from a former team member that leadership is not a blind pursuit. This is precisely where the idea for this book began.
The opportunity to transition from a sales role to running a division within the company presented itself to me in 2014. The new role came with the added responsibility of managing other people. After just one year, frustration set in. Like all young, hungry, and eager professionals, I had grandiose ideas and expectations, most of them revolving around my impact on the people I worked with. Much to my surprise, these expectations for my direct reports were not being met, and my influence on these individuals was minimal. I was stuck in quicksand with no immediate relief in sight. So, I did what an inexperienced leader would do: I made changes to the team.
As I prepared to deliver the unfortunate news, I was far from confident. I wondered, was this the quick fix that would catapult my team to success? Was there more to leadership than hiring, firing, and barking out orders? One of the hardest things I have ever done, I delivered the news to my now ex–team member without much confidence. I was utterly crushed by her aforementioned response.
As she left my office, her words made it clear that the problem was not my team, their drive, skills, or even personalities. It was in me and how I was leading.
Be it fate or divine intervention, I have zero doubt that this moment in my life was predetermined; in it evolved my mission to develop myself as a leader, and from then on I kept the words of author and Navy SEAL Jocko Willink close to my head and my heart: “There are no bad teams, only bad leaders.”
Soon after this moment in 2014, I founded the company LearnLoft, a business whose mission would be to turn professionals into leaders and create healthier places to work. It started with a few blogs on LinkedIn to share my leadership struggles, which quickly became a weekly routine and began to garner the interest and attention of thousands of readers.
In those early blogs, I felt like a real imposter helping other people become better leaders when I had barely done it successfully myself. To help grow my own knowledge around the topic of leadership, I started a podcast called Follow My Lead. The podcast’s purpose was to transfer stories and best practices of today’s leaders to the leaders of tomorrow, and that’s exactly what it did. Much like the blog, the podcast gained a fast following because of the incredible leaders who agreed to come on the show and share their experiences. The weekly practice of interviewing, editing, and pulling out the best lessons for the weekly blog not only caused my confidence as a leader of my own team to skyrocket but laid the foundation for the book you are about to read.
Since the beginning of that journey, my writing has been read by more than 7 million people on LinkedIn, Inc.com, Thrive Global, Training Industry Magazine, Ragan, and CNBC Money. Because of this traction, I was fortunate to be named a “Top Voice in Management & Workplace” by LinkedIn in 2017. The Follow My Lead podcast has been downloaded by more than 500,000 listeners, and 40,000 readers subscribe to my weekly leadership newsletter. The writing and the podcast led to thousands of opportunities to help individual managers become leaders through a virtual instructor-led training program called the Ultimate Leadership Academy, as well as partnering directly with organizations to help improve their employees’ leadership skills at every level of their company. I share this with you not to impress you, but to impress upon you that I have always felt as if I was learning and applying right along with my readers, listeners, and students. I have always been on the front lines leading my own team, trying to help others do the same. I was able to take what I learned from the best leaders in the country and put it into action.
An organization I’ll call Arlington Gas Co. reached out to LearnLoft after realizing there was a dire need in the company for formal leadership training. The organization’s current practice was to promote top performers to positions of leadership as a mechanism to retain talented team members. While this practice isn’t unlike what most companies do, it was not producing quality leaders; on the contrary, these newly elevated managers found themselves inept at leading others. Arlington Gas Co. was drawn to the simple idea exposed by our research of more than 40,000 organizational leaders and hundreds of interviews. The most important job of a leader today is to elevate others. In order to elevate others, leaders need to use high levels of love and discipline.
My first coaching call was with a leader named Chris. Chris spoke very highly of his leadership skills and ability to manage his team. In fact, he let me know immediately that our services were most likely going to be a waste of time, something he had told his supervisors at Arlington Gas when they hired us. But because it was a companywide initiative, Chris had no choice but to participate.
Through our Building the Best (BTB) Leader Assessment, Chris’s team provided feedback about how he was leading. The results clearly showed that Chris’s opinion of himself was vastly different from the opinion his team members had of him. The feedback showed that he was falling short in a number of areas vitally important in leadership. Seeing the forthright commentary from his team was a sobering moment for Chris, and his response foreshadowed the incredible future that he had as a leader. He immediately engaged in our program, making himself vulnerable to the process and the opinions of his team. His willingness to accept criticism allowed him to become one of the best leaders in his company.
I tell this story because of the parallel between it and my own, and our paths to leadership are not unique. Many professionals have been promoted without any formal leadership training because it was assumed they were born with some kind of magical leadership DNA. Which raises the question: Are leaders born, or are they made?
A study completed by the Leadership Quarterly dove into this concept headfirst. It found 26 percent of leadership ability can be attributed to genetics, while 74 percent is learned. Based on this, one may be able to assume that the great leaders of the past that we all know such as Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa, and Dwight D. Eisenhower were most assuredly born with innate leadership skills. Even with such a safe assumption, leaders must set their sights on developing their skills in order to get better.
While it’s clear that leadership skills are primarily learned and developed, leadership in our companies and organizations aren’t in a good place. More money is spent on leadership development than any other area of corporate training, yet recent research by the Brandon Hall Group found that 71 percent of organizations feel that their leaders won’t be able to lead them into the future. If that wasn’t enough, research conducted by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) shows that 60 percent of new managers fail within the first 24 months of taking a new position; 50 percent of executives fail within the first 18 months; and only 23 percent of people feel they are led well in the workplace.
Not only are the statistics gloomy, but choosing to be a leader, and more importantly an effective leader, is almost countercultural at this point. The gig economy has provided opportunities to simply work for yourself in varying service or entertainment industries where it’s more than possible to make a living and only focus on what’s important to you, and you alone. It’s as if everywhere you turn, our culture is telling each of us to do the things that provide immediate gratification. I have news for you, this isn’t leadership. In fact, it’s the opposite of leadership.
My goal for this book is to transfer to you the simple idea that the new model of leading successfully is to elevate others. As someone who has found himself face-to-face with an ugly truth, I want to lay out stories and the research, tools, and personal experiences I have collected for your disposal. This book is meant to be an operating manual in how to Build the Best by focusing on elevating others so you can successfully lead in today’s environment. While I am more convinced than ever that there is no exact way to lead other people, this book describes the best way I know how.
The ideas, examples, and principles conveyed in this book are most applicable for frontline managers who lead a team at work, but leaders in all walks of life can find them helpful. From company executives to athletic coaches, parents, teachers, and beyond, it is my hope that you take to heart a few of my words during your leadership journey.
The book is laid out in four parts. The first part, “Change Your Heart,” is a collection of stories, ideas, and principles to share the real power of leadership and how it’s changing in today’s world. The second and third parts, “Start with the Fundamentals” and “Balance People and Performance,” present a practical guide to put these ideas and principles into practice. The last part, “Never Forget These,” provides some of the most important lessons leaders need in their arsenal to keep them moving forward during the challenging times.
Here we go . . .