CHAPTER 8

Leadership Is Not a Position

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.

John Quincy Adams

Leadership is not a position. You can’t be assigned or appointed to be a leader. Leadership is not about what your business card says, what your title is, or where you sit on the organizational chart in your company. Leadership is a posture; it is a decision that you want to have influence over others in a positive way.

The Day They Stood Up to the Bullies

David Shepherd and Travis Price did not hold positions of leadership, but in September 2007 they decided to lead. It was a normal first week of school at Central Kings Rural High School in Nova Scotia, Canada, when a student arrived at school wearing a pink polo shirt. Chuck McNeill was a ninth grader, and it was his first day at the school, having just moved to the community. It turned out not to be a very good day. He was bullied mercilessly by a group of twelfth graders who called him gay and told him that if he ever wore a pink shirt again, they would beat him to a pulp. Welcome to the school!

Events like this happen every day in schools around the world, often with grave consequences as evidenced by recent events such as the suicide of a Rutgers University student in New Jersey. According to the Centers for Disease Control, over 4,400 teens commit suicide every year in the United States alone, and students who are bullied are up to nine times more likely to take their life than those who are not bullied. One in four American youth will be bullied during their adolescence, and it usually becomes an ongoing problem after the first incident. A British study suggests that half of teen suicides are related to bullying. That means as many as 2,200 teens may commit suicide in the United States every year because of bullying! According to a report by ABC News, some 160,000 US students stay home every day out of fear of bullying! (That’s just one of the many statistics available on bullying. Some cited in this book come from http://www.bullyingstatistics.org/content/bullying-and-suicide.html.)

At Central Kings High, twelfth graders David Shepherd and Travis Price heard about the bullying incident and decided to act. David later said, “I just figured enough is enough. I figured this had gone too far, someone needs to do something about it. I told Travis we should be the ones to do something, and he agreed.” David and Travis were interviewed a few days later on national television, and the story was reported on CBC. You can read the interview at http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/story/2007/09/18/pink-tshirts-students.html.

They hatched a simple idea: they would go to a local discount store and purchase as many pink T-shirts and tank tops as they could find. Through Facebook and email later that night, they tried to get as many people as possible to agree to join what they had dubbed a “sea of pink.” The next morning, not only did students don the fifty shirts and tank tops David and Travis bought. Almost eight hundred of the one thousand students at the school wore some kind of pink. The boys were overwhelmed with the response.

One of the bullies saw the sea of pink and threw a trash-can in anger, but as David said later, “Not a peep was heard from the bullies after that day.” The story was picked up by the national media across Canada and later overseas. Within a week schools across Nova Scotia were wearing pink, the next week schools across Canada joined in, and within a month schools in other countries started doing so.

Over a decade later the “pink shirt day” movement has spread across the globe and in 2012 the United Nations declared May 4 as Anti-Bullying day. Schools across Canada and elsewhere hold annual pink shirt days, all because two twelfth graders decided to step up and lead. No one appointed them, they were not the chairs of (or even members of) an anti-bullying committee, and they were not the stars of the football team. They simply decided to be leaders. David told CBC News, “We won’t be able to stop all bullying, but if enough of us step up and just do what we can, we can get rid of most of it.” See www.pinkshirtday.ca for more information about the annual event.

You Can’t Not Lead

Not only is leadership not a position, but the truth also is that you can’t not lead. That is, whether you want to or not, you are influencing others. Simply by showing up a certain way in our life and work, each of us creates a ripple even if we don’t intend to.

Try this little experiment. Next time you enter a conversation that is negative, intentionally shift gears and watch what happens. If someone is talking negatively about your company or a coworker or a mutual acquaintance, turn it around and make a positive comment. Watch how the energy shifts. In fact, by saying nothing we are actually taking a leading role without choosing to do so. That is why bullying experts talk about bystanders being a critical element of bullying culture in work or school. Doing nothing thus is a form of leading.

Or try one day to have no influence at all. Simply be quiet on every issue that comes up. Before you know it, people will be pressing you for your viewpoint. Your very silence and desire to have no influence in fact will have influenced the course of the conversation. Remember back to our earlier conversation about yawning; whatever we do causes a reaction.

As parents, we should be acutely aware of how we lead even when we are not trying. Think about those times you suddenly find yourself sounding like your mother or father, even though you said you’d never do that. They were influencing you even when they did not know it.

Since leadership is not a position, it means that each of us can throw punches far above our weight class. We don’t need a title or a position of power to have influence. Of course, claiming we have no influence is a great crutch that can keep us from having to step up. We can say things like, “If they ever give me some real authority around here, let me tell you what I would do.” Well, here is a news flash—you already have authority. You already are a leader. The only question is how are you using the influence that you already have?

One way to get in touch with how you want to be influential is to ask yourself what your intention is every day. That is, in what way do you want to influence others every day, just by the way you show up? Over the years in workshop sessions I have led, I have asked thousands of people to do a simple exercise of stating how they intend to influence others every day. I am always both amazed and inspired by the answers people give. A receptionist in a law firm, for example, told me that her intention was that every person who met her all day long got a “shot of friendliness” so that people felt the world was a friendlier place because they encountered her. The list of intentions is inspiring. Some say they want to bring kindness, others goodness, compassion, energy, courage, or hope. Your position does not limit the way you can influence others. This woman was “only” a receptionist, but she could influence others in a profound way by holding that intention.

What is your intention every day? How do you want to influence others by the way you show up?

The Story behind the Starbucks Frappuccino

Part of stepping up is deciding to lead bigger than the prescribed formal role you have. Your job description may say you have a certain responsibility, but if you want to get ahead, decide to lead bigger than your role says you should.

Here are some of my favorite examples. You probably have had a Starbucks Frappuccino, and you may have guessed that the Frappuccino had a huge impact on Starbucks’ profit growth. What you probably don’t know is the story behind the drink.

According to Howard Behar, former president of Starbucks International, the Frappuccino almost never got launched. It was the summer of 1993 in Santa Monica, California, when frontline team members noticed that some local coffee shops were selling iced dessert coffee drinks, which was taking away customers from the local Starbucks stores. Some frontline staff members and the local manager felt they needed to get some blenders and create a drink to compete with the local business. Dina Campion, the manager of the stores in the Los Angeles area, gave Behar, her boss, a taste of the drink, and said that about thirty people every day were asking for the dessert drinks.

According to Behar, he floated the idea up to the senior team at Starbucks. Although executives liked the drink, Behar says, “The marketing manager who was in charge of product innovations said we were in the hot coffee business so he thought it was not the right product. The final vote was seven to one against.” Behar delivered the bad news to Campion and her team. In most cases that would have been the end of the story, but Behar says, “Dina was like a little dog with sharp teeth. She stayed on me, kept calling me, and then finally went ahead and started serving the drinks anyway.”

The perseverance of Dina and her frontline team would wind up leading to one of the most successful products in modern business history. It was not in the store manager’s job description to come up with new products. In fact, Starbucks had a group of people whose job was to create new menu items. But the folks in Santa Monica kept bugging Behar, then vice president at Starbucks. They kept pushing, saying this idea was a winner, even when the answer came back as no. They started experimenting anyway. Within a few months, sales of the new drinks skyrocketed. The perseverance paid off, and the cold drinks became a major product for Starbucks, in part because a few people led in an area where they were not supposed to be leaders. They did not let position get in the way of choosing to lead. That’s the way Howard Behar told me the story. Even though the exact details may depend on whom you ask, the one thing for certain is that the folks in Santa Monica had a big impact on the company.

The Frappuccino changed the trajectory of the company by bringing in new customers who were not normally coffee drinkers and filling its stores in the afternoon and during warm weather when the coffee business was typically slow. The Frappuccino accounted for 11 percent of the company’s summer sales and helped push Starbucks stock to an all-time high.

How a Call Center Agent Won a Customer for Life

Leading beyond your defined role can happen in the most unlikely of places. Canadian Tire is a large, home-grown retail hardware and general goods chain. Some years ago the company leaders came up with a slogan: Customers for Life. They wanted to be so service-oriented and treat customers so well that they would become customers for a lifetime.

In some jobs it was pretty obvious how people could take the lead on this effort. But the connection was not so evident for one group of people, employees in a call center who spent their entire day calling people whose store-sponsored credit cards were overdue. All day long they called delinquent customers to try to get them to pay their bills. It sounds like a tough way to win customers for life. In fact, who wants customers for life who can’t pay their bills? It would be easy to cut some slack for anyone in that department who thought, “It’s not my job to win customers for life!”

One agent made an outgoing call to talk to a woman who was months behind on paying a fairly substantial bill to Canadian Tire. The agent asked when the money might be paid, and the woman told her a story. She said that she had decided some time earlier to start a home candle-making business in which she would have parties at people’s houses to sell her candles. She had bought a large amount of supplies at Canadian Tire to start the business, but there was one big wrinkle in her plan: she could not get people to host the parties. The woman apologized for not being able to pay her bill but said that she had no idea when she could pay, given the large amount of supplies she had on hand and with little prospect for parties.

Most of the time this is where the story would end. The agent would say she was sorry to hear about the woman’s plight and then admonish her to pay very soon. The agent might have even told a few people the story. She could easily be forgiven for not trying to win a customer for life. But few agents would have done what she did.

The next day she called the woman up and said, “I have been thinking about your situation, and I have an idea. We have several hundred people, mostly women, who work here at the call center. I’d like to organize a day where we have some candle parties during lunch times here at the center. I will put up fliers, talk up the party, and all you need to do is show up with your candles.”

A few weeks later they held the parties. Not only did the woman sell out most of her inventory, but many of the agents also said they’d like to hold parties in their homes. The day of parties at the call center launched the struggling business. The woman paid off her credit card and a year later sent a letter to the president of Canadian Tire about what a difference this agent had made in her life and business. The agent won an award from the company. She had, of course, won a customer for life.

This simple story—told to me by Brigid Pelino, a former Canadian Tire executive now at Economical Insurance—illustrates many of the points in this book. First is the issue of responsibility; it was not in the agent’s job description to help people pay their bills or to help struggling businesses become successful, but she took responsibility anyway. She could have easily said “that’s not my job” to do that. Instead, she did what everyone does who steps up; she saw a need and decided she was the right person to do something about it. This is what 100 percent responsibility means in action. It means saying “Why not me?” instead of “Why me?”

It also illustrates the profound difference we can make regardless of where we sit. Stepping up is about doing what you can, where you are, and with what you have. Many of us are waiting to be in a position of influence before we influence, when the opposite is more representative of reality: the more we influence, the more we will be given the formal opportunity to influence in a more significant role. That agent’s credibility in the company grew because she decided to lead. Awards are not given to those who simply carry their weight but to those who decide to lead in a way greater than their position.

Leading beyond Our Position Changes Us

The choice to lead beyond our position changes us and changes the organizations we are part of. David and Travis remain involved in tackling bullying globally, and one of them almost became the youngest provincial legislature member in history in Nova Scotia. Howard Behar, who ran seventy stores for Starbucks, would later be put in charge of the entire international operation of Starbucks (and folks at the company still talk about “Howard Squared” to indicate the impact Howard Schultz and Howard Behar had on Starbucks’ success). Dina Campion would later move into a senior role at Starbucks. The bottom line is that when we lead beyond our position, we become influential in ways we never imagined.

Stepping up is about taking a position of leadership even if no one is asking you to do it. That is what David and Travis did in September 2007 when they took on bullying. That is what those committed few did at Starbucks when they fought for the cold coffee drinks. It’s what the agent did at Canadian Tire when she stepped out of her role to help a delinquent credit card holder.

You are leading right now, whatever your position may be. Why not lead bigger than your position?

Ways to Step Up

   State your intention. Write down how you want to change the world or your workplace (or family) every day. Write that intention on a card. Carry it with you. Your intention might be compassion, it might be respect, it might be optimism or energy. Whatever it is, look for ways to influence in the direction of that intention all day long.

   Punch above your weight or formal position. Come up with ideas for new products and innovations even if it’s not in your job description. Win customers for life even if it’s not your department, and generally go bigger than whatever your role says you must do.

   Don’t let your lack of position get in the way of your influence. David and Travis had no position, but they did lead. How could you lead right now even though you have no position?