CHAPTER 3

THE REAL ME

I have spent a lot of time and effort trying to define a vision for my companies, and it was not always easy. Sometimes the vision appeared naturally, at other times not. It can be even harder to define your personal vision. Some people have a vision, guiding them and their mission in life. Do you have a vision and guiding culture for You?

This chapter is about leading yourself.

#010 Be World Class (BWC)

Finding your own vision.

When it comes to running companies, it is obvious that you have to focus on making the company world class, with the potential to be the very best at what it does. It’s called ‘winning the game’, as I learned from Professor Robert Burgelman at Stanford University. You can also call it ‘world class – or no class’.

To listen to Anja Pärson is inspiring. She is the most successful female alpine skier in history, and she always felt that being best in the world was a natural drive, and worked hard to achieve it. In sports, you are up to your competitors in your discipline and the best is clearly distinguished from the second best. In the game of business, you measure your company against your competitors in the same category. There are a number of hard parameters to determine who is the best in the world: revenue, market capital, market share, growth, profitability and other indicators. You can start another company with the ambition to make that the best company in another field.

But when it comes to making yourself world class, it’s a much more complicated and high-stakes affair. You can’t be the best at many things and you usually have only one chance to really excel at something. It takes all you have, and it’s not always apparent exactly how you stand in relation to your competitors.

I always had this idea that I wanted to be best in the world at something. So, what was I going to be the very best at? I was not going to be the best in the world in any sport, not even close to it. In sports, as a market, you have the quantitative and competitive measures to determine who the top performers are. There is no doubt in the world of sports who is the number-one ranked tennis player, the reigning World Cup football champion or the fastest human being with the record in the 100 metres.

If your goal is to become the world’s best writer, I guess that the ultimate measure is the Nobel Prize in Literature. However, it’s a very narrow race and just like in sports, even if you did possess the extraordinary talent for it, which I don’t, your chances would still be terribly slim. In the end it would still be up to the subjective tastes of the Swedish Academy. Sure, you could also measure writers by sales or numbers of copies sold, if that would really qualify for the title ‘best writer’.

You could go for an Oscar, the award that signals that you are the very best in the world in your field in the movie industry. If you started now and worked really hard it would be possible (everything’s possible, right?) to pick up an Oscar in a few decades. Of course, the achievement would still be subject to the judgement of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

You could build the best company in its category, ranked by any of the typical economical parameters that define companies. It would still be difficult to determine what company is really the ‘best’. Should you, for example, measure size or client satisfaction?

Now, the point here is not really about the glory or big plans, but trying to be really good at whatever you do. Why wouldn’t a taxi driver in Shanghai try to be the very best in the world at driving a taxi in Shanghai? That kind of mindset makes a difference and creates deep satisfaction, in this case both for the driver and for her clients.

It suddenly came to me: I want to be the best in the world at leading myself.

If I can lead myself in a really good way, then perhaps I can be a good leader for others, helping them to ultimately lead themselves, and then in turn perpetuate good leadership. If everyone were to take leadership of their own lives and destinies, personal and professional, we would ultimately have a pretty optimistic future. Good leadership spreads by its own positive force. By leading ourselves, we become ‘hotspots’ that radiate good leadership. It starts with yourself.

Maybe you think it sounds odd or superfluous to have the ambition to be best in the world at leading yourself. Among other objections, there is no market or ranking for self-leadership so you would never know if you are really the best at it anyway.

You can also argue that being best in self-leadership doesn’t require much. After all, there isn’t much competition. Or is there? Who else claims to be better at leading You? Think about it. There are probably several people who might have a say in the Leadership of You. Your boss, your friends, your spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, children, mother, father, coach, colleagues, doctor, personal trainer or anyone else who in some way has a stake in your life. So, let’s start with being better than the people around you at leading you, even though you would also appreciate the great leadership of others when needed.

The vision to ‘be the best in the world’ is more of a mindset, whatever you do in life. It’s an ambition to practise every day to try to do something really well. I can ask myself after a late night with little sleep and early meetings the next day: ‘Was that really world-class leadership of myself?’

#011 Good & Bad Dogs (GBD)

The only one you ever truly lead is yourself.

The main competition is always yourself. You are the one you’re competing with for the great leadership of yourself. It’s about winning over your own shortcomings, weaknesses, bad behaviour – and your insecurities. And it’s about living up to your own values, focusing on all that makes you great, and learning every day how you can be better.

I can easily write a list of the things that I think of as my own bad self-leadership:

• Sending a stupid email when I know I shouldn’t
• Drinking too much at a party
• Telling people what to do, instead of listening
• Being unfair to someone who deserved better
• Losing my temper with my children
• Wanting revenge for something someone did to me
• Reacting to others’ bad behaviour
• Sleeping too little when I need to recharge
• Not giving honest and direct feedback

I can also identify when I do things well, and what makes me a better leader:

• Physical training, with 50% sporting days per month
• Doing yoga and practising to be present and focused
• Turning out great results thanks to a team that I supported
• Listening to the feelings behind people’s words
• Showing compassion and empathy for a colleague
• Sending a thank-you note after a nice lunch
• Accepting things as they are
• Being proactive and choosing my own actions
• Praising people who deserve it

In Robin Sharma’s book The Leader Who Had No Title, there is a wonderful story. A student admires a wise elder for his achievements and his strength of character, then asks him if he ever had weak thoughts. The elder replies: ‘Of course, I have weak thoughts and my ego tries to pull me off track every single day. This happens because I’m a human being. But I also have my authentic side, which is my essential nature and all I really am. That part of me creates the noble and brave thoughts – and keeps me on track to become my greatest self. So it is almost as if I have two dogs inside me: a good dog that wants to lead me to where I dream of going, and that dog that tries to take me off my ideal path.’

‘So which one wins?’ asks the student.

‘That’s easy,’ replies the elder. ‘The one I feed the most.’

Write down what you think is good self-leadership, and what you know and consider to be bad self-leadership.

You are in control of who is leading you, your good side or your other side. The truth is that you are never leading others, you are only truly leading yourself. You can only truly control yourself, since it is your behaviour, interpretations and responses that are the true core of your leadership. Think about it.

You always lead yourself first, by deciding on your course of action. For example, your boss tells you that the company is re-organizing and that your job will change in a way you are not happy with. How do you lead yourself? Do you come to the conclusion that the world is unfair and that it sucks to be a victim of stupid arseholes? Or do you tell yourself that even though things look bad, this could be an opportunity after all: you could negotiate with your boss, look for other roles in the organization, or find a way to make the changes to your job work for you? You decide, you are in charge.

You never really lead anyone other than yourself. When leading, you first decide on your own actions and thoughts, your awareness, and that will then influence others, directly or indirectly. Even if your leadership style is simply to tell people what to do and give orders, punishing and rewarding your team accordingly, you still have to lead yourself into that way of thinking and then act upon it.

So, who are you and what values guide you? Just as a company has (or should have) a guiding culture, what is your own ‘operating system’ and set of core values?

#012 The Real Me (TRM)

Be true to yourself.

In Warren Bennis’s On Becoming a Leader, there’s a quote from the letters of the late American philosopher William James.

‘I have often thought that the best way to define a man’s character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: “This is the real me!” ’

To find out who you are, and why you are the way you are, is the first step in any leadership. This is, of course, a lifelong journey and you may never get the answer. The point of this book is not to help you find yourself – there are plenty of other places and contexts in which to do that – I would just like to underline that all good leadership starts with yourself.

To find out something more about yourself, be on the lookout for moods, circumstances, environments, people, contexts, challenges, rooms, buildings, landscapes, events and other situations where you feel at home. Maybe you find that you are suddenly completely at ease, enjoying just being, a natural part of the context, and you say to yourself, in the words of William James: ‘This is the real me!’ If that happens, notice it. It means something. Then ask yourself why, and you will maybe find out even more.

There cannot be two yous. In 2005 the magazine Business 2.0 asked 30 business visionaries about their golden rule, the philosophy they live by in business and personal life. One of the titans quoted was Warren Buffett, the legendary chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. His golden rule? There can’t be two yous.

‘When you get out of bed in the morning and think about what you want to do that day, ask yourself whether you’d like others to read about it on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper. You’ll probably do things a little differently if you keep that in mind,’ Buffett reasoned.

Ideally, you are one authentic person. You are not different people depending on the situation. Not only does that create confusion for those around you, it also demands more of you if you’re going to keep track of all the different versions of yourself. Above all, it suggests that perhaps you haven’t made up your mind about who you are, that you aren’t connected to your core and fundamental values. Or that you think that you can be the real you only when nobody is watching.

You are also your agenda. If you have ever wondered who you are, take a look at your calendar. This is another simple way to learn about yourself. It might be so obvious that you didn’t even think about it, but how you spend your time tells much of the story about you.

Say your typical day looks something like this: woke up at 6 am, made breakfast for the whole family, took the kids to school, had your first meeting at 9 am with your management team, spent most of the day in various other meetings and calls, had dinner with a woman (who was not your wife or related to your business), came back at 8 pm to read bedtime stories to the kids. That says something about you.

If your day was: woke up at 10 am with a hangover, spent the day looking for a job and then went to the bar again with your buddies, that tells a different story. The way you spend your time doesn’t say why, but it does say what. And your actions speak loudly.

#013 Know Your Weaknesses (KYW)

Weaknesses are not strengths, but it’s a strength to know them.

One of my first mentors told me that the greatest strength you can have as a leader is to know your weaknesses. This is scary stuff, because it relates to sides of ourselves that we are maybe ashamed of, and want to hide or change.

You’re probably also better defined as a human being by your weaknesses than by your strengths. ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,’ begins Leo Tolstoy in his classic Anna Karenina.

In the same way, I assume most good accountants, for example, are probably good at what they do in the same way. They are mainly good at accounting. What separates them, and makes them human, is how they are weak in different ways.

There are different forms of weaknesses, for example:

• Something that you want: you would kill for love, for example, or you need drugs
• Something that you’re afraid of losing: your children, your job, your money
• Something that you are hiding: you’re cheating on your partner, or you’re stealing
• Something that you lack: you don’t have a degree

The main point here is not how to practically deal with your weaknesses, even though that could probably be a good idea, but to know them. Understanding your weaknesses is probably one of the greatest strengths you can have as a leader. It’s better that you’re aware of these weaknesses, can admit them and can deal with them proactively, than for the people around you to uncover them first. Sure, it’s good to find out your weaknesses through honest and constructive feedback (unless you don’t already know about them), but it can be bad if it happens by accident.

How you manage your weakness is a matter of personal preference and the nature of the weakness. The proactive pattern is always the same: 1) know and admit it, 2) deal with it. If your weakness is drugs or stealing, you should probably seek help. If your weakness is just a generally unhealthy lifestyle, you could maybe change on your own by applying better discipline and going to the gym. If your weakness is just good wine, it might not matter at all. You can choose to do nothing and live with it, but ask yourself to what extent your weakness might hurt yourself and others.

Your capacity to build yourself and others is based on the strengths, but what makes you great is to understand the ways in which you are weak and can improve. Your weaknesses and obstacles can also be turned into advantages and strengths if you have the ability to see it that way. (Please also see Take It On #043 TIO.)

#014 Set Your Virtues (SYV)

It’s good to have your own compass, even if you fail to follow it.

Do I follow my own rules? I try to, but fail every day. One way of controlling yourself, your bad dogs and your weaknesses is to set up guiding principles for yourself. Yes, we are only human and we are fantastic just the way we are, but we can always try to be a little better. Another way to put it is to live by your virtues, if you can.

Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, early in life started to practise the leadership of himself. In 1726, at the age of 20, he developed the now famous 13 virtues, which he lists in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin:

Franklin realized that he did not always live up to his own virtues and had his shortcomings, but also saw that the attempt to follow them made him a better man and contributed to his success. The point is to develop a framework to guide yourself, and to allow you to check whether you are on or off track. That has a value on its own – you get a map for your behaviour and will know if you’re lost or not. It is more or less certain that you will fail to live up to your own rules, and that is because you are only human, if it is any consolation.

In 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey suggests that you write your personal mission statement, outlining your philosophy, values and creed – your ‘personal culture’ that guides you and your actions. Things to put in a mission statement can be values such as ‘Listen more than you speak’, ‘Support people to help them grow’ or, if you are more ego-centric, ‘Always put myself first.’

The importance of leading yourself is hardly something new, and neither is the insight that all good leadership starts with you. But given all the focus you have on everything that is outside of you, it’s easy to lose yourself in other stuff: the need to deliver on your budget, meet a deadline, run a project, organize a company, make a return on the capital your investors put into your business, make sure your children are happy, support your colleagues and buy groceries. Don’t forget yourself.

#015 Two Leadership Levels (TLL)

How your actions are connected to your core.

Throughout this book, there are two levels that you should be aware of. The first level is the foundation, your core, your personal mission statement, your own ‘culture of one’ and ‘operating system’ or simply ‘you’. Call it the Ground Level. The second level is your everyday behaviour, your actions, based on your beliefs. This second level is about the ‘management of yourself’. Call it the Surface Level.

Management, or execution, in a company is a consequence of the strategy, goals and culture of that company. Whether management and execution is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘bad’ or ‘good’, successful or not, depends on the frame of reference. In a company, hopefully, you just don’t react to whatever happens. If there is an opportunity (for example, to enter a new market) or an innovative idea (for example, to launch a new product) or an aggressive move from a competitor, you just don’t react and go ahead. You first ask yourself, ‘Is this in line with what our company wants to do and what we believe in?’

Here are some of the values in my ‘personal culture’:

• I always make my children my first priority.
• I proactively take on challenges and focus on the positive.
• I’m fair, honest and trustworthy in business, and try to make all parties winners.
• I know I have a big ego, but I will do my best to focus on others.

In ‘professional’ management of yourself, you should always be conscious of your own actions. Your actions should never be childish reactions to things people say and do. If someone bumps into you on the street and says, ‘Watch your step!’, it is easy to say instinctively, ‘Hey, it was you!’ That is a reaction. Pausing for a millisecond, deciding on your response, you might instead say, ‘Sorry.’ That is to act rather than react.

It takes a lot of training and practice to resist reactive behaviour. Ideally, you should be proactive, taking action based on your own belief system. For example, if I say that it’s good to have meetings in Other People’s Offices (#058 OPO), it is based on my value that I want to focus on others. Calling a meeting in my office is to set the stage from my perspective, while strolling over and having a meeting in a colleague’s office would be to do it from someone else’s perspective, i.e. a little gesture to focus on others. So, it’s a proactive action, based on my own mission statement.

Just like the floors on a house, the second level (the Surface) is built on the first level (the Ground). As the surface and waves of the ocean are connected to the strong currents and floor below, your actions are (or ideally should be) a consequence of your belief system.

Providing a book with a number of TLAs, or leadership tools and guides, would be to offer just the surface of things. These tools are meaningless if they are not connected to your underlying values. Don’t adopt anything that you read here, or anywhere else, without first checking that it is in line with your own mission statement. Sure, it’s great if the TLAs can provide inspiration. But use them only if you truly think that your values support them. The personal culture that you are most comfortable with might just as well be to order people to your office whenever things go wrong because you believe that fear keeps people on their toes, and that, in turn, produces results in your world.

It is a good habit to have your two levels in the back of your head at all times. You can check your actions against your foundation to determine whether they are in line with your beliefs. If you take action that seems not to be grounded, ask yourself what happened.

Sometimes I choose to stir things up, taking on the Entrepreneur’s approach, disregarding the structure and organization in the company (Manager Lens) and the people around me (Leader Lens) to create a little chaos with new ideas. Hopefully, I know what I’m doing and where I am on the map. Sometimes it just goes wrong and I’m off track. Actions without foundation in your ‘operating system’ are just reactions to the actions of others, or plainly whimsical. Live at the Surface Level, but be sure about your Ground Level.

#016 Do You Believe (DYB)

It’s easier to take action if you know what you want.

As Jonathan Powell writes in The New Machiavelli (and as Machiavelli himself wrote before him), charisma is key to leadership skill. And what gives you charisma? Optimism and enthusiasm. To be optimistic and enthusiastic, you have to believe in something. Belief is a core leadership skill. But it is about more than charisma. If you don’t believe in what you do as a leader, regardless of whether you are a Formal Leader or a Mindset Leader, you will have a hard time doing it.

Sometimes I have taken decisions without really believing in them. For example, at one company I agreed on a strategy simply to keep a team member and colleague happy. This was unwise, and resulted in us having to cancel the strategy six months later when it indeed proved not to work, thereby really de-motivating my colleague. In this way I committed two serious mistakes. First, I supported something I did not believe in (even if my colleague did). Second, I put someone’s personal interest before the needs of the company. When you run a business, you must always ask what is best for the company.

Do you believe? As a Leader you have to believe in something. Steve Jobs of Apple believed in amazing products. Bill Gates of Microsoft believed in compatible products.

What is the thing you believe in? It doesn’t have to be right (but you must think it is right and be willing to fight for it until proved wrong). It doesn’t have to be extremely well thought through (but it helps, since others will challenge you with their own data). Your beliefs can be based on intuition, just a feeling or an insight, or they might rest on solid research, experience or logic.

What you believe in can be expressed at many levels, from a general vision of the future or your belief in the right company culture down to how to execute the tiniest detail. Optimism and enthusiasm for this belief create the charisma that motivates both you and the others around you. Furthermore, your beliefs are the foundation for your integrity, if you stay true to them.

For example, you might believe in the future of cloud computing, the idea that software as a service runs on external servers, accessible on the Internet through your browser. However, you have no idea about how this should be executed in your company’s business plan. Another person at your company might also believe in the future of cloud computing, and also believe in a strategy for how to do it: what resources are needed, what clients to target, what the product will look like and whom to recruit to make the ideas come true. A third person at the company might believe in a way to acquire customers using the power of search marketing to drive online sales of the product. But if no one believes in anything, it’s not likely that anything will happen. An important part of leadership is making others’ beliefs count, too.

Whatever you work with, it’s good to have beliefs about how to do things, what is right and wrong, what is good and what is bad. As a leader, you’re expected to have ideas about the future, or how to run a company, or the best way to solve a conflict.

In a key scene in the movie Moneyball (2011, Sony Pictures) the general manager Billy Beane is explaining to his sidekick Peter Brand that he’s about to trade one of their top players, Pena, to favour a lower-ranked player, Hatteberg, which goes against conventional wisdom. Driven by the need to beat richer teams, Beane and Brand have developed a new strategy, an unorthodox system that’s not based on individual (expensive) players, but which uses mathematics to calculate the synergy of all players that can make a team win, using a smaller budget.

Brand: ‘Billy, Pena is an All-Star, OK? And if you dump him and this Hatteberg thing does not work out the way we want it to, you know this. This is the kind of decision that gets you fired. It is.’

Beane: ‘Yes, you’re right. I may lose my job. In which case I’m a 44-year-old guy with a high school diploma and a daughter I’d like to be able to send to college. You’re 25 years old with a degree from Yale and a pretty impressive apprenticeship. I don’t think we’re asking the right question. I think the question we should be asking is, do you believe in this thing or not?’

Brand: ‘I do.’

Beane: ‘It’s a problem you think we need to explain ourselves. Don’t. To anyone.’

Brand: ‘OK.’

Beane: ‘Now, I’m gonna see this thing through for better or worse.’

That’s an example of belief-based leadership. It also shows another essential leadership skill: courage. You are willing to bet. Now, to be a leader, you don’t have to bet your whole life on every decision you make, but having the courage of your convictions helps motivate those around you to realize your vision.

What if you are the Formal Leader and believe one thing and the rest of your team believes the opposite? You all believe strongly, but unfortunately not in the same way. You cannot let two different ‘faiths’ drag on. You either have to surrender to the other belief or make sure what you believe in happens.

#017 Practise Daily Scales (PDS)

Leadership is your job, and you set the role description.

Just as a piece of music needs an accomplished musician to bring it to life, the core values and corporate culture of an organization are useless unless you can turn those values into behaviour and actions. For this reason, many of the ideas in this book come from the ambition to show what everyday leadership means in practice – and to show that good leadership requires regular practice. You can’t become a concert pianist without practising your scales.

Every day, I fail as a leader in one way or another. However, the insight that I have failed means that I know I did something wrong. I can identify the shortcoming and do something about it. Next time, I’ll do it better.

At a course at Stanford University called The Executive Program for Growing Companies (EPGC), I learned a saying, probably hard-earned from the Wild West, that goes: ‘There is only one thing worse than being unlucky, and that is being unlucky without knowing why.’ If you know why you have failed, it’s less of a failure.

The benchmark for what is considered right or wrong, good or bad, is ultimately your own framework. Sure, you probably exist in an environment where there are external rules, like a corporate culture, codes of conduct, manuals and good old social norms. But you will still have to decide for yourself how you’re going to behave.

When you start practising, you will notice that leadership is ongoing, on-the-job training that you will never graduate from. You have to practise constantly, just like the musician plays his daily scales. Part of the practice is to reflect on your leadership, part of the practice is to put your insights into action. Leadership is always learned in a context together with other people. (Please also see Be In Charge #006 BIC.)

#018 I Am Human (IAH)

Your best excuse.

If it’s any consolation at all, nobody is perfect. You are human. There will be times when you know you have done something wrong or said things you shouldn’t have said, when you’re mean and stupid, when you piss people off and hurt the ones closest to you, when you do not perform, when you fail and just plainly fuck up. You know you did, and you know why. You may also be able to identify which parts of yourself, your weaknesses and your strengths, contributed to the actions you regret.

It might sound obvious, but the insight that I am only human was one of the best leadership lessons I ever got. My mentor was an Israeli business leader and former elite soldier with a reputation for being very demanding. When he was the CEO of a company in Scandinavia, where the corporate culture is a bit softer than in Israel, it was said that he frequently reduced people to tears with his tough leadership style.

He told me that he simply could not stand mediocrity and that he could not hold back when he saw it. It was probably a combination of his upbringing, his parents’ sufferings during the Second World War, his experience in the military, his training as a soldier, his cultural background, his personality, and being from Israel. He did not defend his style, and did apologize when he went too far, when he realized he had done so (sometimes because people started crying). But he also knew himself and realized that there was only so much he could change about the person he was. ‘I’m only human,’ he said. You cannot necessarily expect others to always accept your behaviour, but you have to understand what you can change about yourself and what you cannot. You can be sorry about what you do to others, but you don’t have to make excuses for who you are.

Ultimately, the insight that you are who you are provides some consolation, an excuse. Neither you nor your environment can really expect you to be flawless at all times. That’s just not human.