SECTION III LEAD-UP PRINCIPLE 1

Lead-Up Principle #1

LEAD YOURSELF EXCEPTIONALLY WELL

Every now and then at a conference, sharp young kids will come up to me and tell me how much they want to become great leaders and how hard they’re working to learn and grow. But then they’ll lament, “I don’t have anyone to lead yet.”
My response is to tell them, “Lead yourself. That’s where it all starts. Besides, if you wouldn’t follow yourself, why should anyone else?”
Have you ever worked with people who didn’t lead themselves well? Worse, have you ever worked for people in leadership positions who couldn’t lead themselves? What do they do other than set a bad example? They’re like the crow in a fable I once read. The crow was sitting in a tree, doing nothing all day. A small rabbit saw the crow and asked him, “Can I also sit like you and do nothing all day long?”
“Sure,” answered the crow, “why not?” So the rabbit sat on the ground below the crow, following his example. All of a sudden a fox appeared, pounced on the rabbit, and ate him.
The tongue-in-cheek moral of the story is that if you’re going to sit around doing nothing all day, you had better be sitting very high up. But if you are down where the action is, you can’t afford to be sitting around doing nothing. The key to leading yourself well is to learn self-management. I have observed that most people put too much emphasis on decision making and too little on decision managing. As a result, they lack focus, discipline, intentionality, and purpose.
I believe this so firmly that I wrote an entire book on it called Today Matters. The thesis of the book is that successful people make right decisions early and manage those decisions daily. We often think that self-leadership is about making good decisions every day, when the reality is that we need to make a few critical decisions in major areas of life and then manage those decisions day to day.
Here’s a classic example of what I mean. Have you ever made a New Year’s resolution to exercise? You probably already believe that exercise is important. Making a decision to do it isn’t that hard, but managing that decision—and following through—is much more difficult. Let’s say, for example, that you sign up for a health club membership the first week of January. When you sign on, you’re excited. But the first time you show up at the gym, there’s a mob of people. There are so many cars that police are directing traffic. You drive around for fifteen minutes, and finally find a parking place—four blocks away. But that’s okay; you’re there for exercise anyway, so you walk to the gym.
Then when you get inside the building, you have to wait to even get into the locker room to change. But you think, That’s okay. I want to get into shape. This is going to be great. You think that until you finally get dressed and discover all the machines are being used. Once again you have to wait. Finally, you get on a machine—it’s not the one you really wanted, but hey, you’ll take it—and you exercise for twenty minutes. When you see the line for the shower, you decide to skip it, take your clothes, and just change at home.
The key to leading yourself well is to learn self-management.

On your way out, you see the manager of the club, and you decide to complain about the crowds. She says, “Don’t worry about it. Come back in three weeks, and you can have the closest parking place and your choice of machines. Because by then, 98 percent of the people who signed up will have dropped out!”
It’s one thing to decide to exercise. It’s another to actually follow through with it. As everyone else drops out, you will have to decide whether you will quit like everyone else or if you will stick with it. And that takes self-management.
Nothing will make a better impression on your leader than your ability to manage yourself. If your leader must continually expend energy managing you, then you will be perceived as someone who drains time and energy. If you manage yourself well, however, your boss will see you as someone who maximizes opportunities and leverages personal strengths. That will make you someone your leader turns to when the heat is on.
WHAT A LEADER MUST SELF-MANAGE
In Today Matters I reference the dozen things that people who desire to be successful should do. But here I want to focus on leadership alone.
So if you want to gain credibility with your boss and others, focus on taking care of business in these seven areas:
1. MANAGE YOUR EMOTIONS
I once heard that people with emotional problems are 144 percent more likely to have auto accidents than those who don’t have them. The same study evidently found that one out of five victims of fatal accidents had been in a quarrel with another person in the six hours preceding the accident.
It’s important for everybody to manage emotions. Nobody likes to spend time around an emotional time bomb who may “go off ” at any moment. But it’s especially critical for leaders to control their emotions because whatever they do affects many other people.
Good leaders know when to display emotions and when to delay them. Sometimes they show them so that their people can feel what they’re feeling. It stirs them up. Is that manipulative? I don’t think so, as long as the leaders are doing it for the good of the team and not for their own gain. Because leaders see more than others and ahead of others, they often experience the emotions first. By letting the team know what you’re feeling, you’re helping them to see what you’re seeing.
Good leaders know when to display emotions and when to delay them.

Other times leaders have to hold their feelings in check. In his book American Soldier, Gen. Tommy Franks wrote about a devastating incident that occurred in Vietnam when he was a junior officer and the example that was set for him in this area by Lt. Col. Eric Antilla, who put the men he commanded ahead of his own emotional needs:

I studied Eric Antilla’s eyes. I knew he was gripped by anguish, but he never let it show. We were at war; he was commanding troops in combat. And his quiet resolve in meeting this catastrophe gave us all strength. In an hour he would grieve, but now he stood rock solid. In war, it is necessary that commanders be able to delay their emotions until they can afford them.1

When I say that leaders should delay their emotions, I’m not suggesting that they deny them or bury them. The bottom line in managing your emotions is that you should put others—not yourself—first in how you handle and process them. Whether you delay or display your emotions should not be for your own gratification. You should ask yourself, What does the team need? not, What will make me feel better?
2. MANAGE YOUR TIME
Time management issues are especially tough for people in the middle. Leaders at the top can delegate. Workers at the bottom usually punch a time clock. They get paid an hourly wage, and they do what they can while they’re on the clock. Middle leaders, meanwhile, feel the Tension Challenge, and they are encouraged—and are often expected—to put in long hours to get work done.
Time is valuable. Psychiatrist and author M. Scott Peck said, “Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.” In What to Do Between Birth and Death (Wm. Morrow & Co., 1992), Charles Spezzano says that people don’t pay for things with money; they pay for them with time. If you say to yourself, In five years, I’ll have put enough away to buy that vacation house, then what you are really saying is that the house will cost you five years—one-twelfth of your adult life. “The phrase spending your time is not a metaphor,” said Spezzano. “It’s how life works.”
“Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time.”
—M. SCOTT PECK

Instead of thinking about what you do and what you buy in terms of money, instead think about them in terms of time. Think about it. What is worth spending your life on? Seeing your work in that light just may change the way you manage your time.
3. MANAGE YOUR PRIORITIES
The best 360-Degree Leaders are generalists. They know a lot about a lot of things. They often have no choice because of the Multi-Hat Challenge. But at the same time, the old proverb is true: If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.
What is a leader in the middle to do? Since you are not the top leader, you don’t have control over your list of responsibilities or your schedule. You should still try to get yourself to the point where you can manage your priorities and focus your time in this way:

80 percent of the time—work where you are strongest
15 percent of the time—work where you are learning
5 percent of the time—work in other necessary areas

This may not be easy to achieve, but it is what you should strive for. If you have people working for you, try to give them the things you aren’t good at but they are. Or if possible, trade some duties with your colleagues so that each of you is playing to your strength. Remember, the only way to move up from the middle is to gradually shift from generalist to specialist, from someone who does many things well to someone who focuses on a few things she does exceptionally well.
The secret to making the shift is often discipline. In Good to Great, Jim Collins wrote:

Most of us lead busy, but undisciplined lives. We have ever-expanding “to do” lists, trying to build momentum by doing, doing, doing—and doing more. And it rarely works. Those who build the good-to-great companies, however, made as much use of “stop doing” lists as the “to do” lists. They displayed a remarkable amount of discipline to unplug all sorts of extraneous junk.2

You must be ruthless in your judgment of what you should not do. Just because you like doing something doesn’t mean it should stay on your to-do list. If it is a strength, do it. If it helps you grow, do it. If your leader says you must handle it personally, do it. Anything else is a candidate for your “stop doing” list.
4. MANAGE YOUR ENERGY
Some people have to ration their energy so that they don’t run out. Up until a few years ago, that wasn’t me. When people asked me how I got so much done, my answer was always, “High energy, low IQ.” From the time I was a kid, I was always on the go. I was six years old before I realized my name wasn’t “Settle Down.”
Now that I’m fifty-eight, I do have to pay attention to my energy level. In Thinking for a Change, I shared one of my strategies for managing my energy. When I look at my calendar every morning, I ask myself, What is the main event? That is the one thing to which I cannot afford to give anything less than my best. That one thing can be for my family, my employees, a friend, my publisher, the sponsor of a speaking engagement, or my writing time. I always make sure I have the energy to do it with focus and excellence.
The greatest enemy of good thinking is busyness.
Even people with high energy can have that energy sucked right out of them under difficult circumstances. I’ve observed that leaders in the middle of an organization often have to deal with what I call “the ABCs energy-drain.”

Activity Without Direction—doing things that don’t seem to matter
Burden Without Action—not being able to do things that really matter
Conflict Without Resolution—not being able to deal with what’s the matter

If you find that you are in an organization where you often must deal with these ABCs, then you will have to work extra hard to manage your energy well. Either that or you need to look for a new place to work.
5. MANAGE YOUR THINKING
Poet and novelist James Joyce said, “Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it.” The greatest enemy of good thinking is busyness. And middle leaders are usually the busiest people in an organization. If you find that the pace of life is too demanding for you to stop and think during your workday, then get into the habit of jotting down the three or four things that need good mental processing or planning that you can’t stop to think about. Then carve out some time later when you can give those items some good think-time. That may be thirty minutes at home the same day, or you may want to keep a running list for a whole week and then take a couple of hours on Saturday. Just don’t let the list get so long that it disheartens or intimidates you.
I encouraged readers in Thinking for a Change to have a place to think, and I wrote about the “thinking chair” I have in my office. I don’t use that chair for anything else other than my think-time. I’ve discovered since the book’s publication that I didn’t explain clearly enough how to correctly use the thinking chair. People at conferences told me that they sat in their own thinking chairs and nothing happened. I explain to them that I don’t sit in that thinking chair without an agenda, just hoping that a good idea hits me. What I usually do is think about the things I’ve jotted down because I couldn’t think about them during a busy day. I take the list to my chair, put it in front of me, and give each item as much think-time as it needs. Sometimes I’m evaluating a decision I’ve already made. Sometimes I’m thinking through a decision I will have to make. Sometimes I’m developing a strategy. Other times I’m trying to be creative in fleshing out an idea.
A minute of thinking is often more valuable than an hour of talk or unplanned work.

I want to encourage you to try managing your thinking in this way. If you’ve never done it before, you will be amazed by the payoff. And know this: 1 minute > 1 hour. A minute of thinking is often more valuable than an hour of talk or unplanned work.
6. MANAGE YOUR WORDS
Legendary basketball coach John Wooden said, “Show me what you can do; don’t just tell me what you can do.” I think just about every leader has said—or at least thought—those words at some time or another when dealing with an employee. Leaders value action. And if they are going to stop what they’re doing long enough to listen, the words they hear need to have value. Make them count.
In The Forbes Scrapbook of Thoughts on the Business Life (Triumph Books, 1995), Emile de Girardin is quoted as saying, “The power of words is immense. A well-chosen word has often sufficed to stop a flying army, to change defeat into victory, and to save an empire.” If you wish to make sure that your words carry weight, then weigh them well. The good news is that if you manage your thinking and take advantage of focused think-time, you will probably see improvement in the area of managing your words too.
David McKinley, a 360-Degree Leader in a large organization in Plano, Texas, told me a story about something that happened in his first job after graduate school. He was preparing to make an important call on someone, and he decided that he should ask the top leader to go with him. When they got there, David, in his enthusiasm, just wouldn’t stop talking. He didn’t give his leader a chance to do anything but watch until the very end of their visit.
As they returned to the car, David’s boss told him, “I might as well have stayed at the office.” He went on to explain how his presence was superfluous. David told me, “I learned a huge lesson that day about staying ‘in bounds’ when I was with the senior leader. His honest counsel and correction strengthened our relationship and has served me well throughout my life.” If you have something worthwhile to say, say it briefly and well. If you don’t, sometimes the best thing to do is remain silent.
7. MANAGE YOUR PERSONAL LIFE
You can do everything right at work and manage yourself well there, but if your personal life is a mess, it will eventually turn everything else sour. What would it profit a leader to climb to the top of the organizational chart but to lose a marriage or alienate the children? As someone who spent many years counseling people, I can tell you, no career success is worth it.
Success is having those closest to me love and respect me the most.

For years one of my definitions of success has been this: having those closest to me love and respect me the most. That is what is most important. I want the love and respect of my wife, my children, and my grandchildren before I want the respect of anyone I work with. Don’t get me wrong. I want the people who work with me to respect me too, but not at the expense of my family. If I blow managing myself at home, then the negative impact will spill over into every area of my life, including work.
If you want to lead up, you must always lead yourself first. If you can’t, you have no credibility. I’ve found the following to be true:

If I can’t lead myself, others won’t follow me.
If I can’t lead myself, others won’t respect me.
If I can’t lead myself, others won’t partner with me.

That applies whether the influence you desire to exert is on the people above you, beside you, or below you. The better you are at making sure you’re doing what you should be doing, the better chance you have for making an impact on others.