Leadership Rule #8
There Is No Organization (Including Yours) That Performs Better Than Its Leader (i.e. The Leader Is The Lid).
Lots of leaders who like me are also wanna-be athletes work really hard at training. They train on crazy schedules to run a marathon, a half marathon or, if they are borderline nuts, they set a goal to run an iron-man (run 26.2 miles/swim 2 miles/cycle 100 miles). They get up way too early to work out, deprive themselves of real comfort food and adjust schedules to get just another training in.
Me, I am not quite that motivated. I just want to live well and long. And in the short term, I just want to ride a hundred miles in a day in cool southern California, drink cappuccino along the way, eat a bit of fruit and cookies, talk to some cool people, see some scenery and hear friends who know little about cycling praise me for what they perceive as a real feat of physical prowess.
What I always find confounding is that while we will do unusual things to train our bodies to do stuff they wouldn’t otherwise do, we don’t do the same for our brains.
Being an influencer, being someone who can make things better (read: leader), is a muscle. It gets stronger with use and benefits dramatically from training.
I get to mingle with a lot of leaders. The best, the most effective ones are those who don’t think they’ve arrived yet. They are the ones who are willing to learn, to try something different, to fail, to adjust, to win and do it again. They look at leading others even themselves as a process not an event.
You don’t graduate from leader school, you’re always an apprentice. You get better, the organization gets better. It’s a fact.
