Leadership

ONE DAY, you become a leader.
On Monday, you’re doing what comes naturally, enjoying your job, running a project, talking and laughing with colleagues about life and work, and gossiping about how stupid management can be. Then on Tuesday, you are management. You’re a boss.
Suddenly, everything feels different—because it is different. Leadership requires distinct behaviors and attitudes, and for many people, they debut with the job.
Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself.
When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.
Without question, there are lots of ways to be a leader. You need to look only as far as the freewheeling, straight-talking Herb Kelleher, who ran Southwest Airlines for thirty years, and Mi-crosoft’s quiet innovator, Bill Gates, to know that leaders come in all varieties. In politics, take Churchill and Gandhi. In football, take Lombar$di and Belichick.
Each of these leader
s would give you a different list of leadership
“rules.”
If asked, I would give you eight. They didn’t feel like rules when I was using them. They just felt like the right way to lead.
This is not the last you will hear of leadership in this book. Virtually every chapter touches on the subject, from crisis management
to strategy to work-life balance.
But I’m starting with a separate chapter on leadership because it is always on people’s minds. Over the past three years, during my talks with students, managers, and entrepreneurs, leadership questions invariably were asked. “What does a leader really do?” for instance, and “I was just promoted and I’ve never run anything before. How can I be a good leader?” Micromanagement often comes up as an area of concern, as in, “My boss feels as if he has to control everything—is that leadership or babysitting?” Similarly, charisma gets a lot of queries; people ask, “Can you be introverted, quiet, or just plain shy and still get results out of your people?” Once, in Chicago, an audience member said, “I have at least two direct reports who are smarter than I am. How can I possibly appraise them?”
These kinds of questions have pushed me to make sense of my own leadership experiences over forty years. Across the decades, circumstances varied widely. I ran teams with three people and divisions with thirty thousand. I managed businesses that were dying and ones that were bursting with growth. There were acquisitions, divestitures, organizational crises, moments of unexpected
luck, good economies and bad.
And yet, some ways of leading always seemed to work. They became my “rules.”
WHAT LEADERS DO
1. Leaders relentlessly upgrade their team, using every encounter as an opportunity to evaluate, coach, and build self-confidence.
2. Leaders make sure people not only see the vision, they live and breathe it.
3. Leaders get into everyone’s skin, exuding positive energy and optimism.
4. Leaders establish trust with candor, transparency, and credit.
5. Leaders have the courage to make unpopular deci-sions and gut calls.
6. Leaders probe and push with a curiosity that bor-ders on skepticism, making sure their questions are answered with action.
7. Leaders inspire risk taking and learning by setting the example.
8. Leaders celebrate.