A Guide for Leaders:

Easy to be great…hard to be good

Steve Martin’s book, Born Standing Up (Scribner, 2007) hit me in the gut, especially on page 139:

“The consistent work enhanced my act. I learned a lesson: It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical…. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances.”

Martin writes clearly. It’s not great, but very good stuff. What’s so good is that it’s authentic. You get a sense that he peeled back the cover of fame to show you the working parts. Not always pretty, mostly a tragicomedy, Martin reveals the genesis of a comic icon, who has won an Emmy, three Grammys and was a recent (2007) Kennedy Center Honoree.

There’s a now famous joke about a tourist in New York City who asks a cab driver, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The cab driver answers, “Practice, practice, practice.” Reading Born Standing Up, I felt like Martin had been the tourist who not only asked that very question but also took the cab driver’s advice. Steve Martin was not an overnight wonder. He toiled long and hard in the vineyards of Disney World, Notts Berry Farm, nightclubs, small towns, show after show after show, night after night. It took him years of endless practice to climb the comedy ladder, to get recognized and then to be a star—which ultimately and ironically isolated him.

And while at times the book felt like his personal therapeutic memoir written at the direction of his psychologist to place his life in some sort of a meaningful order, it worked for me as a reality check. We all tend to look at success and consider that it appeared magically, as if the entertainer had won the fame lottery. However, reality is doing shows four and five times a day for years, often to crowds small enough to fit into a kids blow-up swimming pool. Night after night, great is easy….good is damned hard.

His life lesson rings true for everyone, especially leaders, the kind of people I, as an executive coach, work with regularly. Many emerging leaders, even experienced ones want the quick fix, the silver bullet, and there is none. No one becomes the CEO of General Electric, Merck, or Wal-Mart by winning some sort of leadership lottery. It’s all about practice, experience, and consistency. So let me recommend Steve Martin’s book to every emerging leader who asks the question, “How do you get to Wall Street?” My answer: Practice, practice, practice.

(Posted on Amazon.com on 1/19/08)

Ten Commitments of Leadership--Kouzes & Posner

Kouzes and Posner write in their classic leadership book, The Challenge of Leadership, Jossey Bass (copyrights 1995), that through their research of over 60,000 leaders across continents, they've uncovered 5 practices and 10 commitments of excellent leaders:

Practice Number One: Leaders Challenge the Process

• Commitment #1: Leaders search out challenging opportunities to change, grow, and improve.
• Commitment #2: Leaders experiment, take risks, and learn from the accompanying mistakes.

Practice Number Two: Leaders Inspire a Shared Vision

• Commitment #3: Leaders envision an uplifting and ennobling future.
  
• Commitment #4: Leaders enlist others in a common vision by appealing to their values, interests, hopes, and dreams.

Practice Number Three: Leaders Enable Others to Act.

• Commitment #5: Leaders foster collaboration by promoting cooperative goals and building trust.
• Commitment #6: Leaders strengthen people by giving power away, providing choice, developing competence, assigning critical tasks, and offering visible support.

Practice Number Four: Leaders Model the Way.

• Commitment #7: Leaders set the example by behaving in ways that are consistent with shared values.
• Commitment #8: Leaders achieve small wins that promote consistent progress and build commitment.

Practice Number Five: Leaders Encourage the Heart.

• Commitment #9: Leaders recognize individual contributions to the success of every project.
• Commitment #10: Leaders celebrate team accomplishments regularly.
  

Fortune: Top Companies for Leadership and Why.

After an study of over 550 companies around the world, Fortune, in collaboration with Hewitt Associates and RBL Group ranked the best companies in the world and why they were so good for leaders. Here’s the list of the top ten and reasons why:

1. General Electric: Take leadership on the road. Training takes place not only at their famous Crotonville training facility but also online around the world.
2. Proctor and Gamble: Hire for emotional intelligence: P&G looks for people with the social skills to understand customer needs.
3. Nokia: Create a mentoring mentality: Top execs at Nokia are evaluated on how their subordinates rate the ability to lead, teach and inspire.
4. Hindustan Unelever: Place the right leaders in the right jobs. They rank leaders by color (green-highest, amber, and red) and provide leadership development based on rankings.
5. Capital One Financial: Coach your managers: More than half their managers get a coach for a year to help hone their leadership skills.
6. General Mills: Prepare to solve problems. They assemble diverse teams to compete on solving real world simulations.
7. McKinsey: Groom global talent. With business in 45 countries, McKinsey insists on global cross pollination through assignments in different countries. PS…they have no “headquarters.”
8. IBM: Learn through integration. IBM has acquired 69 companies in the last 7 years and has a massive corporate integration initiative underway to make it more effective and efficient.
9. BBVA: Apply peer pressure. Spain’s second-largest bank, uses peer reviews as a way to ensure they promote leaders who are participatory and not coercive.
10. Infosys Technologies: Empower your employees. This Indian IT corporate leader actively solicits the ideas from their 20-somethings by creating a group of them called, Voices of Youth and gives them a seat at the company’s management council.

(Source “The Top Companies for Leaders,” Doris Burke, et al, Fortune, October 1, 2007, Vol. 156, NO.7, pp 109-114)