I have always been a big believer in role models. There is enormous power in learning from those with whom you come into contact, and adapting the lessons to your own personal circumstance and individual style. This belief underscored one of the original goals of this column from its founding more than three years ago -- to introduce readers to leaders from a wide variety of disciplines in order to learn, develop, and improve.
In this, the second half of my two-part final 'Leadership by Example' installment, my aim is to distill the most important lessons from the 25-plus leaders with whom I visited in this column. But first a caveat: Profiling a leader did not mean that they were above criticism, that their inclusion was any guarantee of continued success, or that I did not make some mistakes in choosing whom to interview.
And at a time of devastating losses, executive scandals, and plunging stock prices, some readers may have written off business leaders entirely as a category of people worthy of respect. If that is your inclination, please feel free to stop reading this column right now. However, if you are open to looking for the good and seeing what might be gleaned from others, I invite you to continue.
Some Memorable Leaders
Here are several of the most memorable leaders with whom we visited:
Gerald Grinstein, former CEO of Delta Air Lines, addressed the volatile issue of executive compensation head-on. He decided in March 2007 to refuse more than $10 million in promised compensation after shepherding the No. 3 U.S. airline through bankruptcy. Instead, Grinstein decided to contribute this post-bankruptcy pay to scholarships and hardship assistance for Delta employees, families, and retirees. In doing so, Grinstein almost singlehandedly defused employee resentment and regained employee trust and confidence in Delta management. A representative reader comment from this column: "I only wish other 'overpaid' CEOs would follow Grinstein's example."
Howard Schultz, founder, chairman, and CEO of Starbucks, took back the CEO reins from the popular predecessor, Jim Donald, in January 2008. He has fought hard to reset the company's cost base, core value proposition, brand positioning, and culture. Despite the difficult challenges of reorienting a company whose entire history was as a hot-growth company, cultural icon, and investor bellwether, Schultz has remained steadfast in his commitment to keeping the company operating with soul, purpose, and performance. And significant progress is being made. Once again, Starbucks was recently named one of the world's most admired companies, and its performance has put it back on the new 'Business Week' list of 50 best-performing companies.
After becoming the CEO of The Walt Disney Company on October 1, 2005, Bob Iger gave one of his first interviews to this column and, over the three and a half years since, he has emerged as one of the world's most respected CEOs with his calm, inclusive, yet decisive leadership style. He has racked up achievements ranging from resolving the rancorous battle with Roy Disney and Stanley Gold to the successful integration of Pixar, which reinvigorated the company's animation legacy. He has also built new global franchises such as 'Hannah Montana', 'High School Musical', 'Pirates of the Caribbean', and 'Cars'. Of special note is the fact that Iger has shown a company can be transformed by a new CEO who was promoted from within.
For his leadership during and after Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Patrick J. Quinlan, CEO of New Orleans-based Ochsner Health System, was named the Most Powerful Physician Executive. In the tragic aftermath of Katrina, Ochsner was and remains a bright spot. Dr. Quinlan and Ochsner's employees provided uninterrupted service during the hurricane and, in the 24 months since, the organization has played a key role in the recovery of the New Orleans medical community and economy. Ochsner's culture of preparedness helped Dr. Quinlan keep the organization focused and operating during Katrina, and allowed it to fulfill its commitment to helping the battered region recover from the storm.
I also went on a quest to find leadership examples that prove that you don't need to be a household name to achieve extraordinary things. The truth is that everyone, no matter how successful, started out as an ordinary person. At some point, the paths of the great leaders and champions diverged from others when they recognized and honed their skills, established their goals, and decided -- either explicitly or implicitly -- that they would do important things that would add value to the lives of others.
One of the "ordinary" people with whom we visited was Michael Evans, a young man who's working on bridging a religious and cultural divide through basketball. A former college player, Evans took the initiative to create and lead a travel basketball team made up of five Catholic and five Protestant high school boys in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with limited money and insufficient resources. His progress and his organization, Full Court Peace, have begun to spread across that city and into multiple continents.
Leadership Strategies and Tactics
Here are six leadership strategies and tactics to sum it all up:
- Don't be afraid to set ambitious goals for your work and life, as long as you can build a specific, credible, multidimensional plan to achieve them.
- The more your goals are directed at benefiting people beyond yourself, the more likely you'll be to achieve success by inspiring others to support you along the way.
- Good questions make a good leader. Focus on the quality of your questions to stimulate the most compelling feedback and answers. Experiment, collect questions from people such as colleagues or newscasters, and see what works.
- To lead people in uncertain times, project a sense of continuity, of having managed through similarly difficult predicaments. Just as panic is contagious, so too is a feeling of calm, which, when it kicks in, can settle the frayed nerves of those around you.
- Beyond market-leading performance, the greatest source of long-term job security isn't a pre-negotiated employment contract with a golden parachute and rich severance package. Rather, it is to maintain your reputation and integrity at all costs, and be able to articulate what you've done, why you did it, and what the outcomes and lessons learned were.
- The two most important characteristics of world-class performance are the ability to develop mental toughness and the power of deliberate practice. Mental toughness -- the ability to come through and deliver in the moment of truth -- is the key characteristic that distinguishes the greatest performers from everyone else. And, contrary to what most people believe, this is actually a learnable skill.
The very best performers are distinguished less by talents that they inherited than by their ability to continue improving for years, even decades, until they become great. Expert performance is the end result of prolonged effort to improve through a regimen of deliberate, targeted activities specifically designed to optimize improvement in carefully selected areas. The top performers in the world not only work harder than everyone else in their field -- they also work smarter.
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I want to thank all my readers for your time and interest. Some of you were turned off by my optimistic, "anyone can achieve" tone, my conviction that leadership can be learned, and the profiles that many felt didn't apply them. But others found these concepts, role models, and examples helpful, practical, and interesting. Wherever on the spectrum you find yourself, I appreciate your time with and engagement in this topic, and I wish you all the best of success and satisfaction in your careers and lives.
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