LITMIR.BIZ

      Ultimately, your leadership will be judged by your behavior: what you say and what you do. How you show up as a person is how you show up as a leader. You can't separate the two.

      This idea isn't new. About 2,500 years ago, Socrates wrote, “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” “Knowing thyself” has been rebranded as “self-awareness” in our present-day society.

      Self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence (EI). It's the basis of creating effective working relationships. After all, if you don't recognize your own drives and actions, how can you begin to understand the drives and actions of others?

      Not only is EI essential to lead in today's organizations but also it's the competitive advantage of anyone who aspires to lead. In fact, when IQ and technical skills are roughly similar, EI accounts for nearly 90% of what moves people up the organizational ladder.¹

Marshall Goldsmith, considered by many to be the world's preeminent executive coach, wrote a best-selling book called What Got You Here Won't Get You There. If leaders want to continue to develop, he argues, they must grow and change—and the first step of change is self-awareness. You need to hold up the mirror and pay attention. After all, you can't change what you don't see. Self-awareness is the skill that enables you to transform unconscious incompetence or competence into conscious competence. You can't become excellent at anything if you're oblivious as to why and how you do it.

      Know thyself. It sounds so easy.

      But it's easier said than done. Looking in the mirror is a lot harder than it seems. It takes humility to recognize that what's staring back at you is less than perfect.

      We humans have a cognitive bias called illusory superiority. It's the reason that 90% of drivers think their driving skills are above average.² It's common to overestimate our own abilities relative to others. Looking at our own flaws is hard. Some people find the process of self-examination so uncomfortable that they will repress, hide, or deny the facts. I certainly hid from the truth in the run-up to the election with Gary. However, as ostriches demonstrate so well, putting your head in the sand doesn't make reality go away.

      If the idea of change makes you uncomfortable, you're on the right track. Leaders who are committed to developing themselves keep putting themselves in situations outside of their comfort zone. They know it's the only place they will grow.

FOCUS ON THE FUNDAMENTALS

      Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals.

      —Jim Rohn

      When Gary shared his winning strategy with me, I was thunderstruck—and not just because it was a great strategy. I was astonished by how simple it was. Connection, communication, collaboration. In hindsight, it all just seemed obvious—common sense, even. So why hadn't I done something similar?

It's one thing to understand something conceptually. It's quite another to put it into practice. I thought I'd “got it.” But all I had gotten was the idea of leading. I hadn't followed through with action. I thought leading meant being all sophisticated. These basics? They were beneath me.

      Yet, those fundamentals are the foundation for success. No, they don't require a great deal of sophistication. But they do require unusual amounts of focus, effort, and tenacity.

      As an example, imagine that you're a star high school basketball player. In fact, you're so good that you're voted an All-American. Division 1 colleges fall all over themselves to give you a scholarship to their school. You could go anywhere you want.

      You decide to go to UCLA. UCLA has built an amazing program and has won the last seven men's NCAA championships. No other school has won more than two in a row.

      You're excited. It's now the first day of practice. You've come to play for Coach John Wooden, the winningest coach in basketball history. Coach Wooden is known as “The Wizard of Westwood.” What wisdom will he impart on the first day?

      Coach Wooden begins the first lesson in the locker-room. He starts by telling you to take everything off of your feet. He then says,

      The most important part of your equipment is your shoes and socks. You play on a hard floor. So you must have shoes that fit right. And you must not permit your socks to have wrinkles around the little toe—where you generally get blisters—or around the heels.³

      You might think, “Has coach lost his mind? Doesn't he know I'm an All-American athlete? Is he for real?”

      Coach Wooden doesn't stop there. He details how to put on your socks and shoes—holding the sock up while you put on the shoe, how to tie it and double-tie it. “I don't want shoes coming untied during practice or during the game,” he argues.⁴

      What?!

You came all the way to UCLA to learn how to pull up your socks and tie your shoes!?

      Coach Wooden then turns around and closes his practice by saying,

      If there are wrinkles in your socks or your shoes aren't tied properly, you will develop blisters. With blisters, you'll miss practice. If you miss practice, you don't play. And if you don't play, we cannot win. If you want to win Championships, you must take care of the smallest of details.⁵

      Coach Wooden was a master of the details. In fact, over his career, he developed a philosophy of coaching and leadership that he called the “Pyramid of Success.” Bigger things only came as a result of smaller things, and smaller things were based on fundamentals.

      Whether it's basketball or leadership, success is based on fundamentals: learning them, mastering them, applying them, and teaching them to others.

      These small details aren't hard to understand. The challenge is to consistently apply the fundamentals on a daily basis. That's what separates the amateurs from the pros and the average from the excellent.

      Years ago, I had the opportunity to have dinner with a colleague and her father. Her father had started working more than 30 years before as a salesman for a food processing company, and, in the course of his career, he rose up the ranks and became CEO of what was a multibillion-dollar organization.

      I asked him, “At what point in your career did you feel like you arrived? That you could relax and not work so hard to prove yourself? Was it when you became CEO?”

      He beamed and broke into a hearty laugh. “Relax? Not prove myself? That's easy. I remember that day vividly. It was the day I retired.”

      He continued, “When you

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