And then there was one. One remaining concept from the 8 leadership lessons from my 25-year career that hopefully will create a lifelong habit. I didn’t save this one for last for any particular reason, but in hindsight, it should be the last one due to its ongoing impact. Leadership is like any other skill. It takes study and practice to get good at it.
Leadership lesson number 8: “Be a student of leadership”
Many executives merely go through the motions and spend very little time developing their leadership skills. They think that their smarts, dynamic personalities, and gray hair will make them great leaders. What they fail to realize is the fact that, after about 20 years in any career, you’re no longer the expert on everything. If you’re an engineer by trade, you put down the keyboard long ago. If you grew up in sales, you’ve stopped being an individual contributor long ago, and probably have been asked to take over a team. If you’re a CFO, you probably know how to read an income statement, but couldn’t do a journal entry to save your life.
As a leader, you need other people to be successful.
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower once said “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” People won’t follow bad leaders. In fact, there’s data to support the claim that poor leadership is the number 1 reason for employee turnover. The cost of that turnover is somewhere on the order of 2 to 3X that person’s salary to replace them. It’s not insignificant.
It’s why we need to study.
Most successful leaders are voracious readers. President Harry S. Truman said “not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” He couldn’t have been more right. The number of books I’ve read that are still on my library shelf, and get used frequently, number in the hundreds. It matters less what books are the best, as there is no shortage of business and leadership books for sale on Amazon. What really matters is creating the regimen and discipline to creating a schedule to read. Rather than parking your butt on the couch to watch TV every night, or surfing the internet on your phone, have a book at the ready and read for an hour a day. Creating that discipline will carry you far in your leadership career.
That said, everyone always asks me my favorites in my personal library, so I’ll oblige. Here are my top reads in case you need a kickstart:
- “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz
- “Extreme Ownership” by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
- “Leaders Eat Last” by Simon Sinek
- “5 Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencione
Be a student of leadership and create a habit of lifelong learning.