team must be working through something pretty serious. He said, “We have a great kid. I really like him, he's struggling. He needs to talk to you.”
I said, “Well, I will call him first thing in the morning.”
The general manager said, “No, he'll be in his room at 12:15.”
So I called him just after midnight and we talked till 2:00 AM. The issue was that he wanted to be a leader on the team. He was a verbal person and he talked a lot to players. He also spent a lot of time trying to motivate other people, which, unfortunately, often involved him yelling at them.
My point was very simple. I said, “Leaders show leadership through performance. If you go out and be who you are and play the best you can play every single day and do what you can do every single day to help the team win, you're going to be recognized as the leader.” It was another matter of actions speaking louder than words.
Well, the next year he won the Silver Slugger Award and made the All-Star team. Just as important to him, he was considered a leader on the team. His teammates noticed his hard work and began to look to him for motivation. But then the team let him get away as a free agent, which left them with no leadership at all.
I've always thought it's interesting to watch a team perform after the leaders are gone. That's when you have so many people trying to establish themselves as a leader, which can sometimes be a very, very negative direction.
I worked with one corporation at three different levels of management: sales, middle management, and executive. It was an interesting environment because it was a growing company, there was a lot of room for growth, and they tried to promote from within. During my time working with the company, I had many meetings with salespeople and several of them asked me, “Can you talk to the vice president for sales and tell him not to promote me to regional sales manager?”
In a lot of different corporate environments, we get so obsessed with performance numbers that we don't look beyond those when considering leadership positions. Your best leaders may not be your top performers but rather the people who enable top performers to achieve high levels. You can detect this in a number of ways, but none of them are as easy as tracking sales data.
Leaders need to be especially involved with the development of chemistry in the corporate environment. This intangible factor is often overlooked by those who are involved with numbers or obsessed with profit. I have seen firsthand, both in the corporate environment and in sports environments, that chemistry is one of those things that you never miss until it's gone.
Many years ago I worked with a team that was on a ten-game winning streak and a reporter asked one of the athletes, “To what do you attribute this streak?”
He said, “It's because we've been playing well, we hit the ball well, we score a lot of runs.”
“What about chemistry?” the reporter asked.
And the athlete said, “Chemistry is way overplayed. That's just something people like to talk about.”
Well, about a month later we went on an eight-game losing streak. The same athlete faced the same reporter, who asked, “To what do you attribute the losing streak?”
“Well,” the player said, “I don't know. Man, we've lost our chemistry.”
Chemistry, that abstract element that maintains synergy and keeps things running well, is something we don't talk about a lot, but it has everything to do with team performance. As in the sports world, if we don't operate as a team in the corporate world, then we're just developing individual performers. Even if they do everything they can, we as an organization will never reach the levels we need to reach because it's impossible for individuals to get there on their own. Everybody needs to be a part of a team – and leaders are the ones who help people recognize that.
We'll talk about chemistry and a positive work environment in Chapter 7. All you need to know right now is that if you have a negative environment, you're not going to succeed, no matter what kind of talent you have. However, if you have a positive environment, you increase your probability for success because you'll have the right chemistry keeping things together.
Everything I talk about in this book hinges on the fact that talent overrides everything else. I don't care how good you feel about your leadership qualities. If you don't have talent, you can't play. It's a hard fact. I've been in corporate environments where people with the talent to talk and schmooze the right people have, in fact, been promoted up through companies, but they weren't successful over the long term as executives because they didn't have the talent to play.
The first thing that you need to examine if you have aspirations of being a leader is that it takes not only knowledge but also time, communication skills, and personality traits – all of which lend themselves to leadership. You need to decide who you want to be and what you want to do with your life, both in the corporate environment and personally. Too many times leaders are people who have been assigned a label, but they're not true leaders in the corporate environment. The true leaders, as I said before, are within the workforce, in every department. Leaders are very team oriented, but they can also make decisions. They are the people who are recognized – often by their peers – for what they do to help the group succeed.
One thing to be careful of, if you are an aspiring leader, is to examine your personality to ensure you have the traits necessary to succeed in a leadership position. Some people, no matter how badly they want to be in charge, are not cut out to be true leaders who inspire those around them. As for people who are natural followers, that's fine, too. You don't have to be a leader to be successful. Some people are at their best when they are part of a supportive environment but do not have to make key decisions.
Chapter 3 is devoted to the subject of personality, something that you don't see in many leadership books. Most of the industry relies on tests and evaluations to determine who should be given a leader label, but these methods are often superficial and I don't think they help us get a read on who people really are. This sets unattainable expectations because we want a person to become someone who matches the label we've assigned. That doesn't often work out.
For example, I spoke at a corporate environment where, before I arrived, the organizers had given a personality inventory and categorized people into four boxes. I don't recall what the boxes were exactly – introverts, extroverts, leaders, and followers – but they assigned each personality type a color (red, yellow, green, and blue). Then, they bought T-shirts in the colors of the four categories for the conference attendees to wear. This was meant to facilitate better communication in the company.
When I arrived at the meeting, everybody was wearing a T-shirt in one of the four identifying colors. The interesting thing to me was the fact that all the yellow shirts sat in one section, all green shirts in another, and so on. Instead of improving communication, they had pigeonholed people into categories. It turned out that everyone felt more comfortable talking to the people wearing the same color T-shirt.
There are many tests that categorize people into different slots, but I don't think they are fair and I think you lose some potential leaders in the process. You stifle the productivity of a company and shut down individual creativity. Even worse, you establish a relationship dynamic instead of letting one emerge through natural chemistry.
Unlike other leadership guides, this book is based on experience and observation instead of theory. In my 45 years of experience as a sports psychologist and consultant, I have talked to people at every level in both the corporate and athletics worlds. It might surprise you that the leadership skills in those two arenas are not very different.
Some of the greatest athletes I've ever worked with were some of the worst leaders that I've ever been around. Many times you can look at sports teams and find that your greatest performers are your worst coaches. I can think of several managers in baseball who were great players but couldn't manage a young team because everything had come to them so easily when they played.
Don't mistake a title – whether it's coach or CEO – for leadership. Positions slot people into an organizational chart; that's all. Real leadership is showing