The Thing About Leadership - Its Never About You

As a management consultant, I have the privilege of working with lots of brilliant, successful people, and from all over the world. And you know what their downfall typically is? Their own success. It’s an all-too-familiar story: entrepreneur starts a company, makes a brilliant call or two, makes a bundle, and then suddenly, miraculously, from then on he can do no wrong. But that’s not how it works. There’s an expression in investing: “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” Well, guess what. That expression applies to everything and everybody – entrepreneurs, executives, managers, business owners etc...

I once worked with an entrepreneur who had transitioned from a career in health care to building a sales distribution company for a medical device with no formal business training whatsoever. Lets call him Manuel. It was a tough journey but after years of hard work and persistence, Manuel turned an idea into a multi-million dollar sales and marketing company, making him a wealthy individual along the way. Like any business, his company went through several growth curves, but at one point the company hit a brick wall and quickly reversed course, shrinking from its peak to barely surviving as a going concern in less than two years. What happened?

Success got in his way. After several years of big results and new cars in the newly built garage, Manuel truly believed he couldn’t do anything wrong. Every decision he made was the right one and only he could come up with the right decision. He surrounded himself with ‘Yes’ men, making all the decisions, and before you knew it, the CEO was also the sales guy, marketing manager, PR specialist, HR manager and accountant. Everything was about him and nothing got done without him. To the customer or the prospect, it was impossible to separate the company from the man.

Since we were successful once, we delude ourselves into believing we’ve got it all figured out. We become overconfident. And then it becomes a control thing. We try to control everything, especially our people, and this at the expense of creativity, innovation, productivity and results. And that’s exactly what happened to Manuel. Management stopped managing, and leaders stopped leading. Everything became “Manuel wants this” or “Manuel said that.” It was all about Manuel and that’s when things began to fall apart for the entrepreneur and his company.

Management is a messy and dysfunctional business because it deals with people in the real world. And while we managers may try to organize people into neat little org charts, the real world has other plans. The real world doesn’t behave in an organized manner. The real world is chaotic.

The sign you need to look out for is when “you make it about you.” Leadership means never making it about you. And this is at every level of the organization.

When a customer is in need, they don’t care about you. They care about what you can do for them, they want their problem solved. And frankly, they don’t care one bit whether you or someone else solves it, as long as someone does. But if you act self-important, you’ll end up with one less customer. Similarly, when your boss needs something done and calls on you to do it, that’s not about you either. That’s about getting something done for the company, for the business, for him. And if you’re a real pain and whine about it every time, eventually he’ll get someone else to do it. And when an employee needs your help, that’s not about you either. You can make it about you, by giving them a hard time and pushing them around so they know you are the boss. But that is a missed opportunity to teach them something or show them some insight they can utilize for the rest of their life. That’s called leadership.