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What Questions Do I Ask Myself as a Leader?

As a young leader starting out in my career, I was always in a hurry. Filled with passion and vision, I had an urgent agenda to pursue, which prompted me to try to get buy-in from others. I gave a lot of directions and asked very few questions because of this. As a result, I was often wrong but seldom in doubt.

My attitude changed when I made a wrong decision that affected several people in my organization. That’s when I realized that when a leader makes a bad decision, it affects not only him but many other people. That gave me pause. While personal maturity may mean being able to see beyond yourself, leadership maturity means considering others before yourself. I recognized that I could no longer be a Lone Ranger, doing my own thing and asking others to do my bidding. I needed to think ahead and consider others.

While personal maturity may mean being able to see beyond yourself, leadership maturity means considering others before yourself.

I started doing that by asking questions. I explained in chapter one how important questions are. Questions are the basis of learning. But they are also a foundation for better leadership. I realized that during a conversation with one of my mentors, Coach John Wooden, former basketball coach of the UCLA Bruins. We were having lunch. As usual for these sessions, I had prepared for hours and had a list of questions on a legal pad. What he said wasn’t even in response to one of my questions. He simply mentioned it in passing, but it grabbed my attention. Coach said, “John, there is one question I ask myself every day.”

My heart leaped with anticipation as I waited to hear an insight from this highly successful coach known for great wisdom. I’ll share with you what the actual question was later in this chapter. While it has value, the practice he was sharing was even more valuable. I realized in that moment that good leaders ask themselves questions.

After my session with Coach, I couldn’t wait to get home, spend some time in my thinking chair, and write down what questions I should be asking myself every day as a leader. The questions I discovered are what I’m going to share with you in this chapter.

What You Need to Ask Yourself

If you are a leader, you understand that questions are always a part of a leader’s life. The issue becomes, who is asking the questions? As a leader, I can allow others to ask me the hard and important questions, or I can take responsibility, be proactive, and ask those questions of myself. I have come to the realization that by asking myself tough questions, I can maintain my integrity, increase my energy, and improve my leadership capacity.

Since writing out the questions I ask myself as a leader, I’ve reviewed and reflected on them hundreds of times. Many of these questions are personal, but I believe they can also help you as much as they have me. I pass them on to you as a guide, with the suggestion that you develop your own list.

1. Am I Investing in Myself? A Question of Personal Growth

The most important investment you and I will ever make is in ourselves. That investment will determine the return that we get out of life. Jim Rohn’s mentor John Earl Shoaff said to him, “Jim, if you want to be wealthy and happy, learn this lesson well: learn to work harder on yourself than you do on your job.” Jim did learn that lesson well. As he once pointed out, “The book you don’t read can’t help you; the seminar you won’t attend can’t change your life. The business gets better when you get better. Never wish it were easier, wish you were better.”

Since 1974 I have been intentionally investing in myself, and for nearly as long I have been encouraging others to do likewise. Some people do; others don’t. Why is that? I believe three main factors come into play. These will determine if or how you will invest in yourself:

Your Self-Image: How You See Yourself

How do you feel about yourself as a person? Are you positive? Are you negative? On a scale of 1 to 10, what number would you use to describe how you feel about yourself? Take a moment and rate yourself.

Whatever number you picked to describe your self-image also describes your willingness to invest in yourself. For example, if you rated your self-image at a 5, you will be willing to invest in yourself up to a 5 level, but not more. That’s why people with low self-images do not make great investments in themselves. It’s not what you are that keeps you from investing in yourself; it’s what you think you are—or are not. You will never be able to bet on yourself unless you believe in yourself.

You will never be able to bet on yourself unless you believe in yourself.

Many people find themselves thinking like Snoopy, the beagle in the Peanuts comic strip who thinks, “Yesterday I was a dog. Today I’m a dog. Tomorrow I’ll probably still be a dog. Sigh. There’s so little hope for advancement!” To do that is to sell themselves short. People are not stuck in dead-end situations when it comes to their potential. We have the ability to make tremendous advances. But first we must believe in ourselves.

Your Dream: How You See Your Future

When I sat down to write Put Your Dream to the Test, my desire was to help people make great strides toward their dreams. What I didn’t realize until the book had been written and I starting speaking about it was that many people don’t have a dream. I was shocked. My life has been filled with hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Because of that, I assumed that everyone had at least one dream. I was wrong. Why does that matter? Because the size of your dream determines the size of your investment. If your dream is large, you will invest in yourself to achieve it. If you have no dream, you may not invest in yourself at all.

My start in leadership was very unimpressive. I led an old country church attended by a few farmers. But my passion to help people was huge. It filled me with energy. My dream was to build a great church.

We made very little money in those days. I was paid eighty dollars a week and Margaret worked half days as a kindergarten teacher. We barely scraped by. But because I had big dreams, I was always looking for ways to improve myself and my leadership. Any time I went to a bookstore it felt like Christmas. I’d come home loaded with books to help me grow. And I was always on the lookout for conferences that would help me. Margaret would cringe because it put such a strain on our budget, but she always made it work. She believed in me as much as I believed in myself. The dreams we shared for our future were bigger than our surroundings or circumstances, and fueled our desire to grow.

Your Friends: How Others See You

Motivational speaker Joe Larson once said, “My friends didn’t believe I could become a successful speaker, so I did something about it. I went out and found some new friends.” That may sound harsh, but that is what’s needed for anyone who is surrounded by people who don’t believe in them.

One of my most important growth decisions was to expand my horizons and find other people whose passion to grow themselves and help others was similar to mine. At that time I was only thirty-three years old, and I left everything familiar and everyone I knew. That decision took courage. However, if I had stayed where I was, I would never have grown to the next level.

People need others to help them stay inspired and growing. Missionary doctor Albert Schweitzer asserted, “In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.” If you have friends who light your inner fire, you are very fortunate; they will make you want to keep investing in yourself and growing. If you don’t, find some, because nothing is more important for your potential as a leader than your personal daily growth.

2. Am I Genuinely Interested in Others? A Question of Motivation

Someone once said, “People have two reasons for doing anything—a good reason and the real reason.” For you to be a good leader when dealing with people, the good reason must be the same as the real reason. Your motives matter.

If you are a leader—or want to become one—you need to ask yourself why. There is a big difference between people who want to lead because they are genuinely interested in others and desire to help them, and people who are in it to help only themselves. People who lead for selfish reasons seek…

• Power: They love control and will continue to add value to themselves by reducing the value of others.
• Position: Titles are their ego food. They continually make sure that others feel their authority and know their rights as a leader.
• Money: They will use people and sell themselves for financial gain.
• Prestige: Their looking good is more important to them than their being and doing good.

It’s easy for a leader to lose focus. That’s why I need to check my motives daily. I never want to put my leadership ahead of the people I lead.

Naturally gifted leaders have capabilities that they can easily use for personal advantage. They see things before others do, and they often see more than others see. As a result, they enjoy the advantage of having good timing and seeing the big picture. That puts them in a position to make the most of opportunities.

If I can see something before you do, I can get started before you, and that often guarantees a win. If I see more than you see, my decisions will likely be better than yours. I win again! So the question is not “Does the leader have an advantage over others?” The answer to that question is yes. The question is “Will the leader use that advantage for personal gain or for the benefit of everyone on the team?” That is why I need to ask myself whether I am genuinely interested in others. It keeps my natural selfishness in check and purifies my motives.

Leaders are always in danger of abusing their power. That is why when I addressed leaders at the United Nations, I spoke on the subject “Three Questions People Ask of Their Leader.” Those questions are:

Can you help me? That is a competence question.

Do you care for me? That is a compassion question.

Can I trust you? That is a character question.

Note that two of those questions deal with a leader’s motives. If followers are concerned about the motivation of leaders, the leaders themselves should be too.

Let me say one more thing about this subject: questioning your motives is not the same as questioning your character. If you have poor character, your motives will probably be bad. But if you have solid character, you can still fall prey to bad motives. Motives are usually attached to specific situations or actions. Character is based on values. If you have wrong motives in a particular situation, but your values are good and your character is strong, you will probably detect where you’re going wrong and have a chance to correct it.

This is the reason we’ve begun teaching values to leaders through my nonprofit organization, EQUIP. When leaders learn and live good values, they make themselves more valuable and lift the value of other people. That is the foundation of positive leadership.

When leaders learn and live good values, they make themselves more valuable and lift the value of other people.

3. Am I Grounded as a Leader? A Question of Stability

Just as leaders are vulnerable to acting for their personal advantage, they are also susceptible to having an overblown sense of their own importance. That’s why they need to remain grounded. What do I mean by that? Good leaders need to exhibit three important qualities:

Humility: Understanding Your Place in Light of the Bigger Picture

I once read that at the height of the Roman Empire, certain generals were honored with a triumph, a procession of honor through the city of Rome in which the general was preceded by marching legions, trumpeting heralds, and the enemies who had been conquered and captured in the victory. As the general rode in a chariot and was cheered by virtually everyone in the city, a slave held a laurel wreath above his head to signify his victory. But as the procession continued, the slave had one additional responsibility. He was to whisper the following words into the general’s ear: “Hominem te memento,” meaning, “Remember you are only a man.”

Leaders can start to think that everything is all about them—especially when their team or organization is winning. The greater the accomplishment, the greater the need to check their egos. That’s why it’s so important that they remain grounded. The most important quality of a well-grounded person is humility.

What is humility? My friend Rick Warren says, “Humility is not denying your strengths. Humility is being honest about your weaknesses. All of us are a bundle of both great strengths and great weaknesses and humility is being able to be honest about both.”6 My belief is that humility is a choice every day to give credit to God for our blessings and to other people for our successes.

“Humility is not denying your strengths. Humility is being honest about your weaknesses.”

—Rick Warren

Humble leaders are comfortable with who they are and feel no need to draw attention to themselves. They revel in the accomplishments of others, empower others to excel, and allow others to shine. That doesn’t mean that a leader needs to blend into the woodwork. It just means having the right perspective. Leadership author Patrick Lencioni says that good leaders can motivate others and be humble at the same time. He writes, “I have defined humility as the realization that a leader is inherently no better than the people he or she leads, and charisma as the realization that the leader’s actions are more important than those of the people he or she leads. As leaders, we must strive to embrace humility and charisma.”

I recently read a story about a leader who exemplifies charismatic humility: Angela Ahrendts. For seven years she was the CEO of Burberry, a luxury fashion house headquartered in London. While leading the company, she transformed its brand, increased its global reputation, and more than tripled its annual sales and its value.

Ahrendts is known as an innovator, but she is also known for being the kind of leader who promotes collaboration, fosters team spirit, and builds trust. The key? Ahrendts says, “It’s compassion. It’s humility. It’s saying thank you.”7

At only fifty-three years old, Ahrendts was set at Burberry and could have continued there until she decided to retire. Instead she did something that surprised many people. She chose to step down as CEO at that company to become a senior vice-president of Apple. As writer Jeff Chu asked, “Why would a CEO become someone else’s underling?”⁸ Because a grounded leader who is humble is willing to take on a new challenge, even though it means taking risks, giving up power, and losing a degree of autonomy.

Authenticity: Being Comfortable in Your Own Skin

Successful leaders are often put on pedestals by people. To stay real and grounded, leaders need to get off that pedestal and stay with the people. They do that by being honest and authentic. Maybe that’s why Mark Batterson, an author and the lead pastor of National Community Church in Washington, D.C., identifies authenticity as the new authority in leadership.

If you are a leader, your goal is to lift up your people, not have them lift you up. If you allow others to put you on a pedestal or if you minimize your faults and accentuate your successes, you create what I call the Success Gap. That’s a perceived distance between successful people and those who are less successful. Inauthentic people enjoy that gap, protect their image, try to stay above the crowd, and, if anything, make the gap look even larger.

In contrast, authentic leaders work hard to close that gap. How? They are open about their failures and shortcomings. They use self-deprecating humor and laugh at themselves. When they are asked to speak, they prefer simple introductions, and they walk among the people and connect with them before and after their time onstage. They do everything they can to be themselves without pretense.

Calling: Having a Purpose That Is Bigger than You

The third thing that can keep leaders grounded is their calling. Recently during a Q and A session I was asked the difference between a dream and a calling. My answer was that a dream is something you really want to do, but a calling is something you have to do. Look at the lives of people like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr., and Steve Jobs. They were people who felt compelled to do their life’s work.

A dream is something you really want to do, but a calling is something you have to do.

Every day I wake up knowing that my calling is to add value to leaders so they can multiply value to others. This is what I’ve been doing for the last forty years. It’s who I am. It’s what I know. It’s what I want and love to do. It’s not work. As the old saying goes, work isn’t work unless you’d rather be doing something else. I don’t want to do anything else.

Work isn’t work unless you’d rather be doing something else.

Author and marketing expert Seth Godin advises, “Instead of wondering what your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” I think that’s something everyone should aspire to. There’s nothing like doing what you were created for. I know that for me…

When I found my why, I found my way.

When I found my why, I found my will.

When I found my why, I found my wings.

I never want to become a leader so full of himself that he becomes unable to fulfill his purpose. Leaders who do that become unstable. That’s why I check myself to make sure that I remain grounded. If I maintain humility, display authenticity, and remain true to my calling, the chances are good that I’ll be able to keep my feet on the ground.

4. Am I Adding Value to My Team? A Question of Teamwork

I shared with you at the beginning of the chapter that John Wooden said to me in one of our mentoring sessions, “There is one question I ask myself every day.” Here’s what he said: “Every day I ask myself, how can I make my team better?” Not only did that question inspire me to create my own list of questions to ask myself as a leader, but it’s such a good question that it also made my list.

As a leader, I need to figure out what I can do to make my team better, to add value to the players and promote teamwork. Here are my suggestions for adding value, based on what I learned from Coach Wooden. Every day, I try to do the following:

Promote Full Commitment

Executive speaking coach Patricia Fripp says, “A team is a group of people who may not be equal in experience, talent, or education but in commitment.” A team whose members aren’t committed is doomed to perform unevenly when the heat is on. That commitment must start with the leader and extend to the entire team.

“A team is a group of people who may not be equal in experience, talent, or education but in commitment.”

—Patricia Fripp

When Coach Wooden noticed that a player wasn’t giving 100 percent in practice, he would take that person aside and say, “I know you think you can make up tomorrow for what you don’t do today, but that is impossible. If you are giving 50 percent today, you can’t give 150 percent tomorrow! You can never give more than 100 percent.”

If you are a leader, the true measure of your success is not getting people to work. It’s not getting people to work hard. It is getting people to work hard together. That takes commitment.

Create an Environment of Encouragement and Support

One of the nicest things about teamwork is that you always have others on your side. It’s pulling together, not pulling apart. It’s many voices, one heart. But that often doesn’t occur unless there is an environment of encouragement and support. Leaders need to take responsibility for working to create that.

One of the ways Coach Wooden used to do that was to ask his players to acknowledge the skills and contributions of others. He told each player that if a teammate made a great pass or set a pick that allowed him to score, he should acknowledge the teammate on the way back down the court. One time a player asked, “Coach, if we do that, what if the teammate that made the assist isn’t looking?” Coach Wooden replied, “He will always be looking.” Coach knew that people look for and thrive on acknowledgment and appreciation.

Identify Adversity as an Opportunity to Develop Character

Teamwork is never tested during good times. You know how good your team is when adversity hits. It introduces you to yourself, and it reveals where you’re strong and where you’re weak. We often don’t like that, but the reality is that losses can be learning experiences if your attitude is right. Author and apologist C. S. Lewis took that thought one step further. He wrote, “God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons we could not learn in any other way.”

Coach Wooden told me that in the early years of his coaching, his team did not have a basketball arena of its own, so all of its games were played at the arenas of opponents. That sure seems as if it would be a hardship. However, Coach felt that this disadvantage to his team became an advantage during the NCAA tournament, because his team was used to playing on the road. We would be wise to look for the opportunity in adversity and learn from it.

Consider Each Person’s Strengths and Weaknesses

One night I was having dinner with former college football coach Lou Holtz, friend and businessman Collin Sewell, and other friends in Odessa, Texas. As we sat and talked about leadership and teamwork, Lou said something that grabbed my attention: “The freedom to do your own thing ends when you have obligations and responsibilities. If you want to fail yourself you can—but you cannot do your own thing if you have responsibilities to team members.”

“The freedom to do your own thing ends when you have obligations and responsibilities.”

—Lou Holtz

I believe that’s true. If you are a team leader, you must take responsibility for helping your team to succeed. A big part of that is knowing what everyone’s strengths and weaknesses are and using everyone’s strengths to help the team win. You can do that by asking, “What’s best for the rest?”

Many people don’t think to ask that question. Why? Because people are often naturally focused on themselves. Here’s an example. When a group picture is taken with you in it, who is the first person you look for when you see the picture? Yourself. How do you determine if it’s a good picture? It usually depends on how good you look in it. Only after you’ve checked your own image do you begin looking at everyone else’s.

Teamwork demands that we focus a little less on ourselves and a little more on how the team looks. To succeed, we must value completing one another more highly than competing with one another. If we want the team to win, we can’t be like the man in the comic strip who says to his friend, “There may not be an ‘I’ in team, but there is an ‘M’ and an ‘E,’ and that spells me!”

Good leaders are like good coaches. They know how to bring out the best in the people on their team. That’s what John Wooden did. It’s also what legendary NFL coach Vince Lombardi did. When he took over the Green Bay Packers, the team had suffered through eleven straight losing seasons. Lombardi turned the team around in one season. How? By discovering the strengths and weaknesses of his players and helping them to perform at their best. In particular, Bart Starr, Jim Taylor, and Paul Hornung—all of whom had sat on the bench under Lombardi’s predecessor—excelled. In fact all three of them ended up in the Hall of Fame.

If you are a leader and you are not adding value to your team, you need to question whether or not you should even be the leader. Adding value to team members and helping them to win are what leadership is all about.

5. Am I Staying in My Strength Zone? A Question of Effectiveness

Of all the questions I ask myself as a leader, this one has done the most to help me reach my potential. But I didn’t know to ask it at the beginning of my career. In fact, when I started in leadership, I didn’t even know I had a strength zone! I did everything. In addition, I spent too much time on the wrong things and mistook activity for progress.

Poet and critic Samuel Johnson wrote, “Almost every man wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities he does not possess.” That was me. But that’s OK. In the beginning of our lives, we have to do many tasks that don’t play to our strengths. In fact, if we don’t do a lot of things, we won’t be able to find our strengths. But it’s sad if after several years in our careers we still haven’t discovered our strengths. Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, said, “A gift opens the way and ushers the giver into the presence of the great.”9 How can we ever reach our potential if we don’t know what we do well?

I was fortunate to have parents who recognized, encouraged, and cultivated my strengths, so I got an early start in life in this area. But I also worked at learning about them. I tried new things. I asked people for constructive feedback. And I used tools to help me understand who I am. One that I often recommend to others is StrengthsFinder. Developed by members of the Gallup organization, it is a survey that nearly ten million people have used to discover their top five natural strengths.

“Almost every man wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities he does not possess.”

—Samuel Johnson

As I discovered my strengths, I disciplined myself to work within and improve on those strengths. As I grew in them, I developed my uniqueness and found a greater sense of purpose. Philosopher-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson asserted, “Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him.” What he is describing is moving toward the unlimited potential each of us has when we find and stay in our strength zone.

Staying in your strengths gives you an advantage. In a world where people spend much of their time shoring up their weaknesses, your focus on maximizing your strengths will set you apart from others. That’s good. However, your temptation as a leader may be to leverage that advantage selfishly for personal gain. As Daniel Vasella, chairman of Novartis AG, says, “When you achieve good results… you are typically celebrated, and you begin to believe that the figure at the center of all that champagne toasting is yourself.” You must guard against that.

Staying in your strengths also gives you opportunities. You don’t want to miss them. In the foreword of my friend Kevin Hall’s book Aspire, Stephen R. Covey writes,

The root of opportunity is port, meaning the entryway by water into a city or place of business. In earlier days, when the tide and winds were right and the port opened, it allowed entry to do commerce, to visit, or to invade and conquer. But only those who recognized the opening could take advantage of the open port, or opportunity.10

The more you focus on your strengths, the better you will be positioned to see and seize opportunities as they arise.

If you haven’t already done so, when you discover your talents, gifts, and strengths, you will come to a point of decision. Will you use them to coast along? Or will you dig into the hard work of developing them?

Someone who did this was Major League pitcher Nolan Ryan. There was no question that Ryan had talent. He pitched his first no-hitter before he was in high school. And as a high school pitcher, he once struck out twenty-one batters in a single game. It was said that he threw the ball so hard that he broke bones in the hands of his catchers. But when Ryan made it to the Major Leagues, he realized he could not simply rely on his talent. He had to improve it. Ryan explains,

All I knew was to throw as hard as I could for as long as I could. Early in my career in the big leagues, when I would get in trouble I would resort back to that mindset. Finally, after being unsuccessful with that approach—I learned that when I was just throwing hard I was throwing wild and walking guys and losing games—it finally dawned on me. If I didn’t make an adjustment or change, then I was going to be one of those players who was very gifted, but didn’t make a lot out of it.… A lot of people get here with the God-given ability, the gift that they received. But to stay here and have a lengthy career takes a commitment to make sacrifices that most won’t continually make. Talent may get you here, but it takes work, real work, to stay here, and it takes development of the mental side of your game to separate yourself on this level.11

Ryan did separate himself, so much so that he ended up in the Hall of Fame. He played at the highest level until age forty-six. By the time he retired, he had won 324 games, recorded 5,714 strikeouts (the most in history), struck out 383 batters in one season (another record), and pitched seven no-hitters (also the most in history). That’s what you call staying in your strength zone!

6. Am I Taking Care of Today? A Question of Success

Good leaders naturally look to the future. They are known for vision and for leading others to new and higher destinations. However, the future isn’t where anything gets accomplished. That happens today. That’s why you need to take care of it.

John Wooden would often say, “Make every day your masterpiece.” How do we do that? By making each day count. We need to have the words of former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir ringing in our ears every day. She said, “I must govern the clock, not be governed by it.”

“I must govern the clock, not be governed by it.”

—Golda Meir

Getting your hands around what you should be doing every day can be difficult. To best use my time correctly, there are five areas where I want to make sure I’m taking care of business. I can’t do everything every day, but I can do the most important things every day. Here is what’s on my list:

Faith

Former president Jimmy Carter asserted, “My faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference.” That’s a great perspective. Because I agree with that, I must be sure to exercise and live out my faith every day.

For me, faith means bringing God into the picture every day. And that’s good news. Looking at everything with God in the picture gives me a sense of security and resilience. When your day is filled with those two qualities, you will have a good day.

Family

For many years now my definition of success has been having those who are closest to me love and respect me the most. Why? Because if those who really know me don’t respect me, it means I’m not living right and doing what I should. Respect has to be earned. Keeping this in mind is a gut check for me and helps me remember to always do right by my family.

As parents, Margaret and I tried to give our children roots and wings. We gave them roots by instilling values that would keep them grounded. Today they have beautiful families and are giving their children those same roots. We also tried to give them a good self-image and believed in them so they could fly. Today we are also trying to do that for our grandchildren.

Here’s what I know. You can’t do much about your ancestors, but you can influence your descendants in a wonderful way.

Relationships

One of my strong beliefs, which I shared in my book Winning with People, is “All things being equal, people will do business with people they like. All things not being equal, they still will.”

Success is a relationship game. Dr. Thomas W. Harrell, former professor emeritus of applied psychology at Stanford University, spent much of his career tracking a group of MBAs after graduation. He discovered that their grade point averages had little connection to their ultimate success in the business world. What really mattered was their social skills. The graduates who ended up with the most prestigious jobs and the highest salaries were communicative, outgoing, and energetic.12 As New York–based executive recruiter John Callen says, “The most sought-after skill from CEO on down is the ability to communicate with people. The person who can do that in business will always be in demand.”

“The most sought-after skill from CEO on down is the ability to communicate with people.”

—John Callen

Relationships are important to every area of life. They help define who we are and what we can become. Most of us can trace our success to pivotal relationships.

Few things will pay you bigger dividends in life than the time and trouble you take to understand people and build relationships. As I have said for years, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Take care of relationships today, and you do much to take care of success tomorrow.

Mission

My mission, like yours, is personal. I am responsible for fulfilling mine. You are responsible for fulfilling yours. My personal mission is to add value to leaders who multiply value in others. Every day I have to ask myself whether I am actually doing that. I have never made it my goal to try to build companies or organizations. My passion has been for my mission and I have led organizations to try to fulfill it.

If I give personal attention to my mission every day, that will help to keep me from straying away from it someday in the future. That will also be true for you.

Health

The discipline of taking care of my health has been a daily battle for me. Eating right and exercising daily are things I find it very easy to neglect. And for many years I did. To me it looked like the only way to get healthy was to follow the advice of Mark Twain: “Eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d druther not.”

Though I don’t have much natural desire in this area, I do possess a great desire to finish my life well—but not too soon. My cardiologist often says to me, “You help a lot of people and you are responsible for staying around as long as you can.” So I work on my health daily. I may not do it perfectly, but I do it.

Each day is an unrepeatable miracle. Today will never happen again, so we must make it count. Do that with every today, and tomorrow will take care of itself.

Each day is an unrepeatable miracle. Today will never happen again, so we must make it count.

7. Am I Investing My Time with the Right People? A Question of ROI

The greatest legacy any leader can leave is the other leaders he raises up before he’s finished. That means finding the right people and investing in them continually.

People often ask me how to find great leaders. The answer is simple: know what a great leader looks like. If you have a clear picture of a good leader and you can describe it in words, you know what you’re looking for.

If you don’t already have a list of your own, take a look at mine and see which factors you also desire in the leaders you work with:

1. The Influence Factor—Do they influence others?
2. The Capacity Factor—Do they have the potential to grow and develop?
3. The Attitude Factor—Do they desire to grow and develop themselves?
4. The Chemistry Factor—Do we like each other?
5. The Passion Factor—Are they self-motivated?
6. The Character Factor—Are they grounded?
7. The Values Factor—Are our values compatible?
8. The Teamwork Factor—Do they work well with others?
9. The Support Factor—Do they add value to me?
10. The Creative Factor—Can they find possibilities in impossibilities?
11. The Option Factor—Can their contribution give me options?
12. The 10 Percent Factor—Are they in the top 10 percent of those on our team?

When I first began developing leaders, I was so excited about making a difference with people that I was not very discriminating about whom I invested my time in. To put it bluntly, I recruited everybody. But then I discovered that not everyone desires to grow, and relatively few people truly want to make a difference. That’s a problem, because you can’t make a difference with people who don’t want to make a difference.

You can make an equal investment of time, effort, and resources in two different people and you will get a completely different return on each. When I realized that different people gave different ROIs—returns on investment—I began to change the way I approached leadership development. I started to think about who had given a good return for my time and who hadn’t. And that’s when I began to define what a good leader looks like. When the picture became clear to me, my investments became strategic—and my results improved greatly.

What’s on Your List?

Take some time to review my list and come up with your own. What factors are most important to you for selecting and investing in leaders? Remember, your leadership capacity and your legacy depend on the leaders you develop.

Author Noel M. Tichy says, “The ultimate test for a leader is not whether he or she makes smart decisions and takes decisive action, but whether he or she teaches others to be leaders and builds an organization that can sustain its success even when he or she is not around.” That requires not only the intent to develop leaders, but also the right people who are willing and able to grow and develop.

These are the seven questions I ask myself as a leader every day—inspired by my conversation with Coach John Wooden. They help me to be successful by keeping myself growing, checking my motives, maintaining stability, promoting teamwork, leveraging my strengths, focusing on today, and investing in the right people. I hope my list inspires and encourages you to take some time and think about the questions you need to be asking yourself every day.

Socrates is quoted as saying, “The unexamined life is not worth leading.” I would add that the unexamined leader is not worth following. Leaders who never take time to ask what they are doing and why they doing it are unlikely to stay on track, lead at their best, and reach their potential. That is why we need to keep asking ourselves tough questions.

The unexamined leader is not worth following.