My absolute favorite thing about human beings, said Kaily Adair, an honors business student and Phi Mu at the University of Alabama, “is that we're never satisfied with our condition—in the sense that we are constantly questioning, exploring, and innovating in order to better our situation as a whole.” Kaily's observation expresses one of the most important truths about leadership—the truth that challenge is the crucible for greatness.1 We said this in Chapter 1, and we're going to say more about it here. No leader ever made anything extraordinary happen by keeping things the same.
Kaily also added that:
If we were just content with the way things were, we might not have ever gotten past the Stone Age, we might never have discovered a way to harness electricity, and we may never have created the Internet enabling people around the world to connect. We are now researching ways to cure cancer, put people on Mars, and perfect alternative energy technologies—each day getting one step closer to what was considered science fiction less than a century ago. Better yet, once we achieve this, we will be searching for the next area for growth. We are constantly looking to challenge the process.
Ginni Rometty, IBM's chair, president, and chief executive officer (CEO), would likely agree with Kaily. At the 2015 Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, she offered this advice: “Think of when did you ever learn the most in your life? What experience? I guarantee you'll tell me it was a time you felt at risk.”2
To become a better leader, you have to step out of your comfort zone. You have to challenge the conventional ways of doing things and search for opportunities to innovate. Exercising leadership not only requires you to challenge the organizational status quo but also requires you to challenge your internal status quo. You have to challenge yourself. You have to venture beyond the boundaries of your current experience and explore new territory. Those are the places where there are opportunities to improve, innovate, experiment, and grow. Growth is always at the edges, just outside the boundaries of where you are right now.
Challenging yourself doesn't mean you need to go out and start something entirely new, launch a new company, begin a social movement, or change history to be considered a leader. But you do have to be involved in exploring, investigating, and experimenting with how things could be better than they are now. Just take a look around today's homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces, and you can't help noticing lots of things that aren't going as well as they could. There are no shortages of opportunities to improve the way things are and to have the possibility of making a difference.
Challenge is the defining context for leadership. We've consistently found this to be the case in our research on what people are doing when performing at their personal best as leaders. And not only is it the context for leadership, but it's also the context for learning.
In Chapter 3, we described the Personal-Best Leadership case study, the research methodology we use in our investigations of what people do when performing at their best as leaders. We explained that after reviewing thousands of these cases, we concluded that (1) everyone had a leadership story to tell, and (2) the leadership actions and behaviors across these stories were quite similar. The pattern of those responses led to the discovery of The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership.
We concluded something else from these cases of leadership best practices: Every one of them was about change, challenge, and adversity. In their Personal-Bests, people described dealing with misfortune, with turbulence, and with unexpected difficulties and hardships. They told us about venturing out into unchartered waters—personally, professionally, and organizationally. They told us about having to turn around failing operations or starting up a brand-new venture. They told us about pioneering a project no one else would even try or being the first to tackle an issue that terrified others. Not one single story was about keeping things the same, doing things the way they are always done, or maintaining the status quo. Not one.
Our research shows that:
It's important also to remember that we asked people to tell us about their personal-best leadership experiences. We didn't ask them to talk to us about change, or hardship, or turbulence, or volatility, or first ever, or adversity. But that's what they discussed, and that is why we say that challenge is the crucible for greatness. Maintaining the status quo is the breeding ground for mediocrity.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, distinguished professor of psychology and management and founder and codirector of the Quality of Life Research Center at Claremont Graduate University, found something similar in researching flow—a state in which a person is completely immersed in an activity and it seems quite effortless. It's often referred to as being in the zone. What he found was that “The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times. . . . The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”3 It's not only personal-best leadership that comes from stretching ourselves to do something that's difficult; everything that truly makes people happy in life comes from this kind of experience.
If you are going to learn to lead, then you need to be restless when it comes to the status quo, adopt the leadership attitude of looking for opportunities to challenge your skills and abilities, and be willing to experiment with changing the business-as-usual environment. Good enough can never be good enough when you strive to be the best you can be. In fact, we find that the more people report that they actively search outside the boundaries of their organizations for innovative ways to improve what is going on, the more effective and engaged they feel in their workplaces. And their managers and colleagues see this action, along with seeking out challenging opportunities to test one's skills and abilities, as directly correlated with how favorably they evaluate that individual's effectiveness.4
Challenges, difficulties, setbacks, and hardships are all familiar sights on the leadership landscape. And one of the things they cause you to do is to come face-to-face with yourself. They are a rather harsh way of reminding you of what's most important to you, what you value, and where you want to go. Randy Pausch knew this all too well when he delivered his now-famous last lecture at Carnegie Mellon University. At the very beginning of his speech, Randy stunned the audience when he told them that he had numerous tumors in his liver and that his doctors said he had three to six months of good health left. But he quickly added, “We cannot change the cards we're dealt, just the way we play the hand.” He said that he was not feeling morose or in denial and that he was well aware of what was happening to him. Then, in the course of his lecture, he made this observation: “The brick walls are there for a reason. They are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.”5
Randy's personal circumstances were certainly unique to him, but his observation applies to everyone. It's especially relevant to leaders. Your challenges may at times seem insurmountable compared with those others face. But you have to remind yourself that many generations before you have successfully dealt with world wars, economic depressions, and natural disasters. They've had to adapt to technological innovations, scientific advancements, and cultural shifts. What might seem like brick walls are really doors to a new future, asking, “What do you want? And how badly do you want it?”
Challenge, whether it's overcoming adversity or creating something unique and new, presents you the chance to ask yourself some very fundamental questions about your purpose and direction. It's another reason, as we discussed in Chapter 7, why it's essential to know what's important to you.
Leadership scholar Warren Bennis has said that “Leaders learn by leading, and they learn best by leading in the face of obstacles. As weather shapes mountains, problems shape leaders. Difficult bosses, lack of vision and virtue in the executive suite, circumstances beyond their control, and their own mistakes have been the leaders' basic curriculum.”6 Practitioner Jeanne Rineer, a group manager of camera procurement at Apple, agrees. Leaders, she says, “look for innovative ways to improve by taking risks and experimenting. If failures and mistakes are made, the mistakes are looked upon as learning opportunities instead of patterns of incompetence.”
Recent studies on the state of leadership and executive development reinforce Warren's observations and Jeanne's experience. In one survey, executives reported that they felt the most effective methods for leadership development were action-learning projects and stretch assignments.7 In another study, activities such as participating in cross-functional teams, working on a team to solve a specific customer issue, or being part of a global project team were the kinds of experiences that were most effective in developing their leadership capabilities.8 Just as leaders have to search for opportunities inside and outside their organizations to grow and develop the business, learners have to find those same kinds of opportunities to improve themselves. It's clear that if you want to develop your leadership capabilities, you need to take the initiative and volunteer for assignments that stretch you beyond your current comfort zone. You need to make them part of your personal leadership development curriculum. The only way that you can learn is when you are doing things that you've never done before. If you do only what you already know how to do, then you will never develop new skills and competencies, nor develop the confidence that comes with increased competence.
Remember, however, that a learning curve is not a straight line.9 Let's say you're doing something right now that you know how to do, and you're doing it very well. Then people like us come along and suggest that there's a need to improve and to learn new things. Because you're eager to excel, you say, “Great. I don't know how to do this, and I'd like to learn.” But when you engage in learning, instead of getting better, your performance at the beginning typically declines. That's why it's called a learning curve. When learning something new, performance almost always goes down before it goes up—and if it doesn't go down, then you are only doing something you already know how to do.
Abigail Donahue, a development associate at National Writing Project, experienced that learning curve when given the opportunity to convene a session at her organization's national conference. She said that it was “possibly one of the most challenging things I've done and stretched me to my limits in organizing this.” In the past when she didn't get something right at the beginning, she would typically doubt her capabilities and take that as a sign to stop doing whatever she was doing. However, Abby was able to find “an internal reservoir of strength to keep going because of the realization that learning is not a linear process. You are going to make some mistakes, but you just need to pick yourself up, learn from them, and keep moving forward.”
Perhaps, you've been told more than once in your life to “get it right the first time.” That's sound advice if it's a perfected method and you're concerned about consistency and quality. But it's terrible advice if you're trying to learn new things. The fact is that when learning something brand-new, no one ever gets it right the first, or second, or even possibly the third time. You're going to make mistakes while learning. That's just a natural part of the learning process, as Abby came to appreciate.
The real issue is how fast can you learn? How quickly can you learn from your mistakes and your failures before you get it right? Picture that learning curve in your head, and know that innovations are nearly always failures before they are successes. If every inventor, entrepreneur, or leader quit halfway through, nothing new would ever happen. Each failure produces valuable lessons that can be applied to the next iteration. Perseverance is an essential characteristic of exemplary learners, as well as of exemplary leaders. William J. Stribling, director and screenwriter, told us that “Embracing and loving failure is one of the most valuable things I've learned. It sucks, and it's hard every time, but ultimately it leads to good things and a richer perspective.” He went on to say that failure and success are all about perspective and related how impressed he is by the abilities of baseball managers and players to embrace failure. They play 162 games in a year, and winning slightly more than half of those games is a great success. A player might hit the ball only 25 percent of the time, and that's considered a solid batting average. As Will relates, “Having faith in yourself and your abilities allows you to accept the very real (and likely) possibility of failure, making failure far less scary, and, in fact, necessary.” Failures and disappointments are inevitable in learning and life. How you handle them will ultimately determine your effectiveness and success. You have to be honest with yourself and with others. You have to own up to your mistakes and reflect on your experiences so that you gain the learning necessary to be better the next time around.
The key message of this chapter is this: To both do your best and develop as a leader, you have to challenge yourself and face challenges head-on. You have to step outside your comfort zone. You have to seek new experiences, test yourself, climb over brick walls, experiment, make some mistakes, and keep ascending that learning curve. You're not growing until you feel you're pushing the edges.
Knowing that stretch assignments are among the most effective ways to learn and grow, reflect on your development needs, and make a list of such possibilities in your leadership journal. Select one that will challenge you—something that goes beyond your current level of skill and comfort. It shouldn't be something so difficult that you feel overly stressed and scared, but it needs to be something at the edges of your current capabilities. For example, if you want to improve your public-speaking abilities, you could personally stretch yourself by taking a course on public speaking or joining Toastmasters. Similarly, you could stretch yourself professionally by making a presentation at work or a national conference on something you might normally just share in written form.
Find ways to challenge yourself beyond your current capabilities. Maybe it's taking on an assignment in another country, interacting with a new customer group, or working in a functional area about which you don't know much. It could be learning to use a new computer application at work or creating a professional blog to write on issues about which you are passionate. Is there a place you could be volunteering or a task force you could join?
By the way, the learning experiences don't all need to connect directly with what you are doing right now or know today. Perhaps your growth opportunity can take the form of learning a new sport, language, or craft. It could be meeting people outside of your field or exposing yourself to movies, books, music, and places outside of your normal tastes. You could even revisit some things that you might not have liked or cared for in the past and give them a second, and possibly even new, look.
Keep coming back to this list. Challenge will always be your training ground for developing your leadership capabilities. Stretching yourself and facing new challenges isn't something to check off your list. It's something to keep doing continuously to improve and grow.