We've been following the inspiring life of Don Bennett for more than 30 years. Our initial encounter with Don was after he'd become the first amputee to ascend Mt. Rainier—that's 14,411 feet on one leg and two poles. We interviewed him about his leadership of the team that made that climb.1 More recently, Don's been talking about his current passion, the Amputee Soccer League. He's working very hard to qualify amputee soccer for the Paralympic Games, and he's almost there. What's really fascinating is how it all got started.
After completing his historic climb, Don told us he was in the best shape of his life. He wanted to continue to do something to stay in good physical condition, and he started thinking about what he could do. One day Don was outside watching his son, Tom, shoot baskets. Tom kept missing, and the ball kept bouncing around. Don couldn't bend over to pick it up, so he just kicked the basketball with his one good leg. He did that several times, and later that evening he had this flash of inspiration. “Wait a minute,” he remembers saying to himself. “We can ski on one leg. Why can't we play soccer with one leg?” He continued to explain:
All I had was the inspiration. I didn't know that much about soccer. I didn't know there were even two sizes of soccer balls. . . . So the next thing is to get out and start doing something. The doing part of it is picking up a phone, calling a few friends, and saying, “Why don't you meet me over on Mercer Island. Don't bring your artificial legs. I've got an idea here. I really feel it.” So when they come over, I pull out a soccer ball. They already have their crutches, and we start kicking it . . . Then things start happening. You've got to kick the ball around to get a feel for it. . . . The inspirations come with kicking the ball.
Don's amputee soccer story captures the essence of what leaders do when they are curious and have a question about something. They go kick the ball around. They experiment. They take initiative.
Research shows, for example, that the master of business administration (MBA) students who rate high on proactivity are considered by their peers as better leaders, and they engage more in extracurricular and civic activities targeted toward bringing about positive change.2 Similarly, salespeople who score high on proactivity are likely to make more sales and receive higher commissions compared with those low on proactivity.3 Taking initiative also results in a stronger support network and higher performance evaluations by direct supervisors.4 Taking charge of change pays off for leaders, constituents, and their communities. Taking charge of your own development pays off in the same way.
One simple way to exercise initiative is by being curious. When you're intrigued by something, you become inquisitive, and you're eager to know the answer to questions. That's what Don Bennett was when he asked himself, “Can people play soccer with one leg?” His curiosity and his question led him to start a movement that meaningfully occupied his time and energy for decades. The same thing can happen to you when you become curious.
It certainly happened to Brian Grazer, one of the most successful movie producers ever. Among his credits are some of the most popular films in recent years, including Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, Splash, and Parenthood. To what does he attribute his phenomenal success? His answer: “Curiosity has, quite literally, been the key to my success, and also the key to my happiness.”5He also says, “Curiosity is what gives energy and insight into everything that I do. . . . For me, curiosity infuses everything that I do with a sense of possibility.”6
How does Brian express his curiosity? “I ask questions. The questions spark interesting ideas. The questions build collaborative relationships. The questions create all kinds of connections—connections among unlikely topics, among unlikely collaborators.”7 Asking questions is one of the best ways, in his opinion, for learning from other people and expanding your own knowledge and insight into what is going on.
Brian suggests if you want to start a curiosity conversation, you can begin with something like this: “I've always been curious about how you ended up as a [whatever that profession is], and I was wondering if you'd be willing to spend 20 minutes talking to me about what it took to get where you are—what the key turning points in your career were?”8 In that conversation, you can ask about a significant challenge they faced in their careers, or why they do something in a particular way, or how they handled an extraordinarily difficult situation, or how they came up with a particular idea. There is no fixed set of questions. You have to tailor them to the person and situation, but questions, sparked by curiosity and with an underlying interest in learning, always get the conversation started. Open-ended questions get people talking whereas closed-ended ones shut down conversations and unnecessarily narrow them.
Questions send people on journeys in their minds. Knowing what to ask and how to ask it are critical skills for leaders and learners. The better the question, the more rewarding the journey is. Preparing to ask questions forces you to think about what you'd like to learn. For example, do you want to improve your capacity to enlist others in a common vision? Do you want to do a better job of strengthening others? Do you want to know more about the trends that might influence the direction of your work in the next 10 years? What exactly is the journey you'd like to go on? What are the questions to which you'd like to know the answers? Whom are the best people to ask? Spending time reflecting on questions like these is vital to your development.
When you are curious about things that are outside of your regular affairs, and when you start asking questions, what you learn often becomes the catalyst for change and opens up new possibilities. This is all part of having that growth mindset that we talked about in Chapter 5. Because they believe that they are capable of always learning and developing and that their abilities aren't fixed, individuals with a growth mindset seek opportunities to learn. Gathering information about how they are doing and what they could do better is part of that process.
Which is precisely the insight that Varun Mundra, currently with Indasia Fund Advisors, gained when thinking back upon his early career experiences as a financial analyst: “When I did question the status quo—when I did come up with innovative ideas, when I followed through with the changes I suggested, got feedback, understood my mistakes, learned from them, and was open to improvements—I won the respect of the people around me. It did not matter as much whether the changes were as effective as hoped for but the fact that someone was ready to stand up and challenge what everyone else used as the norm was generally enough to get something started.”
This positive view of questioning, getting feedback, and being open to improvement enabled Varun not only to initiate change, but also to earn greater trust and respect. Being curious and asking questions—even challenging ones—can lead to positive outcomes.
When you take the initiative, when you are curious, and when you ask lots of questions, you're invariably going to come up with a long list of things to try. And it's highly likely that you're not going to know much about or how to do many of them. Good job! Leadership is not about playing it safe, and learning is not about doing what you already know how to do. Sure, you could always play only to your strengths. You may even enjoy it. But where's the growth or the opportunity for greatness in just doing that?
Leadership is always much messier in practice than it is in plans. The same goes for learning. You will stumble, make mistakes, have setbacks, and experience failures. But with a learning mindset, you can act like a scientist. Make your life a laboratory, and use it to conduct as many experiments as possible.
Try something new, fail, learn. Try something new, fail, learn. Try something new, fail, learn. This phrase should be one of your leadership mantras. Realize, as well, that you will learn that every so often you should try something entirely different, pursue another approach, or change pathways.
Charles Kettering, the founder of Delco and holder of more than 185 patents, used to say, “It doesn't matter if you try and try and try again, and fail. It does matter if you try and fail, and fail to try again.” Baseball's home run champion Hank Aaron put it this way: “My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.” And as Harry Potter series author J. K. Rowling said, “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”9 You need to heed their lessons. History will not judge you harshly for your failures if you learn from them, but it will be unkind if you fail to try, stop swinging, or live too cautiously. Those who have left the most lasting legacies are those who have made mistakes, failed, but then tried again. That final try makes all the difference.
You can learn something about trying, failing, and trying again from how exemplary coaches help young players become successful. Consider this example from the Institute for Women's Leadership Founder and CEO Rayona Sharpnack about coaching her eight-year-old daughter's softball team. Rayona certainly knew the game: She was the first player-manager in the 1980s of the most profitable franchise of the International Women's Professional Softball League. Before that, she set a Junior Olympic record by throwing a softball 189 feet. On one of the first days of practice for her daughter's team, she had everyone try to do some batting. As she explains,
I take a soft, spongy ball, and I toss it to the first girl. She's standing maybe 10 feet away, I'm throwing baby tosses, and she screams and hides her head. So I say, “Hey, no problem, Suzy. Go to the back of the line. That's fine. Betsy, you step up.” Next girl in line, she does the same thing—buries her head and screams. So I'm realizing that this is going to be a really long practice if we don't do something different.
I go out to my car where I have my handy whiteboard markers in my briefcase. I take the bag of practice balls and draw four smiley faces—red, black, blue, and green—on each ball. When you look at a ball, all you see is one smiley face. I go back out and call the girls back over: “Okay. We're going to play a different game this time,” I say. “This time, your job is to name the color of the smiley face. That's all you have to do.”
So little Suzy stands up, and I toss a ball by her. She watches it all the way and goes, “Red.” Next girl, Betsy, gets up there. Betsy goes, “Green.” They're all just chirping with excitement because they can identify the color of the smiley face, so I say, “Okay. Now I want you to do the same thing, only this time I want you to hold the bat on your shoulder when the ball goes by.” Same level of success. Excitement builds. The third time through, I ask them to touch the smiley face with the bat. We beat our opponents 27 to 1 in the first game.10
Rayona took something that was initially frightening and gradually overcame the team's fear the girls' lack of skills. She coached the girls in increments on how to focus on the task and then to execute. That's what this example is really about: It's about getting the learners to focus on something coming at them in a way that's not frightening. For example, maybe you dread interviews. Perhaps it's the idea of having questions tossed at you that's a little scary. A simple technique is to repeat back the question and ask the questioner if you understood them correctly. This process slows the ball down, so to speak, and gives your brain a few seconds to process the question.
Whatever your developmental needs, find ways to move incrementally forward. You don't have to hit it out of the park the first time. You just have to learn something with every swing. Every time a professional baseball player goes up to bat, he believes he's going to get a hit, even though he knows that his batting average would say this is impossible. Whatever the outcome, he stores away this experience so that next time he faces that same pitcher, he's better prepared to make a hit.
Taking the initiative to learn and grow is characteristic of leaders. Nevertheless, persistence is yet another essential ingredient in the formula for successful growth and development, and we'll explore that in the next chapter.
The key message of this chapter is this: To challenge yourself to grow and learn, you have to take the initiative to try new things. You have to be curious. You have to ask a lot of questions. You have to experiment with new ideas and new ways of doing things. And when you initiate, question, and experiment, you are inevitably going to make mistakes and fail. The key is to learn from the experience and be willing to repeat the process. Try, fail, learn, and repeat is your mantra from this chapter.
At the top of a page in your leadership journal, write down this statement: “When I think about what it takes to become an exemplary leader, what I am curious about is . . .” Next, record as many ideas as you can think of that respond to that statement.11 Don't worry about the quality of the ideas—it can be as simple as “How do you lead under conditions of uncertainty?” Or, “What gives people the courage to rock the boat with their peers?” Or, “How do you let go of the negative memories connected with missing a shot or missing a deadline?” Record as many as you can think of in three minutes.
When the time is up, go back through your list, and sort the ideas into three categories regarding their importance to your learning to become the best leader you can be: very important, important, and somewhat important. Now, just focus on the items you indicated were very important, and select one of them to pursue. Then identify individuals who are likely to have some familiarity with this question and can provide you some insights from their experience. Reach out to at least one on the list within the next week to schedule a curiosity conversation with them. Follow this up with another person; or if you got that question resolved to your satisfaction, take up another issue on your list and repeat the process. Keep track of the lessons learned in your leadership journal.