How did you learn to lead? We've asked this question of everyone in our research on Personal-Best Leadership Experiences. No matter where people are in their careers, or how they acquired their leadership knowledge and skills, the answer comes down to two key categories.
The first is trial and error. There's no substitute for learning by doing, especially doing things that challenge you. Typical comments are ones like this from Denise Straka, vice president of corporate insurance for Calpine Corporation: “One of the ways I learned to lead was by trial and error and then acknowledging mistakes and doing things differently next time.”1 Whether it's taking on a new supervisory role, leading a team project, heading up a volunteer community improvement effort, chairing a professional association's annual conference, captaining a sports team, or starting up a business venture, the more chances you have to serve in a leadership role, the more likely it is you'll develop the skills to lead. You just get in there and try things. Some stuff works and other stuff doesn't; but when you step back and reflect on what happened, these experiences yield valuable lessons on leadership.
The second most frequently mentioned way in which individuals learn to lead is from people. Not only do you need other people's support, as we noted in the previous chapter, but you also need to discover the lessons experienced leaders can teach you. You don't have to engage in all the experiences yourself; you can learn by observing how other people lead, both well and poorly. Cliff Dennett, executive vice president and senior lending officer, Pinnacle Bank, echoes this message in telling us that he's “been fortunate to work and be mentored by several excellent leaders, and over the years I've made mental notes of the positive attributes these leaders exhibit.” Look around. There are people who can show you what leadership looks like in the real world.2
Experienced leaders are not only role models. They are also necessary connections to information, resources, and, of course, other people. They make it a lot easier for you to get doors to open, and they increase the chances you'll get to meet those who can provide exceptional learning and career opportunities in your future.
To become an exemplary leader, you have to connect to others. You have to invite people into your life. You have to knock on doors and introduce yourself. You have to be curious and want to interact with them. You have to be willing to get close to people and open up with them. You need to plug into the resources others have, find opportunities to observe leaders in action, and learn the social skills that will facilitate social interaction. You don't have to be a fiery extrovert to do all this; you can be a quiet introvert and still make lots of connections.3 Whichever you are, you have to network and make connections, building relationships with people.
When it comes to making connections, you need to be the first mover. You need to take the initiative. Go knock on doors or call people up, and ask them whether they'd spend a few minutes with you talking about their work. Brian Grazer, the movie producer mentioned in an earlier chapter, is extraordinary at this.
“I had a rule for myself,” Brian explained. “I had to meet one new person in the entertainment business every day.” Initially his conversations were just with entertainment business insiders, but “pretty quickly I realized that I could actually reach out and talk to anyone, in any business that I was curious about. It's not just showbiz people who are willing to talk about themselves and their work—everyone is.”4 Brian estimates that these conversations number more than 500, and they've led to movies, business ventures, and creative endeavors. Most important, they've enriched him with a wealth of knowledge and information that he can draw upon every day of his life.
The evidence around social capital strongly supports Brian's belief about the importance of relationships.5 Humans are social animals and hardwired to connect.6 Survival and growth depend on it. The information economy wouldn't exist unless people needed to connect. Information flows depend on social networks, and through norms of reciprocity they mutually benefit everyone involved. People will do extraordinary things for one another, and you need to both build and tap into this urge to form social networks. The more connections and relationships you have, the more access you'll have to richer and more diverse sources of information and knowledge; they enlarge the potential pool of people from whom you can learn and seek guidance. James Citrin, a senior partner and member of the board of the search firm Spencer Stuart and the author of The Career Playbook: Essential Advice for Today's Aspiring Young Professional, explains that relationships are “critical both to getting jobs and being successful on the job, as well as being one of the most essential factors to overall happiness.”7 Research shows very clearly that when social connections are numerous and strong, there's more trust, reciprocity, information flow, collective action, happiness, and wealth.
It's important to recognize and appreciate that no one gave Brian the work assignment to have curiosity conversations. He came up with that idea all on his own. And he did it when he was fresh out of college. You can do the same thing. You can make a rule for yourself to have a curiosity conversation with one person each day. If it can't be once a day, make it once a week. Get curious and get more connections.
As you advance in your career, the quality of your connections becomes more and more significant. Recent longitudinal research has found that when people are in their twenties, the number of social interactions predicts greater well-being. As people move into their thirties and beyond, however, the quality of relationships becomes more important.8 Your ability to cultivate intimacy with others increasingly becomes a significant factor in your personal and professional development.
Researchers have shown that “high-quality connections contribute to individual flourishing and to team and organizational effectiveness.”9 People who have high-quality connections are healthier, have higher cognitive functioning, are broader thinkers, are more resilient, are more committed to the organization, and know better whom to trust and not to trust. They also exhibit more learning behaviors. With high-quality relationships, people are more open, which means they more readily and fully understand themselves and the viewpoints of others. Greater quality in your connections results in more attentiveness to what's going on around you and how to approach various activities. The quality of your relationships significantly influences the quality of your learning.
You still have to be you, but you can more effectively develop your leadership abilities by connecting to people who, based on their experiences, can teach you about the things you would like to achieve and the skills you'd like to acquire. Find out about their struggles, hardships, and mistakes as well as their accomplishments. Consider connecting with people who are not particularly well known or flashy but who exhibit deep competence, unswerving dedication, and a good sense of who they are. Most important, choose people who make you feel good about yourself because the purpose of this relationship, after all, is to encourage and inspire you to improve yourself. The people with whom you connect should be people who care about you and are interested in your betterment.
In finding and selecting people with whom to connect, start by thinking local. Who is a friend or colleague at work who's been successful at leading in the context in which you're interested? Who has mastered a leadership skill you would most like to learn? Who exercises excellent judgment, is insightful, or is visionary? Who is someone you know who has overcome rejection or obstacles in the course of a career? Think of what you most need right now, and then look nearby for people you know. Start locally and then expand that circle out as you gain more experience in engaging with others around your learning agenda. Travis Carrigan, a senior engineer at Pointwise Inc., tells us that he's been doing this for the last few years, and he says that it's led to some great projects and collaborative work. “These relationships,” he says, “are phenomenal at helping me become a better leader, listener, and engineer.”
People become the leaders they observe. If you want to become an exemplary leader, you have to watch and study exemplary leaders. “Modeling is the first step in developing competencies,” says Stanford professor Albert Bandura, one of the world's leading authorities on the topic. “By observing modeled performances, individuals gain knowledge about the dynamic structure of the skill being acquired. Repeated opportunities to observe the modeled activities enable observers to discover the essential features of that skill, organize and verify what they know, and give special attention to missing aspects.”
To become the best leader, you'll need more than the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that make you a successful leader; you also must understand how to apply these across a variety of real-life settings. Although reading stories and biographies of leaders is helpful, as is watching videos and movies, it's a lot more useful to observe and engage in real time with real people who have mastered leadership competencies.
If you want to improve your ability to give an inspiring presentation, watch and study someone who's mastered that skill. If you want to know how to handle a difficult negotiation, find a way to observe one in action. If you want to know how to become more future oriented, spend time with someone who's mastered that art and science. You can't know how to do something until you've seen it done successfully. Observing models of mastery is an extraordinarily effective development methodology.
Of course, you will eventually have to do this on your own. You won't be able to pull out your tablet every time you are about to perform a task and watch an expert do it first. However, it helps enormously when you can start learning from a good role model and then create a mental picture of performing that same skill yourself. For example, we asked Taylor Bodman, general partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, to reflect on the leadership role models in his life. He was able to tell us in great detail why he selected each person, what each did, how he felt about each, and what he learned from each that enabled him to be a better leader. All of them were people he knew personally and not the people who make the covers of magazines or the nightly news.
Taylor's experience is consistent with our research showing that the majority of people find their role models close to home. Although it's commonplace in the popular press to talk about the rich and famous, that is not where most people find exemplars from whom they learn about leadership. After asking people for nearly 30 years to recall who has been their most important leader role model, the results are consistent over time. For people younger than 30 years of age, the top three categories of leader role models are family member, teacher or coach, and community or religious leader. For individuals older than 30, the top three categories are family member, business leader (usually an early-career supervisor), and then teacher or coach.
Positive role models are also necessary because it is impossible to excel based upon a negative. You can excel only to a positive example. You can know 100 things not to do, but if you don't know even one thing to do, then you can't perform the task. Likewise, what you can learn from an ineffective supervisor is quite limited; knowing what you don't want to emulate is a poor substitute for knowing what you do want to imitate. It's essential to have positive role models in your life because they are the individuals who can demonstrate the most skillful execution of a leadership behavior or practice.
Obviously, no two people will have the same set of role models. Moreover, your role models don't need to be exemplary at every leadership behavior; that would be a tall order to fill. Focus on one or two skills you most want to learn, and look for an individual who's good at those. Your role models can come from anywhere (home, work, or community), so look around. You'll greatly benefit from watching them work.
The key message of this chapter is this: To learn to become an effective leader, you need to get connected. You need good advice and counsel, and you need people who can open doors for you. Identify who those people are, how you can reach out to them, and what you can do to improve the quality of your relationships with them. You're going to have to take the initiative to create and sustain relationships. Find people who are role models; observe how they do what they do. Follow their example.
In the last chapter, we asked you to surround yourself with individuals who could provide you support and encouragement. Now we would like you to go one step further and propose that you put together a personal board of directors. Your personal board should have four to seven people whom you respect and trust and to whom you can turn when you need counsel on tough questions and ethical dilemmas, guidance during transitions, advice about personal development needs, and help in staying true to your values and beliefs. They should represent a diverse set of skills and experiences and be role models of many of the skills you'd like to develop.10
Whom would you like to be on your personal board of directors? Make a list in your leadership journal of their names and, ideally, what help you'd like from each person. Start by asking one person to be on your board. Tell that person what you're up to, and ask whether they'd be available for a cup of coffee every so often to offer advice and counsel. You can then go out and find a second board member.