Challenge is the crucible for greatness.
Challenge is the crucible for greatness. Every single personal-best leadership case involved a change from the status quo. Not one person claimed to have achieved a personal best by keeping things the same. The challenge might have been an innovative new product, a cutting-edge service, a groundbreaking piece of legislation, an invigorating campaign to get adolescents to join an environmental program, a revolutionary turnaround of a bureaucratic military program, or the start-up of a new plant or business. It could also be dealing with unexpected economic downturns, personal betrayal, loss of physical ability, natural disasters, civil unrest, and technologi- cal disruptions. When Katherine Winkel, marketing operations manager at Seattle Genetics, reflected on her personal best and lis- tened to those of her colleagues, she was struck by “how similar the stories were and how each person had to overcome uncertainty and fear in order to achieve his or her best.”
Leaders venture out; they don’t sit idly by waiting for fate to smile on them. This was exactly what Rob Pearson, now R&D manager with Angiodynamics, experienced in his first job after
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G E college at Medtronic Corporate Ventures: “Change was thrust upon
me when I had to choose between being passive (guaranteed to fail) or seizing the initiative and bending the rules to suit my needs (increasing the possibility of success). I decided to rise up and meet the challenge head on.” By making something happen, Rob was able to move his project forward.
Leaders are pioneers, willing to step out into the unknown. But leaders aren’t the only creators or originators of new products, ser- vices, or processes. In fact, it’s more likely that they’re not. Innova- tion comes more from listening than from telling. You have to constantly be looking outside yourself and your organization for new and innovative products, processes, and services. You need to search for opportunities by seizing the initiative and by looking outward for innovative ways to improve.
Because innovation and change involve experimenting and taking risks, your major contribution will be to create a climate for experi- mentation in which there is recognition of good ideas, support of those ideas, and the willingness to challenge the system. Taking risks, says Ryan Diemer, business planner and purchasing analyst at Stryker Endoscopy, “is never easy and sometimes scary.” But what he learned from his personal-best leadership experience is “that taking risks is necessary because it requires you and those you are working with to challenge not only what you are working on but how you work. Sometimes the risks pay off and sometimes they do not, but what is always true is that if you do not take a risk, you won’t get any gain.”
When you take risks, mistakes and failures are inevitable. Proceed anyway. One way of dealing with the potential failures of experi- mentation is by constantly generating small wins and learning from experience. Pierfrancesco Ronzi, associate with McKinsey & Company in Italy, recalled how, in successfully turning around the credit
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process for a banking client in North Africa, it was necessary to break the project down into parts so that people in the organization could find a place to start, to determine what would work and how they could learn from one another in the process of moving forward. “Showing them that we were able to make something happen,” he said, “was a great boost for their confidence in the project and their willingness to stay involved.” As Pierfrancesco suggests, leaders are constantly learning from their errors and failures as they experi- ment, try new things, and incrementally move projects forward. The best leaders are the simply the best learners, and life is their laboratory.3
Enable Others to Act
A grand dream doesn’t become a significant reality through the actions of a single person. It requires a team effort. It requires solid trust and strong relationships. It requires deep competence and cool confidence. It requires group collaboration and individual account- ability.4 Sushma Bhope, program manager at Biomass NPL, appreci- ated how she had to “lead by empowering those around you.” In consolidating a customer relationship management system across a globally dispersed company, she realized clearly that “no one could have done this alone.” As other leaders have experienced, Sushma found that “it was essential to be open to all ideas and to give everyone a voice in the decision-making process. . . . The one guiding principle on the project was that the team was larger than any individual on the team.” Sushma clearly understands that no leader has ever gotten anything extraordinary done by working solo.
Leaders foster collaboration by building trust and facilitating relationships. This sense of teamwork extends far beyond a few
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G E direct reports or close confidants. You have to engage all who must
make the project work—and, in some way, all who must live with the results. Early in her career, Lorena Compeán, founder of Co- Creating Hong Kong, discovered that she needed to trust that other people on the project team could and would do their jobs. As the project manager, she found herself, at the beginning, “checking every single analysis they did, but I noticed how they got angry with me because I didn’t let them conclude anything by themselves.” She discovered that she needed to “show my trust in others in order to build their trust in me.”
Constituents neither perform at their best nor stick around for very long if you make them feel weak, dependent, or alienated. Giving your power away and fostering their personal power and ownership will make them stronger and more capable. When you strengthen others by increasing self-determination and developing competence, they are more likely to give it their all and exceed their own expectations. Heidi Winkler, attorney-at-law with Pihl, a privately held construction company in Denmark, learned from reflecting on her personal-best leadership experience “how much easier it is to achieve shared goals (or even make goals shared) when you involve people in the decisions to be made, trust them to handle the execution, and give them responsibilities and credit along the way.”
Focusing on serving the needs of others, and not one’s own, builds trust in a leader. And the more that people trust their leaders and each other, the more they take risks, make changes, and keep organizations and movements alive. Derek Rupnow, business devel- opment manager at Broadcom, points out that “you develop trust and respect by building personal relationships, as well as treating everyone with respect, and making sure to keep everyone up to speed on what is going on.” He seeks out the opinions of others and uses
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the ensuing discussions not only to build up their capabilities but also to educate and update his own information and perspective. Derek realizes that when people are trusted and have more discre- tion, more authority, and more information, they’re much more likely to use their energies to produce extraordinary results. Through that relationship, leaders turn their constituents into leaders themselves.
