From 1975 until his retirement in 1988, Senator William Proxmire from Wisconsin published a monthly winner of his Golden Fleece Award.  A fiscal hawk, Proxmire aimed to expose what he considered a wasteful use of taxpayer money.  The idea was quite popular and I remember many a newscaster gleefully exposing the latest in government waste.  Years later, in some discussion on scientific research, the Golden Fleece Awards came up again.  The grant money for fundamental R&D came overwhelmingly from government agencies like the DoE, DoD, NIH, etc and research grants were often the “winners” of Proxmire’s award.  We discussed one of these winners in depth: a research program to understand the sex lives of roaches.

I can see the eye brows raising.  The sex lives of roaches?  That seems a fairly ridiculous thing to study.  Except it wasn’t.  The researchers were investigating pheromones, those naturally produced agents that attract a member of a species to breed.  All jokes aside about actually wanting roaches to breed more, the identification of a cockroach sex attractant led to a fairly useful invention:  The Roach Motel.  Pre-Roach Motel, you would need to spray a poison around your kitchen or bathroom to hopefully banish the beasts (good luck with that).  The Roach Motel, however, attracted the roach to the “device”, which it entered and found the nicely contained poison.  (“Roaches check in….but they don’t check out.”)  For anyone with small children or pets, this was a huge safety improvement.  Now, pheromones are part of our common vernacular and are a critical part of the pest control industry.  Worth a little basic understanding of the sex lives of roaches.

There are several jumping off points from here on which to build an essay.  I could talk about how important basic research is and how scary it is that the US has severely reduced its support for fundamental knowledge building.  I could talk about how the practical application of knowledge is often a twisty turny unexpected road and most often cannot be managed through the use of Gantt charts, but patience in funding R&D is a topic for another time.  No, I want to go more general.  What the above example inspires in me today is this thought:  If something looks simple, or ridiculous, or stupid to me, my first thought is that I just don’t know enough about it.

A wonderful aspect of being retired is that I now have the time and the mental energy to read a whole lot more than I did while I was working.  I was a great skimmer, before.  And a great buyer of books and magazines that would pile up.  Now, not only do I have time to read these things; but being a lover of non-fiction, I have time to let my curiosity take me further into answering those follow on questions.  What I invariably find is that the truth has nuance and what I thought was fairly clear cut is not quite so clear.  For example, right now I am reading a lengthy treatise on Cliven Bundy—the Nevada rancher who has been fighting the Federal government for the right to graze his cattle on federal grasslands without paying a fee.  Reading the backstory is giving me a much greater understanding of where the Bundys are coming from.  While I still don’t agree with most of their positions, I do see a different way to have the conversation to come to an agreement.  And couldn’t we all do with a bit more understanding of where others are coming from?

Before I went to grad school at Penn State, I was a city girl who ardently opposed sport hunting.  I remember walking on College Avenue one day, seeing a car drive by with a deer strapped across the roof rack.  “How can they just kill these magnificent creatures?!” I would judgmentally exclaim.  Then I began to talk with my new friends, many of whom had been sport hunters all their lives.  I learned about deer overpopulation because their natural predator, the mountain lion, had been driven out.  I learned how deer were starving.  I learned about the true sport hunter and the ethics of sport hunting:  only fire when you can make a clean kill, use the meat, follow the state game rules.  I still abhor people who sit on the tops of hills with a high powered rifle, just knocking off animals for the fun of it.  But I understand and appreciate true sport hunting.  I appreciated it even more after I had a car accident with a deer!

In a business environment, assuming “easy answers” brings a lack of understanding across business functions that need to work together to accomplish a goal.  Things always look simple from a distance.  If you are in sales and you need a tweak to a product to close the deal, that tweak can often seem pretty minor–unless you are the process engineer who needs to figure out how to do that tweak.  Magnify this difficulty ten times when someone gets the “bright idea” to enter a new market without sufficient research.  Distance from the details always makes things look simple and straightforward.  We’ve talked about assumptions.  Don’t assume that just because you don’t know how difficult something can be that it must be easy.

This issue is exasperated in large organizations where those several layers above the people doing the work do not understand what it takes to get something done.  I remember a time when a hurricane flooded out a production facility.  Once the flood waters receded, a team was put together to assess the damage and execute repairs.  These people worked day and night for several weeks.  It was an amazing effort!  The quick turnaround saved the company loads of money in lost sales.  I was in a meeting where this result was brought up in side conversation. The senior manager’s take was “Geez, why can’t we get people to work like this all the time?” DO YOU HAVE ANY FREAKIN’ IDEA WHAT THOSE PEOPLE WENT THROUGH?  No, you don’t.  You were too far removed from the details of the effort. That was not sustainable! 

In this current world, where we are inundated with sound bites from all directions, resist the temptation to just accept what you read and hear.  Consider the source.  Dig a little bit to find all sides of the story.  As with other topics we’ve discussed, though, you do need to pick your battles.  It is time consuming and mentally exhausting to try to research every little thing.  However, never doing it is just as dangerous.  Even just retaining the consciousness that you may not know enough to judge is a very good thing.  Certainly you would want people who might judge–or misjudge–you and your actions to take the time to understand.  So even if you don’t have the time to dig into it, at least remember that if what you are hearing sounds ridiculous, simple or dumb, you probably just don’t know enough about it.

I have been anticipating writing this essay since the idea for this blog went from idea to reality.  People who know me know that this concept of owning your decisions and actions, owning your own role in creating the situation you are in, is a BIG hot button of mine.  I’ve built your expectations of an “essay to beat all other essays” as I’ve teased the appearance of this entry.  We’ve been building up to it over the last three essays, discussing first identifying the RIGHT problem to solve, then thinking forward a few steps in your decision-making process to ensure you are making the best decision, followed by a discussion on the consequences of the actions (or inactions) you take.  It all boils down to this thought, though:  whatever decision you make, whatever actions you take (or don’t take), whatever consequences occur because of those decisions and actions, you must own the outcome and deal with it.  So, here we go. (Steps up onto soapbox)

All of you out there, whether you’ve been in large multinational corporations or small “mom and pop” shops know someone like this:  They walk around every day grumbling about how unhappy they are.  “This place SUCKS,” you will often hear them sneer.  “I hate it here.”  After a while, you lose your patience and ask the obvious question:  why don’t you leave?  Invariably, the answer is “I can’t.  I’m stuck here.”  Oh, I got so tired of hearing “victim talk”!  You were not stuck there!  You just didn’t like the consequences of your other options.  You chose to stay, whether you wanted to admit it or not.  That was usually when I wanted to scream, “Shut up about it and make the best of the situation!  Own your choice to stay.”

I know another person, a serial small time entrepreneur.  He has had glimpses of brilliance, but invariably within a year or two each venture has failed.  Miserably.  Every time our paths would cross, there would be another sob story about what went wrong.  It was always due to issues beyond his control:  I couldn’t find good employees; the location was bad; there was too much local competition; and, my favorite, I was misled about the opportunity.  Do you know what I have never heard from him?  I have never heard any such version of:  this is what I’ve learned from this venture and what I know to look out for next time.  Never, I repeat, never has anything ever been his fault, or had he done anything which he could consider learning from for his next venture.

While I hesitate to go here, there is an awful lot of victim-playing going on in our current social environment.  The types of opportunities available to certain groups of people have changed as our economy has evolved.  Accepting that and asking the hard questions about what you need to do differently to get on a better path is hard work.  And often depressing.  And can leave you feeling helpless and hopeless.  For many, it is easier to play the victim and blame the “other”.  Unfortunately, our current social environment has embraced blaming the “other” to a violent and clearly counterproductive degree.  I know it’s hard, but OWN your situation.  Life may not have treated you fairly but blaming someone else is not going to make your situation better.

Although I’ve now spent about half this essay talking about how annoying, frustrating or even dangerous it is when other people don’t own their choices, I want to focus on you.  Or, rather, get YOU to focus on you.  As much as I’d like to complain about the behaviors of others, I can’t make them act any differently.  I can only affect my own actions, just as you can only affect yours.  So, as I step down from my soapbox, let’s discuss some ways to resist playing the victim and set strategies for successfully owning your own decisions and their consequences.

First, let’s be clear and honest about one thing:  consistently owning your decisions and their consequences, consistently resisting playing the victim, is difficult work.  It is downright exhausting.  And it is hard.  You will, at times, blame others or something out of your control.  That’s ok.  Sometimes that becomes a self-preservation mechanism.  The key is to not do this most of the time nor to get stuck in that mode even for a given situation, like a job loss or relationship crumble.

I hear the cries from the gallery:  “Sherri, what do you, or anyone else, care about how I handle my own crises?  It’s none of your dang business.  Leave me alone and stay in your lane.”  I hear you and in some cases that is true.  However, in most cases, you not owning the consequences of your decisions affects many others.  And those of us affected care very much!  Even if we don’t care much about you, personally, we care that you’ve impacted our situation.  So, gallery, it’s not just about you.

Over the years, I have sat on panel discussions aimed at various age ranges, to discuss “what should students/young adults do to best prepare themselves for success in the ‘real’ world?”  I would listen to my fellow panelists wax poetic for extended periods of time discussing various strategies for success.  When the mic came to me, I always shared some short version of this:  Show up on time; do what you say you’re going to do; own the consequences of your decisions and actions.

As someone who has hired and managed scores of people over my career, these were always my guiding principles for evaluating employees and the standard to which I tried to hold myself.  It’s not rocket science, but nor is it necessarily easy.  I promised strategies, so here is what I recommend:  as noted above, no one can hold themselves to this standard 100% of the time.  It’s ok to give yourself a little pity party.  We all do it.  But make it short and keep it as private as you can.  Remember that you are not doing this to be accountable to anyone but yourself.  Others will benefit, but no one more so than you.  You are worth it.  You want to like what you see when you look in the mirror.  It can be extraordinarily frustrating to see many others around and above you shirking responsibility but I guarantee this:  over time, it will in some way come around to them; and the longer it takes the worse it will be.  Shut them out.  Focus on yourself.  Show up on time.  Do what you say you’re going to do.  Own the consequences of your decisions and actions.

When I was in high school, I had a math teacher named Ms. Counts.  Yes, really.  And I didn’t see the humor in that name until I was much older!  Ms. Counts was a no nonsense lady.  She dressed impeccably and sat ramrod straight on a stool next to her overhead projector where she’d teach her lesson for the day.  As she wrote, the spool of transparency film containing her writing (this was the ‘70s) would ooze down the aisle behind the projector as we all tried to keep up.  My classmates would often raise objections when she announced a test or homework.  Invariably, Ms. Counts would respond, “You don’t have to take the test” or do the homework or whatever.  She’d wait a beat to get hopes up and then would say, “as long as you are willing to accept the consequences.” Then she would smile her Ms. Counts smile. 

Decisions and consequences.  In the last couple of essays, we discussed the need to make sure you are identifying the REAL problem to put your efforts toward solving and then the equally important need to think forward a few steps to make sure the pathway you are evaluating is not actually going to make things worse.  This process is all about evaluating the consequences of actions and that is what I want to spend time unpacking today.

Throughout my life, I have heard people make this statement in explanation of an action or inaction:  “I had no choice.” For a long time, I accepted that justification.  I would look at the situation from my best guess of their point of view and say, “Well, I guess you are right,” even if that decision had a fairly negative impact on me.  Once I entered my Ferocious Forties (and all the life experience that came with that age), I realized that comment is absolute bullshit.  Repeat after me:  You always have choices; you just don’t like the consequences those choices bring. You will always choose the decision that has the most acceptable (or least unacceptable) consequence.  You are assuming, of course, that you truly know what the consequences are.  But since most of us do this evaluation subconsciously (and instantaneously), the assumptions you are making about which consequences you are facing are often faulty.  The first step toward addressing this issue of faulty assumptions is to first realize that you DO have choices and those choices DO have different consequences.  What are the choices?  What are the consequences you have presumed?  What assumptions have you made that led you to those presumptions and have you tested their veracity?  (Starting to understand why I find “assumptions” so critical?)  Following this process consciously will not only lead to better decisions but also, I hope, better ownership of the choices you have made.

Choices and consequences are also strongly related to priorities.  Thus, this process also works well when someone tells you that they just don’t have time or money for (blank).  That is wimp-speak for “what you are asking me to do is not a high enough priority for me and I don’t accept the consequences of shifting said priorities.”  Here is another repeat-after-me:  You always have time and money for the things that are important to you (read: high priority).  One of my last deadly volunteer activities while I was at Air Products was taking over the leadership of a cross-business task force looking into the need for a formal Career Development activity at the company.  Since this would invariably cost money and take time, this group was tasked first with defining the need for access to this capability.  The process involved interviewing many employees from across levels and business functions as well as senior executives.  Executive after executive would tell me, “Gosh, Career Development is so important.  I wish I had more time to devote to it.”  After talking to dozens of employees who said, essentially, “I have no idea where to even START,” I reported back to the Executive Committee.  What I tried to get across were two thoughts:  1) Knowing how to kick start your career was either instinctive to you executives or you lucked into great mentors when you needed them.  You had no trouble, so you don’t understand why anyone else does; and, 2) You would have plenty of time to devote to this issue if you considered it a higher priority—see #1.  I don’t need to tell you how that went over.

Look, I don’t want you to beat people up who don’t give to your fundraiser because they don’t consider it a high priority (“I don’t have the cash to spare”) or don’t do something with you because “they don’t have enough time”.  Focus, instead, on how to make what you want a higher priority for them.  How does your cause impact them directly (or someone or something they care about)?  What do they get out of spending time with you—are you proposing an activity they like?  Make whatever “it” is about them and not just about you.  Similarly, don’t get mad at (or judgmental about) someone for making a decision that you think is idiotic based on the consequences that YOU see. What are the consequences of action or inaction that they are evaluating that led them to their choice?  Increasing transparency to information may change how they see those consequences.  Or, perhaps, understanding their “big picture” might cause you to reevaluate how you see the consequence trade-off.

My high school math class would always sigh and murmur after Ms. Counts would say that line about accepting consequences. But we all knew what she meant.  No one is MAKING you do anything.  You may not WANT to take the test or do the homework, but neither are you willing to fail the class.  You know the consequences.  Don’t whine and play the victim.  Own your choices; own your actions; own the consequences of them.  And regarding that personal accountability?  We’ll tackle that one next time. I dare say my classmates and I internalized those critical lessons about consequences, choices and priorities and we are all the better for it.  Ms. Counts, wherever you are, thank you.

When I was a kid, my Dad taught me to play chess.  I only realize now, in my late 50’s, what incredible perseverance my Dad had.  I couldn’t have been more than 6 or 8 when he taught me and I doubt I had much patience with the game.  He seemed to agonize over which move he would make.  I did not.  Or at least not at first.  However, learning to play chess was worth the effort.  Chess is a wonderful metaphor for decision making in general.  More specifically, for the importance of thinking through the consequences of your decisions as well as “thinking several moves ahead” of your current position.

As many of you know, I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, which has a storied history with kudzu.  Kudzu is a vine native to Japan that was introduced in the US at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876.  It was soon brought to the south as an ornamental vine to shade porches and backyards.  The big purple flower just added to the appeal.  Kudzu proved to be a hardy, fast growing vine.  Since Southern farmers had just about thoroughly depleted the soil by growing so much cotton, the government decided to push kudzu planting to stem major soil erosion.  What could go wrong?

What went wrong is that kudzu quite literally took over the South. The Atlanta of my youth was one big kudzu covered mound.  No one apparently voiced concern that kudzu was not native to the area, so the natural forces that kept it in check might not be there.  The vine was uncontrollable, even choking out forests.  By the mid-70’s, kudzu covered 7 million acres of land in the south.  In recent years, the effort has focused on eradication—everything from herbicides to goats to another Japanese import, Megacopta cribraria, a bug that’s been chomping its way through kudzu growth since it landed accidently (probably through the airport) around 2009—and, yes, we don’t know yet what else it might chomp through.  (Thank you to the Atlanta Journal Constitution for these fun kudzu facts.)

My point is this:  no one took the time, back in 1876 when it was first brought over, or in the 1930’s and ‘40s when kudzu was purposely introduced to control erosion, to ask the question about what might happen next.  Examples abound in our casual abuse of nature, since she has had about 4 billion years to evolve a beautiful balance and we seem to be able to upset that balance in decades or less.  But there are plenty of other examples of not thinking a few steps ahead across our lives.

Let’s take active involvement in deposing a horrible dictator, like Sadam Hussein or Mummar Khadafi.  Both were horrible, violent rulers.  Few in our society could argue that they should be stopped.  However, in both Iraq and Libya, where the US was either very publicly or more covertly involved in removing those dictators, the aftermath was a mess.  Why?  Because as horrible strong men, they kept their countries together by force.  In the absence of that force, there was a vacuum of control and violent civil wars ensued.  Let’s remember that these areas are tribal lands and have been for thousands of years before the winners of WWII drew “country” boundaries. Allegiances were always more to the tribe than to the country as a whole.  While this probable outcome was no surprise to many who understand these lands and people, there was still very little effort put into the “post-deposition” plan.  Tens or hundreds of thousands of people died.  It’s important to think a few steps ahead.

There are many examples each one of you could think of in your workplaces or in your home life.  How about the very common situation of a company needing to reduce costs to improve profitability?  While I would love to get on my soapbox about “you can’t save your way to profitability,” cost reduction schemes often get companies a quick boost on Wall Street.  I’ve been through those discussions about who loses their jobs (the only real way to save quick bucks).  You can’t just pick off the biggest salaries or the people least likely to sue.  You must think through how a person fits into the organization, the skills they bring (both technical and personal), who depends on their output, who can pick up the slack or how you can make the work go away.  I say “you must” but we all know that rarely happens effectively or at all.  And even if you try, there are always consequences you can’t effectively mitigate.  However, most of the time, managers don’t think several steps ahead and the consequences can be disastrous and long lasting.

Another common situation is how people choose a car.  I want that sleek looking coupe!  Too bad I didn’t think about how to get a car seat in the back or, even worse, how my elderly Mom is going to get in and out of the front seat (or her walker not fitting in the non-existent trunk).  Then there are the people who really, really, really want to drive a luxury car but can’t afford to buy a new one.  They are focused on their monthly car payment, so they either buy a used car or lease one.  What they often don’t think about is the cost to insure a luxury car vs. a more modest vehicle.  Or the cost to maintain or repair one.  Or even the need to use premium fuel vs. 87 octane.  I applaud those that think about the full cost of ownership.  I also know you are rare.

Just as it is critically important to ask five successive “why” questions when trying to identify a real root cause problem, it is equally important to ask a few successive “what” questions when thinking about the consequences of a decision or action.  Ask yourself: “If I make this decision, what do I expect to happen, both good and bad?”  What steps could you take to mitigate the bad things that might happen and what other things might THOSE actions cause?  Go down a few levels.  Then try that with a different decision.  Think a few steps ahead, just like you would in a chess game.  What seems like a good move at first can be disastrous.  And what seems like a wimpy move could end up leading you to win the game.

There’s a bit of a thought flow developing here.  First we discussed identifying the REAL problem you are trying to solve.  Today we discussed thinking through the consequences of your decision to help choose the most favorable path.  Coming up is a more thorough treatment of “consequences”, leading to one of my favorite topics (OK, it’s more of a hot button)—taking personal responsibility for your actions.  Stay tuned!

If you are a regular reader of my essays, you know that I have been gifted with a number of wonderful bosses and mentors throughout my life and career.  At some point, we’ll discuss some of the non-wonderful ones but not today.  I am reminded often of a lesson that another of my favorite bosses taught me.  This lesson came during the “at the lab bench” part of my career.  My lab mates and I were working on developing new chemical products to solve a particular need we saw in the market or trying to solve customers’ problems with existing products we were already selling.  We would often have heated discussions during project review meetings, arguing about the proper pathway or the interpretation of data.  Our boss, known for being quiet until he wasn’t, would listen for a while and then cut us off with his favorite line:  “What problem are you really trying to solve?”

We’d stop talking, mouths open mid-word.  We’d look at each other.  One brave person would try to frame the question.  Another would disagree.  We’d start talking over each other again and he would cut off discussion once more:  What. Problem.  Are you.  REALLY. Trying to solve?  We’d try again and in a few minutes we’d have agreement on what the real issue was.  Amazingly, alignment on next steps came quickly after that. 

This concept of stopping up front to define the true issue or problem is broadly applicable.  Everyone has assumptions they’ve made about the REAL problem, but usually those assumptions are not verified.  I’ll stay away from controversial political examples (of which there are many) and give a simple household one.  Let’s say you have a water stain on your kitchen ceiling.  Well, you have a stain.  Saying it’s a water stain is an assumption.  The easiest thing to do would be to get out some paint and paint over it.  Problem solved.  Until it comes back.  Then you hit it with KILZ and paint.  Proud of yourself, you keep one eye on the ceiling and go on about your life.  Dangit.  It came back again!  The issue is that the problem you are trying to solve is not the stain.  That’s the symptom.  The real problem is that you have a water leak in the bathroom upstairs.  Not as easy to fix, but you can paint that ceiling 900 times and if you don’t fix the REAL problem, the stain will always come back.

It’s human nature to look for easy fixes.  Sometimes they actually work but most of the time they don’t.  Not getting enough breakthroughs in R&D?  Fire and replace the staff.  Not getting enough traction in the market for your new product?  Take out more ads.  Not able to hire and retain reliable staff?  Must be the talent pool. Finding and then owning the REAL problem takes work. No one wants to hear that they have made the wrong investments in R&D strategy or that the product they introduced does not meet the market need or that their skills as a manager and leader do not attract top talent.

One method I like to use is “The Five Whys”, often employed in Root Cause Analysis studies.  The basics of this technique are simple:  when trying to identify a true, underlying issue, ask “Why” at least five times.  To see how the technique works, let’s try out the five Whys on a simple problem.  How about the “hypothetical” issue of my weight gain in the last few years:

1.  Why have you put on weight, Sherri?  Well, I’m older now and have been through “The Change”.  It happens.

2.  Why would getting older and going through said Change cause you to put on weight?  Um, my metabolism has dropped.  My body doesn’t use calories the same way anymore.  Happens to every woman.  Nothing I can do about it.  Oh, and Trish has taught me to enjoy a glass of nice wine regularly.

3. Why would your metabolism changing (and the regular glass of wine) cause you to gain weight?  Well…I guess I don’t use as many calories anymore for energy.  And wine has more calories than water.

4.  Why would more calories and less efficient usage of them cause you to gain weight?  I’m taking in more calories than I’m burning, Einstein.  That’s the only reason people gain weight.

5.  Don’t get snippy.  Why are you taking in more calories than you are burning?  Sigh.  Because I need to control portion size and perhaps gets to spin class more often.

Getting to the REAL problem has a few key advantages.  First, you design solutions that get at the source of the problem and not a symptom.  Second, you are forced to face a more complex or simply “less fun” solution than you might really prefer to pursue.  Third, as in the case above, you are forced to take personal responsibility for the solution instead of playing the victim, which I will plumb in more detail in a future essay.

Now the above was a rather obvious example.  For more complex issues, you can find yourself really surprised by the answers to those third, fourth and fifth “whys”.  Wouldn’t it be nice to see this process used on the more intractable issues of our day, such as drug overuse, immigration, gun violence, environmental policy, tax policy, even trade?  I’d sure like to see us get at solutions to the real problem instead of reacting to a symptom.  These are complex issues requiring multi-faceted solutions.

Recognizing the importance of identifying the root problem is also key in creating strong relationships.  During my career, I facilitated countless discussions involving employee disputes.  The gratifying outcome is they usually solved the problem themselves.  My role was getting them to actually LISTEN to each other, discover what incorrect assumptions they were making about each other’s behavior, and get them to articulate the real issue between them.  Once that was achieved, resolution usually happened quickly.  I try to use this thought process in my personal life, as well.  Don’t assume what is driving someone’s behavior.  Get to the root issue behind the disagreements and own your piece of it.

I’ve vacillated on how to end this essay.  I could implore you to apply this goal of identifying underlying causes as you think about the big issues of today.  I could remind you that the first challenge in getting to the real problem is untested, unarticulated assumptions (which you know is a favorite topic of mine).  But I think I’m going to end this way:  give yourself and others around you a little grace.  We’ve all got so much going on, that it seems almost impossible to take the time and mental effort to get at the real problem, bust through the blame game and fight the desire for a simple solution.  Yes, you have to pick your battles.  But please pick them.  Problems, big and small, will never get fixed until you understand what problem you’re really trying to solve.

Now, THAT is a presumptuous title for an essay!  Teasing out critical leadership characteristics is an entire field of study that many people wiser than me have devoted their lives to figuring out.  And making the assumption that I can give that topic any sort of decent treatment in a 1000 or so word essay is probably brave.  So let me start out by saying that these thoughts are mine and mine alone, and built from no more rigorous research than what I have observed over my life and career.

I have had the opportunity to study leadership in many a training class and seminar.  I have been to Leadership Development camps designed by two different multi-billion dollar, multi-national companies.  I have even been fortunate enough to have had a personal leadership coach.  Go on the web, search “top leadership characteristics” and you’ll get a slew of lists from Forbes to Tony Robbins to the Center for Creative Leadership.  They usually contain such stalwarts as integrity, ability to delegate, ability to inspire, communication skills, decisiveness, and passion.  All good qualities, to be sure.  And while I hesitate to pick one that stands out from all the rest, I’m going to do it anyway.

I believe the most important characteristic of a good leader is humility.

Let’s think about that for a minute.  To be “humble” as I use the word here is “to have or show a modest estimate of one’s own importance.” (Dictionary.com)  That doesn’t seem to jive with many of the characteristics noted above, which are often high energy and forceful.  One thinks of a humble person as deferential and quiet.  Not what we think of when we think of a “strong leader”.  I beg to differ.  I propose that the effectiveness of those other characteristics is directly correlated with the level of humility that the leader embodies.

The importance of this concept was really driven home to me during my stint leading one particular Intertek business.  Because of distance and other responsibilities, I was only on site for one or two days a week—and that was when I wasn’t traveling somewhere else.  This type of management is only possible if you have a strong #2 on site every day.  When I first took over the business, I inherited a very strong personality as my second in command, one who had been with this particular business for decades, long before Intertek purchased it.  Our working relationship took no small effort to build since he naturally thought that HE should be leading the business, not me.  He quickly realized that since I was physically there only a relatively small amount of time, he could just do what he wanted (to a point) while I wasn’t there.   The “what” he did wasn’t a huge problem.  He ran the day-to-day operations and there wasn’t too much wiggle in the “what”.  It was the “how” that was the big problem.  I would catch him summoning people to his office for regular yelling sessions.  And he would always summon them to him—I rarely saw him walking the halls.  He led through intimidation one minute and then, maybe after he read an article in the Harvard Business Review, would suddenly get poetic about the importance of personal accountability (in others).  You never knew which personality you would get from day to day, although he always managed to be deferential to me and to others when he knew I was watching.  As much as this behavior gnawed at me, I did not take immediate action because I needed him: he really knew the business!  Finally, as a prelude to putting him on a Performance Improvement Plan, I sat him down for a talk.  “The most important quality in a leader is humility,” I told him, to start the conversation.  We talked a lot about his “how”.  He refuted every statement I made.  Within a week, he quit.  And while he left a big hole to fill, the majority of the organization heaved a sigh of relief.

What drives a leader’s behavior can be a tricky topic of discussion, especially when you are talking with other leaders as opposed to those they lead.  Let’s be honest:  the perceived power of many leadership positions drives ego.  We’ve all fallen prey to it now and then.  But what really should drive a leader is the awesome responsibility of the position as it relates to the people who are depending upon you to make decisions that impact their wellbeing.  The larger the leadership position, the greater the impact on a larger group of people and the greater the probability that each decision will impact some more positively than others.  Finding and owning that balance requires introspection and deep personal ownership of the outcome.

Humility is what causes a leader to recognize that she doesn’t have all the right answers all the time.  She has the confidence to seek true counsel, not just confirmation of her positions.  The humble leader remembers that the real work gets done by others and she needs to focus first on making sure they have what they need to be successful.  Her success is dependent upon their success.  What they need is a well-articulated direction and strategy and the tools to execute, not required blind adherence to a set of rules not explained.

Humble leaders don’t lead through fear and intimidation.  They lead through motivation.  Employees respect him.  And he’s earned their respect, in turn, by respecting and valuing them for what they bring to the table.  The difference between a good business and a great business is that extra bit of effort an employee chooses to give: that extra bit of attention to a report; that extra bit of time with a customer on the phone; that extra question they ask themselves about the quality of their work that causes them to choose to spend more time to get it right.  People want to work for the humble leader and give that extra bit of effort because they know he will notice.  They know he will say “thank you”—and mean it. 

She has no real problem finding and retaining strong employees.  When something goes wrong, the humble leader does not ask who’s at fault but rather “what can we learn from this?”  And the humble leader does not blame “conditions outside of my control” for her struggles, but rather asks “what can I do differently next time?” She does not shirk personal responsibility and accountability. The humble leader is not “soft”.  She will discipline as needed and do so quickly—the whole organization is depending upon her to do just that.

We’ve all worked for both types of leaders—those more humble and those infinitely impressed with themselves (and who seem to desire your constant confirmation of it).  I don’t have to ask who you prefer working with.  I’ve tried to be a humble leader when at all possible.  I have not been 100% successful and look back with a bit of embarrassment at those times when I was more caught up in the position than being respectful of what the position required of me.  I learned the humility lesson over time and through seeing the huge difference it made when I took a more humble approach.  If you are a newer leader, give some thought to this concept.  Save yourself some time and pain!  Get over yourself now and you will have a lot more to be proud of over the length of your career.