The Fork in the Road

Before we dive in: if The Things We Hide has helped you put words to what you have been carrying. Would you take two minutes and leave a review on Amazon?

It is a small act that decides whether the next leader who needs it ever finds it, and if you have not picked it up yet, let this be the nudge.

Grab your copy or leave a review: Amazon.com

Nobody hides a mistake because they think it will fix itself. We hide mistakes because of what we fear they reveal about us.

In December 1914, Thomas Edison watched his West Orange laboratory burn, decades of work feeding the flames, and the story goes that by morning he was thankful all his old mistakes had burned up, and he could start fresh.

I have grown to love this story, where, for years, I cringed at being found out for doing something wrong, not failing, not doing it right.

I built a career on being the guy with the answers. Consulting for dairy farms, I was paid to walk onto someone else’s operation and tell them what to change, and when a call did not pan out, everything in me wanted to explain it, soften it, bury it under context.

Anything but the three words that would have served the family in front of me: I was wrong.

Underneath all that explaining sat a question I feared:  if I admit I missed it, why would they keep me around?

In The Things We Hide, I trace how beliefs drive thoughts, thoughts drive actions, and actions drive results. The belief was that being right made me valuable, so admitting a mistake meant handing back my value. 

The actions followed, defending decisions long past their expiration date, going quiet about the ones that failed, working twice as hard to cover what one honest sentence would have closed.

The results were the loneliest part. One of the four walls I write about is isolation, and this is how it gets built. When people learn that you cannot be wrong, they stop telling you the truth. They watch you drive past the missed turn because correcting you costs them more than the detour costs the team.

A leader who cannot own a mistake does not stop making them. He starts making them alone.

Podcast

Tom Kubiniec was a heavy metal guitarist who Guitar Player Magazine named one of the best unknown guitarists in rock, until tendonitis ended his career right as it was taking off. He rebuilt himself from a telemarketer selling typewriter ribbons into the founder and CEO of SecureIt Gun Storage, the global leader in military weapon storage and armory design, and today he is bringing that military approach to a consumer gun safe industry he calls the definition of dogma.

Here are three takeaways from my conversation with Tom.

1. Are You Managing a Company You Should Be Leading?

Tom started three different companies, and each one grew to five million in sales before hitting a ceiling. Three different businesses with the same problem meant the problem was not the businesses. Then a speaker at his CEO peer group laid it out: five million is where a managed company maxes out, and the way through is to delegate everything you do.

Tom hung a sign on his wall that read, “What are you doing that you should delegate?” and his fear of an empty desk never materialized; the space filled with creative thought, and the company went from 5.1 million to more than 16 million in four years. The line that unlocked it: “Generals don’t dig foxholes. Generals make decisions.”

2. Tell Them the Outcome. Let Them Find the How.

Tom’s delegation rule is simple: define the outcome you expect, then stop talking. When you tell people how to do things, they will do them exactly that way, and you have capped their creativity at the ceiling of your own. Let them figure it out, and sometimes they will find a way that leaves you asking whether it is better than yours. 

There is a second payoff most owners never see: handing someone a real outcome tells them they are trusted, and trusted people play differently. “You’d be surprised these people are running through walls because they so desperately want to impress the owner. And they do.”

3. Keep Moving and Course Correct

Tom’s analogy: you are driving and hit a fork that is not on your map. You can go right, go left, or stop and analyze, and the one who stops always finishes last. Even the driver who chooses wrong beats him, as long as he corrects quickly. Tom lives this. 

He once overrode his team and changed his site’s mobile homepage, watched sales fall off a cliff, and had the old page back up inside 48 hours, telling his team they were right and to push back harder next time. “You gotta look at yourself in the mirror and say, you know what, you blew it. It doesn’t end the world; it’s just next time, do a little better.”

Own It

The fastest leaders are not the ones who never miss a turn; they are the ones who never waste a mile pretending they did not.

That is the work of the Lead Without Hiding Challenge, July 21 through 23: three days, live with me, on naming what you have been hiding, mistakes included, and leading from who you actually are.

If being right has been running your leadership, this is where that changes.

Save your seat: leadwithouthiding.com

Did you catch this podcast? If not, listen to it here.