Gold Stars

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

The problem with giving people gold stars is that they start doing what it takes to get more.

This can work exactly as intended for the giver, but it can cause some serious pain for the receiver. 

Earn a gold star for working hard, and you'll work hard at anything and everything you do.

A few months ago, I watched the movie Smoke, which mirrors the story of John Leonard Orr, an arson investigator found guilty of starting the very fires he was investigating.

Much of Orr's drive to start the fires was to earn the gold stars of recognition, even penning a book, Points of Origin, about an arson investigator who started fires.

Gold stars aren't meant to reward doing the wrong things well!

I once reveled in working hard because I was recognized and applauded for it. That conditioning had me running from task to task, convinced the hustle itself was what mattered.

I learned early that doing so got noticed, and the more I did, the more notice I got. I wasn't chasing hugs; I was chasing gold stars.

And I earned them, never seeing that the thing that earns you gold stars becomes the thing you are terrified to put down.

Years later, leading people, I was still that kid, still measuring my worth by what I did that day.

My intensity, drive, and wiring intimidated and wore people out. There was no reason to go with me when they could sit back and watch me work my tail off.

Beliefs lead to results, and the belief that kept me stuck was that I am what I produce.

That belief produced a thought: if I'm valued for what I accomplish and get done, why would I want to pass that off to others?

The actions followed as I worked hard and expected everyone else to work as hard as I did. 

I would even race to answer questions people could have answered themselves, and part of me liked being asked, because my value was in what I knew.

And the results? People waited, bringing me problems instead of solutions, because that was the dance I had trained us all to do.

One of the four walls of insecurity is inactivity, and it doesn't look like laziness. 

It usually looks like the opposite: a leader so busy doing that they never do the one thing only they can do, which is grow themselves and grow their people. Busy is the most respectable way to hide.

Being needed is not the same as being valuable. Need keeps people small so you can feel big, while value builds people so they can go anywhere.

The gold stars were never going to answer the question; they just kept me from asking it.

Podcast

Mark Miller was the 16th employee at Chick-fil-A and spent almost 45 years on its corporate staff, rising to Vice President of High Performance Leadership. He is the co-founder of Lead Every Day and the author of more than a dozen books, including The Secret, the international bestseller he wrote with Ken Blanchard. Twenty-five years after that book split leadership into skills above the waterline and heart below it, the new fourth edition finally puts the whole iceberg in one place.

Here are three takeaways from my conversation with Mark.

1. You Cannot Develop Leaders You Have Never Defined

When Chick-fil-A realized its leadership bench was empty, Mark's team started with a question that sounds simple: What is it that leaders do? They wallpapered a conference room with flip chart paper and came up with 1,234 answers, which proved leadership is real work and left the team completely overwhelmed. So someone asked for the short list: what have great leaders always done, and what will they always do? That exercise produced the five fundamentals: see the future, engage and develop others, reinvent continuously, value results and relationships, and embody a leader's heart. Mark's warning to every organization is blunt: “They can't accelerate leadership development because they've never agreed on what their leaders are supposed to do.” Try his test. Hand everyone on your team a card and ask them to write down their definition of leadership. If the answers all come back different, you just found your starting point.

2. Doer. Delegator. Developer. Designer.

Most leaders get promoted because they were good at doing, so they lead with a doer's bias. The ones who survive discover delegation and think they have arrived. Mark told me about a Chick-fil-A operator who kept getting distracted during their conversation, then finally excused himself to tell someone to pick up trash in the parking lot. Mark asked him one question: “Who tells them to pick up the trash when you're not here?” That is the trap of getting stuck in delegation, because people learn to wait to be delegated to. Developers teach people to see the trash themselves, and designers build systems that develop people without them in the room. You will move between all four modes, because the world is too dynamic not to. The question Mark asks is where you spend most of your time, and it should be as a developer and designer.

3. No One Leads Well From Quicksand

Busyness, complexity, distraction, fear, fatigue, and even a little success: Mark calls that combination quicksand, and leaders stuck in it are not working on culture, engagement, or development. They are working on survival. His prescription starts small: take an honest look at your calendar. Peter Drucker said he never met a knowledge worker who couldn't eliminate 35 percent of it with no ill effect. Then schedule one hour with yourself and protect it like any other meeting, so when someone asks for that slot, you can say with full integrity that you have one. Because, as Mark put it, “over time, leaders will discover they add their greatest value when they're alone.”

Put Down the Gold Stars

This whole conversation kept circling one question: who are you when the doing stops?

That is exactly what we are digging into at the Lead Without Hiding Challenge, July 21 through 23: three days, live with me, on putting down the gold stars, naming what you have been hiding behind, and leading from who you actually are instead of what you produce.

If being needed has been running your calendar, this is where that changes.

Save your seat: leadwithouthiding.com

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