The Fence You Built

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John Maxwell tells a story about a farmer who walks into a hardware store and asks for credit on fence posts and the wire to go with them. A banker happens to be standing there, watching the whole thing.

The store owner asks him one question: are you fencing in, or fencing out?

Fencing in, the farmer says. Another fifty acres, right across the creek.

Take it, the owner tells him, and starts ringing it up.

The banker asks how he decided that fast. If he’s fencing in, the owner says, he’s growing. If he’s fencing out, he’s scared and trying to limit what’s coming at him. That man doesn’t get credit.

Same posts, same wire, same holes to dig. All that changes is which side of the line you’re standing on when you build it.

I’ve put up a lot of fence in my life, and not all of it was for cattle.

The one I defended longest went around me. I ran hard and alone and I was proud of it, because the results kept coming in. My intensity wore people out, so fewer of them came close, which only confirmed what I already believed: nobody was going to work the way I worked, so there was no reason to let anyone in far enough to try.

That’s fencing out. It’s also the wall of isolation, which never shows up wearing the word lonely. It shows up as efficiency. Faster to do it myself, cleaner to make the call myself, easier to carry than to explain. Every one of those is true in the moment and ruinous over a decade.

The belief holding that fence up was simpler than I wanted to admit: if people saw what it cost me, they’d think less of me. So I kept the hard parts to myself and explained almost nothing. My team had no idea what I was carrying. Eventually they stopped offering to help.

Not facing something doesn’t make it smaller. It makes it structural. You stop calling it a problem and start calling it how things work around here.

That store owner could read direction off a man buying fence posts. Anybody watching you build can read yours.

Podcast

Brad Sugars started ActionCOACH in 1993, after a good customer stopped coming in and told him, when he called to ask why, that the business had folded. Thirty-three years later, it’s the world’s largest business coaching franchise, with more than 1,000 offices in 80-plus countries, and Brad has written a shelf of books on growth and execution, including Pulling Profits Out of a Hat. He also tried to retire at 26, took up golf, and quit after three weeks.

Here are three takeaways from my conversation with Brad.

1. You Are Not Building the Business. The Business Is Building You.

Brad lays the phases out plainly: a manager with helpers gets you to your first million, a leader who builds a management team gets you to ten, and a CEO who builds a C-suite gets you to a hundred. Most owners hear an org chart problem and start hiring. Brad’s point runs the other direction. “You think you’re building a business. The reality is the business is building you.” 

When I asked how his business had built him, he didn’t reach for a win. He said it kept showing him everything he was no good at, because a company can’t grow past its owner’s competence. He told me about a client who just sold for eleven million pounds and still can’t bring himself to buy a business-class seat. The man hasn’t caught up to his own balance sheet. Brad gave him a four-word assignment: your next job is you.

2. Stop Tying Their Shoelaces

I asked Brad why owners insist on fixing what their people could fix themselves. His answer took a second: “They like to be the superhero.” Then he told me about his daughter learning to tie her shoes on a morning the family was already late. He could’ve done it in two seconds. He gave her five minutes instead and never tied them again. Most leaders take the two seconds every single time, then wonder why they’re still the answer to everything a decade later.

Brad’s alternative came from Alan Mulally, who ran Boeing and Ford: “My job is to say the least, because if I say it, it becomes gospel.” So Brad asks questions instead. It takes four, five, or six of them rather than one, because you can make the mental leap in a single question but the person across from you can’t. Slow it down and let them land on it themselves.

3. A Goal Is Something You Don’t Know How to Do

Brad’s sequence is dream, goal, learn, plan, act, and he’s emphatic about the step everyone skips. Jump straight from a new goal to planning, and your plan can only contain what you already know, which means it prescribes the same actions that didn’t get you there the first time. So the first move after setting a goal is learning. He also named the word that kills more goals than any competitor: how.

“By definition, a goal is something you don’t know how to do. If you knew how to do it, it’s not a goal, it’s a to-do list item.” When he moved ActionCOACH’s target from hundreds of millions to billions, a friend told him Good to Great wouldn’t help him anymore, because everything good enough at the old level is worthless at the new one. Brad’s summary of what came next: there are no breakthroughs without breaking something.

Walk Your Fence Line

Every leader I’ve had the pleasure to chat with has a line they drew a long time ago, on a bad day, for a reason that made complete sense at the time. The fence is there. The only question is which direction you were facing when you built it.

That’s the work at the Lead Without Hiding Challenge. The August round just wrapped. The next one runs September 22 through 24: three days, live with me, walking your fence line and naming what you put it up to keep out, so you can start building the kind a banker would bet on.

Save your seat: leadwithouthiding.com

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