Hello me, is that really you?
What do you get when you cross an acappella bassist (a self-identified “bum-bum” guy) with a truth seeking, self-reliant leadership expert? You get the charismatic and comfortably confident Managing Partner, Founder and CEO of Brimstone Consulting: Bob Marcus (LinkedIn profile).
A valley local, Bob is a compelling speaker and a thought provoking leadership activist. He spent nearly 25 years working with CEO’s to “help them figure out what their job is.” I laughed when he said this because it reminded me of the first time I watched “Office Space.”
But it got me thinking- do I really know how to be a leader? Certainly not a CEO at this point, but do I exactly know what I’m doing here?
Over ten years in the US Army I was asked countless times to define leadership. The military, as you might imagine, places a premium on effective leadership because often times lives are at stake. So how does the Army adequately articulate the importance of “Army Leadership?” Well, like everything else in the Army, we published an official manual about it! Seriously, it has a preface and acknowledgements and everything. Guess how long it is? 102 pages! You can find the Army’s manual on leadership further down the shelf from the manual on “Unified Land Operations” but before you get to “Army Correspondence.” Yes, the Army also has a manual that teaches you how to write properly.
The Army defines leadership as “the process of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation to accomplish the mission and improve the organization.” The subsequent 102.75 pages of the “Army Leadership” manual discusses important topics like key leader traits (character, presence, intellect) and how leadership is different at various operational levels — all critical components to understanding the fundamentals of leadership. Here is a link to the leadership manual for those interested.
Military leadership, however, is in it’s own arena. As Bob pointed out, Eisenhower was a stellar General during WWII, but found being President very difficult.
Bob went on to more elegantly and succinctly define leadership relevant to today’s corporate environment. He said leadership is “making things happen that wouldn’t happen without you.” Woah! Insert mind-blown hand gesture. Coming from a leadership environment that over-complicates important concepts in long manuals that no one really reads, Bob’s terse, yet profound definition was a refreshing thought experiment into what leadership really means. That can almost fit on a t-shirt! I wonder now how many of the things that happened under my Command would have happened whether I was there or not…
Anyways, our discussion of leadership tied directly to the main focus of Bob’s talk: authoring your reputation. Like leadership, authoring your reputation must be a purposeful act. This means that we should all take time to promote, develop, foster and reshape our reputation into what we want our preceding echo in life to tell others about us. If you could throw a baseball forward in time to your next boss, upon which you wrote how you hope your reputation precedes you, will it match when you show up to retrieve it?
Maybe just as important as thinking about how to purposefully author a positive reputation is to think about your reputational negatives. I, for example, know that I am emotionally inaccessible. Most of my former colleagues provided out-going feedback that I am hard to relate to because I do not show my emotions. They never really knew if I was joking (most of the time I was so I guess that’s why my hilarious jokes weren’t landing…) or if I was less than happy about a situation. So now what can I do with this knowledge? Bob says you can reshape your reputation by proving to those around you that you are working on the negatives. An important distinction here: everyone has weaknesses, but the importance is not in eliminating your weaknesses as much as it is in proving to others that you recognize them and are motivated to improve. If you pretend you have no weaknesses, then don’t even think about broadcasting your strengths because people always see through the Superman story. So true! Think about this: when you are in the work force on a team, can you speak up and tell them what you struggle with? Should you deliberately put people around you that will offset your weaknesses?
Returning full circle to the incredibly witty title of this blog post, the key takeaway here is to determine if your reputation realistically depicts who you are. If not, how do you purposefully reshape it? Looking back, how clearly have you articulated the reputation you are trying to broadcast? Reputation and biography are analogous. So, if your reputation does not describe you, then start to live your life differently to allow your personal story to re-author your reputation. Do yourself a favor now and the future you will thank you for it!
For more of Bob’s thoughts, check out this blog post he created a few years ago.
