Uncommon Leadership
Life lessons from a goalie and a surfer
You don’t have to have a title to be a leader.
These wise words were spoken by my 17-year-old daughter, Anna, as she told me about her first soccer practice of the season. She’s a senior in high school, and this is her third year as the first string varsity goalkeeper. At the end of last season, she was not chosen as a captain for the 2020–21 school year, a decision that didn’t disappoint her too terribly; she hadn’t expected to be a captain.
Two other seniors, who are good friends — and very deserving — were chosen to lead the team. Both are natural leaders with impressive skills on the field, and off the field their out-going, assertive personalities are magnetic. Anna, by contrast, is a bit of an introvert whose resonant goalie voice belies her quiet leadership.
Over the summer, however, as Vermont’s low COVID-positivity rates allowed teams to hold informal “captain’s practices,” it sometimes fell to Anna to lead the sessions when one or both of the captains couldn’t be there. She was an obvious choice, not only because she is reliable (she missed just one captain’s practice all summer), and not only because she’s a senior (there are several others). The captains and coach knew she had the skills and experience to get the job done. And now, her unofficial leadership over the summer has helped her realize the powerful role she can play in the development of the team over the upcoming season, captain or not.
What a great lesson to learn at a young age: leadership comes in many forms.
Anna has a head start on me with that lesson. I didn’t come upon it until college when I helped to form a new student organization on campus (my first bite at the entrepreneurial apple). The woman who’d had the original idea for the organization became, fittingly, our first president. She held the position for two years until she graduated and left us in the somewhat stupefying position of having to choose a new president. Kim had always been our leader; how could we replace her? But replace her we must, and so we elected Elizabeth.
This was the first time I really took notice of the fact that there are different styles of leadership. Kim was a textbook entrepreneur-turned-CEO. She brandished the metaphorical banner and we willingly followed. She was our figurehead on campus, and always in charge of our meetings. The organization was her baby, and I’m sure she would’ve stayed on as president if that pesky life transition called graduation hadn’t forced her out.
Elizabeth, on the other hand, was a behind-the-scenes kind of leader. Less visible to the broader campus community, she focused on strengthening internal structures and cultivating leadership within her team. In other words,
…she was just what our fledgling organization needed as it transitioned from start-up to growth stage.
Now, of course, a student organization is a far cry from a start-up, but there are parallels in leadership lessons. As a new organization, we’d succeeded in large part due to Kim’s vision, dynamism, charisma, and sheer force of will. Her focused determination and ability to inspire were a magical combination that few possess, yet many will follow.
But for how long?
That’s a big question. At a certain point in a company’s life, when it ceases to be a start-up and becomes a growth-stage business, it needs leadership that will strengthen foundations, build teams, establish systems and protocols, and bring efficiency into proper balance with innovation. Can one person do all that?
Can one person evolve from a charismatic leader into a systemic leader?
Many have tried…or at least they’ve managed to keep themselves in the CEO role as their company grew and evolved. But that doesn’t necessarily mean their leadership style evolved correspondingly. I lived through a long-term founder/CEO situation when I worked at Seventh Generation in the early 2000s, where Jeffrey Hollender, the company’s co-founder and CEO for 15+ years, was my manager.
I loved working with Jeffrey. As a quintessential charismatic leader, Jeffrey was a big reason why I joined the company in the first place. I strongly believed in his vision for the Seventh Generation that reached far beyond its products toward making the company the paragon of corporate sustainability that it is today. But while I loved working with Jeffrey, it was hard to work for Jeffrey.
As many of Steve Jobs’ former direct reports would likely confirm: people who have the vision, drive, and ambition to launch companies also tend to be lousy managers. Effective people management is just not in their DNA. I’m not throwing shade, and this is nothing I haven’t said to Jeffrey directly (and we remain friends and colleagues beyond Seventh Generation to this day), it’s just that entrepreneurs are wired differently.
An effective visionary, almost by definition, needs to spend a lot of time at the 30,000 foot level envisioning ways to transcend boundaries.
Management, on the other hand, takes place at ground level. It requires focus, connection, and continuity. Sometimes it simply means just showing up for meetings, providing feedback and guidance to employees, and — gasp! — delivering annual performance evaluations in a timely fashion. That may be too much to ask of folks who are hard-wired toward the next big idea.
When it comes to fostering a company through its growing pains, the leader who is known for his disruptive innovation can be…well, downright disruptive. And that’s not good for business.
The start-up world is littered with stories of founders who were forced out of their companies, often ungracefully, when others (usually investors) decided they’d outlived their utility.
Unfortunately, this is what happened to Jeffrey. In 2009, after 23 years and amid increasing pressure, he stepped down as CEO, only to be fired outright in 2010. I’d left the company several years before and even back then in 2005, I could see the writing on the wall for Jeffrey.
That first-hand experience of being (unsatisfyingly) managed by a founder weighed heavily on my mind as I took my first steps toward becoming a founder myself. What kind of leader would I be? In the summer of 2007, as I finalized the business plan for my first start-up venture, I found some guidance by pure luck. I happened upon Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, a memoir that provided an alternative leadership role model in climber/surfer/founder, Yvon Chouinard.
What struck me about Yvon’s story was his realization, from the very early days when Chouinard Equipment morphed into Patagonia, that he and his wife were the creative leaders of the company and the owners. Period. They were the inspiration for Patagonia’s products as well as the masterminds behind its eccentric corporate culture, but that didn’t necessitate either of them being CEO. In fact, in a chapter titled “Management Philosophy,” Yvon reveals that in its first 30 years, Patagonia had six CEOs, none of which were ever himself or his wife.
While some may question Yvon’s decision to entrust the management of his baby to someone else, I see wisdom. The person who guides a company through a period of rapid market expansion may not be the best CEO when the company needs more financial rigor and attention to internal systems to support those new markets. In one of the truest statements ever made about leadership, Yvon says,
“…(I)t’s hard to find one person who can do everything well.”
Thus, Yvon structured Patagonia’s leadership team in a way that allowed him to focus on the things that he loved and did well — product development and corporate culture (and, of course, climbing and surfing)— and he hired or internally developed a CEO and other managers to do the rest. Like my daughter Anna, he understood that he didn’t need a title to be a leader.
In 2008, when I launched TrueBody Products, I took Yvon’s example to heart. Even though I started as the company’s CEO, I was ever mindful that a time might come when the company would outgrow my ability to be an effective executive manager. What happened with TrueBody is a story for another day, but let it suffice to say that after launching it and several other businesses, I have confirmed this bit of self-awareness:
Like so many entrepreneurs, I’m very good at starting businesses but not so good at managing them as they grow.
Perhaps it’s more accurate to say I don’t enjoy managing a business through the growth stage, and therefore I don’t give it my best. And that is perfectly fine, because — you know what — there are plenty of people out there who have absolutely no clue how to launch a business but who are very, very good at growing one. And they need us as much as we need them if we can only get our egos out of the way and find each other. This is how viable businesses get built and continue to innovate, to stand the test of time.
It’s also how we entrepreneurs keep our sanity; by staying true to ourselves and being the best that we can be. One person can try to do everything, but no one person can do everything well. The leader who admits that — to themself and others — is stronger for the admission and more effective in their role, whether it has a C-level title or not.
