Back in my World of Warcraft days we had a phrase for what the business world would call excellence. We called it “Being pro”. Being pro meant doing whatever was necessary to gain just that little extra advantage. It meant that you took the biggest area of improvement in your game and you worked on it until it no longer was. Then you switched over to the thing that would make the next biggest difference. Then the next and so on and so on. There was no stopping, every time you thought there was no possible way to improve your character or your performance you kept looking until you found something else. Months turned into years and while some advantages came and went as the game evolved, some stayed and became part of your personal repertoire and was what made you a great player.

I’ve heard this called many things. Both excellence and mastery spring immediately to mind. I call it the “pursuit of pro”. They are all variants of the same thing with very similar tenants. It is not a goal, it is not something we hope to achieve. It is an all encompassing philosophy of how you do things. It is the little voice in the back of your head that constantly says “How can we do this better? Faster? More efficiently and with less effort?

Leadership is a sales job as much as anything. You must sell your people that the vision you are espousing is possible. That YOU have the ability to make it possible. How do you sell that ability? How do you show people that you can do what no one else says can be done?

Clearly you must sell your ability as a leader of people, to be able to deal with people on a regular basis, to motivate, to coordinate and resolve disputes. Obviously you must be able to persuade, empower and make people feel good about themselves. But it is not enough. As a leader you must not only be able to show you have the people skills but that you embody the belief systems that will forge the team into what it needs to be.  As much as anyone can be, the leader IS the team. Its beliefs, its morals and its modus operandi. Everything from your ability to attract the best talent to being able to develop and motivate the talent you have is dependent on being near the top of the game yourself. If not at the top then defiantly on a par with the top. Note that you don’t have to be at the top of the same game as those in your team. Obviously if you are a marketer and you have a programmer in your team you don’t have to know programming at his level in order to earn his respect and belief. But you damn well do need to know marketing at his level of programming and be able to improve at the same rate as him. The bigger and grander your vision the greater the importance to attract a team of the best and in order to do that you need to be the best yourself. That is the entry ticket to play the game. And that is where the pursuit of pro comes in.

It is what allows you to reach the highest level of performance. It is the purpose in purposeful practice talked about in the book “Bounce” by Matthew Syed. In this book Syed builds on many of the principles found in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “Outliers”. He adds that the 10,000 hour rule of world class performance only applies if the practice being done is purposeful (see this post for more on the 10,000 hour rule). That is to say, if the practitioner is actively trying to improve. If he is just going through the motions then he might as well not be doing anything. This is what separates a world class performer from just another guy who has 30+ years experience in this or that industry.

I recently read “The Leader Who Had No Title” by Robin Sharma and I loved 10 pages in particular, 64-74, when the characters discuss mastery. They introduce the concept of FMOB (the First, the Most, the Only and the Best). To me, striving for that ideal just about sums up what the pursuit of pro is all about.

Here are my favorite quotes from those 10 pages.

“Mastery, Anna offered. ‘committing yourself to mastery at what you do, mastery at your craft–whether your craft is selling staplers or educating children–is the only standard to operate under in these change-rich times. Anything less and you’ll be left behind. The comedian Steve Martin said it really well when he advised, ‘Be so good that people cannot ignore you’”

“Expect more from yourself than anyone around you could ever expect from you. Play in the big leagues, Blake! Just fly up into the thing space of rare air. Most people set such low standards for themselves. They aim so low–and then, sadly, reach that goal. And so you’ll find that you don’t have a lot of company out on the extra mile.”

However you look at it, the pursuit of pro is the first step to great leadership. After all, if you cannot bring out the best in yourself how can you hope to bring out the best in others?

So how do you go about developing the pursuit of pro mindset? You can do it in many ways. By far the best way I’ve found is to immerse yourself in an environment where the pursuit of pro is an integral part of the communities DNA. Even better, to be part of a team that is likewise and where the group performance rests on the individual ability of every team member. Your teammates will, over time, pound the following mantra into your head. “Be better” “Practice harder and smarter” “Never quit” “How good I was yesterday means nothing only how good I am being right now.” That’s what WoW did for me. It’s what team sports did for many of the top performers of the last few generations. It’s what the military and often the general will to thrive and thus survive did for generations before that. What it is that gives you the attitude matters not. All that matters is that you get it.

Of course this is not to say that you must have had an experience like this in order to be able to understand and live the principle. Another quote from those 10 pages mentioned above….

“BIW just means Best in World. In my work here at this hotel, I continually ask myself a very power self-coaching question: “What would the person who is the best in the world at what I do be doing in this very moment?” Once I get the answer, I immediately refocus myself and get down to the business of doing only that which will create the largest results and the biggest impact. My goal here, each and every day, is to be the best in the world at my craft of housekeeping. And that’s how I continually move closer towards mastery,”

…. Just forming the habit to constantly ask yourself this on a regular basis can do the job. Attach the thought to an object or action that you often do throughout the day, whenever you do that action, pass that place or see that object, ask yourself that question. Eventually it will become as much a part of you as the food you eat and air you breathe.

George Leonard, author of “Mastery – The Keys to Success and Long Term Fulfillment” got it first from his flight training and experience and latter from his practice of Aikido. “Mastery” is a great read by the way, indispensable to anyone who is series about developing the pursuit of pro attitude.

Gordon Ramsay got it first from his cut-short football career long before he opened his first restaurant.

Donald Trump got it from playing varsity football, American football and baseball.

The list goes on and on and on.

Wherever you get it, however you get it.  Find a way to go and get it. It’s THAT important.

- James

[This weeks blog post is brought to you from a local internet cafe as my internet is down at the moment.]

I love models. Specifically I love models of the way humans behave and interact. Many of my favorite books have been ones that have given me a new tool for helping me understand why people do what they do and I recently found another one… Yay!

A few months ago I watched a speech given at the TED conference by management consultant and professor at USC, Dave Logan. In said speech Dave gave an outline of a model he had been working on for well over a decade to help the leaders of tribes (groups of people between 20-150) lead. Well I was intrigued and dropped his book that he was pushing into my amazon cart and left it there until time came for my next shipment.

After having read his book something brillant happened. I started seeing the model everywhere. Suddenly the people at the supermarket weren’t just complaining, they were complaining “in a stage 2 culture”. The seminar audio series I was listening to wasn’t just motivating people, it was “motivating people to adopt a stage 3 mindset”.

I highly recommend that you click through to the video I linked above and watch the presentation for yourself, or even better, read the book, but for the sake of completeness here’s a quick overview of the model:

• Stage 1: Life sucks
• Stage 2: My life sucks
• Stage 3: I’m great (and you’re not)
• Stage 4: We’re great (and they’re not)
• Stage 5: Life is great

Now one of the author’s assertions is that if you are at a certain stage in the ladder you cannot “skip runs” so to speak. If you’re at the ‘life sucks’ stage you must first go through ‘my life sucks’ before you can continue to move up. This revelation makes SO much sense to me and explains why trying to pump up people at stage one just does not work! It also means, interestingly, that you can’t get to ‘we’re great (and they’re not)’ before going through ‘I’m great (and you’re not)’. This is one of those rare times I’ve come across someone pushing the idea that great personal achievement comes before great leadership, something that resonates with me intensely.

I also find interesting to look at my own progression over the years… I think (and I know that being objective about yourself is very tough) that for quite a long time I’ve been mostly in an ‘I’m great (and you’re not)’ mentality… I think that since I’ve started studying practicing what I’ve read, I’ve started to move from that thinking to more of a stage 4 mindset however it’s defiantly still an early stage 4 mindset.

Long, long way to go yet

- James

Books. A brilliant way to access the wisdom of great thinkers and doers.

Cheap (with Amazon), accessible (with Amazon) and plentiful (you get the picture). Very very plentiful. The best guess I could find for number of book titles in the world is 65 million.

That’s a lot of books.

How on earth is anyone who is in the “I don’t know what I don’t know” phase of leadership development meant to know what is worth reading and what isn’t?

Well, for quite a number of years my approach to reading was a stumble and pray strategy and it produced “some” good results. Most of the books I read though, while  not useless to someone who knew next to nothing, could have been much better. The result of this lack of guidance was a factor in why I didn’t read as much as I could have for quite a while.

However, I then got a stroke of good luck (yay for serendipity). I tripped over Josh Kaufman’s Personal MBA (PMBA) website. Josh created this website with the vision that you don’t have to spend a fortune on an MBA to get a good business education. While I was stumbling around not reading much, he was reading books by the thousand! Josh has created a list of what he considers to be the 99 best in the categories he considers of most importance for a successful business leader.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. - Sir Francis Bacon

All of the books on the PMBA that I have read so far, fall very much into the last category. The list’s brilliance is down in most part to Josh’s own laser sharp understanding about business and leadership, which is very evident from his own blog articles, videos and projects.

Since I started my quest to understand leadership development I have read a lot of books and I usually have some trepedation before starting one (I hate not finishing books once I’ve started them).However everytime I pick up a PMBA book I know that it’s going to end up on my “I can’t imagine myself not having read this book” list.

So far I’ve read 16 of the 99 total. I’m thinking of some way to show my progress on this blog since it’s something I really want to complete.

So anyway, go check out the PMBA manifesto, start reading, and become just a bit more awesome with every page turn!

- James

PS. This is not an attack on MBA programmes, I think they have their place and can be very good choices for many people. However I also feel that in today’s world, the idea that you can have a monopoly on knowledge is silly. If I ever take an MBA I’ll let you know my opinion of MBA vs. PMBA but until that time I’ll take the knowledge I can get a hold of right now.

When I was twelve I watched a documentary series first shown in 1994 and presented by Desmond Morris called The Human Animal. While I suspect the intro of naked people walking through a busy city street did more for the interest of a kid just entering puberty then the promise of the scientific import of the material, I nevertheless loved the series and the way it approached the study of people from a zoological perspective. Something I had never thought of before.

It was my first introduction to linguistic and social anthropology, although it would be some time before I learned that’s what it was.

Over a decade later and I’m now studying leadership development.

The significance of social anthropology to anyone either wanting to either become a leader or develop someone else to become a leader should be obvious. After-all, we’ve already said that one of the purposes of the leader is to forge the team and social anthropology is the study of how humans behave in social groups.

The tales and stories of social anthropologists are full of jungle treks, mountain hikes, paddling between islands in canoes and bumping across rough desert terrain in 4x4s. And although many of them have now moved towards studying modernity rather then… *tires to remember the PC term*… um, people with sticks, they have taken the tools they developed during those expeditions and turned them towards us.

Social anthropologists study how people behave by observing them in their natural conditions. They don’t pull them into labs, in controlled conditions and ask them to give shocks to each other (although they seem to be very fond of sticking needles in people). They are very much interested in how the many facets of human individuality, culture, religion, hierarchy, wealth, gender, lineage, education etc. come together to form behaviors between people.

Social anthropologists are impartial observers (ideally). And one of the best tools that leaders can get out of a study of social anthropology is a healthy habit of observing human behavior and questioning its causes and purpose.

There’s long running joke in the anthropology world comparing those who go out and actually observe people to those who stay at home reading the reports of those who do the field work. The latter often being referred to as “armchair anthropologists”. A leader is never an armchair anthropologist. Sure, go and buy books, listen to courses and watch documentaries. But more then that, whenever you’re with other people, watch how they behave and try to figure out why; Their body language, voice tone, emotions, who they pay attention to and who they ignore, everything.

Understanding people makes you a better leader… duh.

- James

I like to think of myself as a travelled person. I’ve lived in 4 different countries and moved 6 times.

I’ve hiked up Mt. Vesuvius, skied in the Alps, kayaked down the Ardeche, eaten reindeer stew in Lapland, climbed Aphrodite’s rock, dinned in the oldest restaurant in Russia, walked the museums of Vienna, bought a bit of the Berlin wall (guaranteed not a random bit of masonry lying around… honest gov.), rambled across the lake district, and generally made awesome memories wherever I could (not hard).

But in all that time, I’ve never stepped far outside Europe. So when I received an email this morning saying I’d been accepted to the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing I was very, very happy *dancing*. I’m still waiting for word back from another uni I’ve applied for in Shanghai but as it stands chances are I’ll accept the offer from these guys.

The thought that I’ll be spending four years in the Celestial Kingdom is such a hit. No doubt reality will bring me down soon enough however for the moment I am walking on air.

I often get asked, why China? And to save myself from going through a carefully thought through chain of reasoning which makes my dinner companions eyes glaze over, I usually look them in said eyes, lean in and say “I just feel drawn there” and they smile and nod knowingly.

Truth is I’ve always loved East Asia and East Asian Culture…. (What follows is definitely not a carefully thought through chain of reasoning but my bed is seducing me from the other room and all attempts at rational thought are failing me):

• China:  Upcoming world power house, largest population on earth, amazing culture reaching back 7,000 years, leadership seriously serious about being the best.
• India (not technically east asia but I like anyway): Ditto, nearly ditto, democracy.
• South Korea: Hugely intensive IT scene, concentrated population in a small area.
• Japan: Best popular culture in my world, concentrated population in a small area, stagnant/declining  economy.

After looking at the options I decided on China. I’d love to live in Japan but I’m doing this to develop myself as a better business person not to sink further into otaku tendencies. Similar reasoning goes for South Korea. Flipping between China and India… I feel that learning Mandarin would be more useful then Hindi and I guess I just like Chinese culture more.

I still have a three or four months where I am now which I intend to take full advantage of (I somehow doubt I’m going to have a swimming pool outside my apartment for quite a while).

So there you have it, to the Middle Kingdom!

- James

If you remember back to the first post, our definition of  power was “The ability to make something happen in potentia.”

Now let’s talk briefly about going beyond power in potentia and into power, actualised. We can actualise power to affect the environment or to affect people, for now we’ll focus on people.

There are three ways to apply power to people:

1. Aggression
2. Persuasion
3. Manipulation

Instead of talking you through the three, I thought I would make a chart to show the differences instead. You can click on the image to get a bigger version.

Visibility: What the other person sees the act as.

Intent: Self-explanatory

Usage: Recommended frequency of usage. Generally, threatening or using power to hurt others is always bad for the wielder long term. I reserve aggression for moments where there is an immediate and real threat to my or another’s physical well being and even then, only if that is the only option.

People: How people react to the use of power to affect them changes from person to person, the biggest single factor that determines their reaction is their security in themselves.

Adding to the people row… Whether someone is insecure or not says nothing about their ability to spot manipulation. ‘People smart’, insecure people are the worst kind to deal with since they both don’t like being manipulated, don’t know how to tell the difference between it and persuasion and are very adept at spotting it. Avoid like the plague (thankfully they are rare since ‘people smart’ people tend to be quite secure in themselves).

The other kind of people who don’t like being manipulated are people who manipulate others with detrimental intent. Since people often see the world as a reflection of themselves they often assume manipulation on themselves to be detrimental even when it is anything but. This can be a good litmus test to judge someone’s character with. If they react badly to spotted positive manipulation (or even obvious persuasion) this could be a sign of insecurity or issues with morality/long term vision, either way its a clear indicator that caution should be used.

- James

OK, what has history got to do with leadership development?

Five things: Vision, Belief, Perspective, Certainty and Second hand experience.

Vision

Leaders have two kinds of vision:

• A vision of their reality where they do nothing and,
• A vision of their reality where they change it.

A study of history makes the first one more accurate and the second one more meaningful.

In physics if you wished to predict the trajectory of an object currently in flight you would wish to know:

• Where the object came from and how fast it was moving (history).
• Where the object is now and how fast it is moving (current affairs).

You would then take the two and calculate where the object will be in the future.

Human affairs are far more complex then simple physics but the principle is the same, to see the future you must have an understanding of both the past and the present.

Belief

By studying history you immerse yourself in the events that shaped the world and the people that were the catalysts for it. Great leaders often have an ‘anything is possible’ attitude, one that can be developed and strengthened by seeing beyond the mundane of everyday life. Each story about someone who overcame incredible odds to lead the people around him strengthens your resolve.

Perspective

So many things have happened in the course of human existence. So many lives lived, so much joy, so much sadness, so much glory and so much fear. When you start to get a handle on how others have lived you appreciate your own fortune that much more and are that less likely to lose control at someone because they spilled your coffee.

Certainty

Followers look to their leaders to be rocks during periods of uncertainty. Certainty can be gained from many sources and one of them is in knowing the history of your people and in a greater sense, the history of the human race. It can give you a place to stand, a feeling that ‘I have been put here for a purpose and I will not rest in pursuit of that purpose’.

Second hand experience

Every lesson learned from the mistakes or experience of the people of the past is one more lesson you won’t have to learn the hard and expensive way. Not being paralysed by the fear to fail is vital but knowing how to learn to reduce the chances of failure is just as important.

As your knowledge of our worlds past, and the people that lived in it, increases so you will be able to see the patterns around you everyday that illuminate both problem and opportunity.

One last thing. In my study of great leaders of the past one thing has almost always struck me. The fact that almost every great leader that the average person can name, all of them, were great students of history. They were probably on to a good thing

- James

In my last blog post I defined leadership development as the improvement of your personal ability to lead, a process of self improvement.

Now, when you are working to become a great leader on your own this is as far as it needs to go. However when you are attempting to develop someone else as a leader I consider this to be an umbrella term which encompasses three fields which need to be treated separately:

• Leadology –  The study of power and people (teaching knowledge).
• Leadership training – The practice of the skills used in leading (training skills).
• Leadership coaching – Building the habits necessary to become an effective leader (coaching habit).

It is important to make the distinction because all three require different approaches and methodologies. You can be a great teacher and a poor coach, or a great trainer but a poor teacher.

These three skills, teaching; training and coaching, are important not only to the person wishing to develop leadership in others but also to the self-developed leader. This is because developing people is essential to being able to lead. It is one of the key attributes that followers need from their leaders… “Will I be able to grow with this person?”

Some more definitions to aid understanding of the above definitions:

• Power – The ability to make something happen in potentia.
• Leading – The realising of power and people to change the status quo.
• Leader – A person who both studies leadology and who leads.

I should add that these are my definitions for these words, the dictionary will say something quite different. However I believe language is a toolbox that should serve the needs of man, not the other way around and so within the context of leadership development this is what I mean when I use these words.

When I discuss how to develop leadership in other posts I will do so from the POV of someone developing leadership in others. Self-developing leaders can adapt the ideas to themselves with far greater ease then the other way around.

Leadership development is the improvement of your personal ability to lead.  It is a process of self improvement.

Leaders are concerned with two primary functions. These are functions that only the leader can perform, everything else can, in theory, be done by someone else.

1. Forging the team
2. Having and articulating vision

Therefore, all of the areas that I focus on improve a persons ability to do one or both of the above things.

I break up the development of a leader into three categories:

1. Knowledge (mental models of how the external world works)
2. Skill (the ability to manipulate the external world)
3. Habit (action without thought)

I further break these down into certain key areas that I believe all leaders should develop if they wish to become competent in their craft.

There are many, many more areas that should be developed too but I present here my key ones.

• Knowledge
  • History
  • Psychology
  • Anthropology
  • Management
  • Current affairs
  • Self
  • Ethics
• Skill
  • Understanding
  • Thinking
  • Persuasion
  • Investing
  • Mathematics
• Habit
  • Correct sleep
  • Correct diet
  • Exercise
  • Respect
  • Compassion
  • Reflection
  • Goal setting
  • Positive thinking
  • Reading
  • Note taking
  • Questioning

This is the basis of my thoughts on leadership development. In the words of the great Warren Bennis…

“It is clear to me now that the process of becoming a leader and the process of becoming a fully integrated human being are one and the same, both grounded in self-discovery.” – Warren Bennis

- James