Practice 1: Embody an Inherently Positive View of Human Nature

The principles of Peak have their roots in humanistic psychology and a basic belief that man is meant to be all that he can be. So, it's not surprising that the fundamental first practice is assuring that a Peak leader believes that humans—at their very core—gravitate to goodness when the right conditions exist for them to flourish.

Creating the right psycho-hygiene in a company has a lot to do with focusing on people's best qualities and believing in what's been known for more than a half-century in business as a Theory Y perspective on management versus Theory X. As we discussed in Chapter Two, with Theory X, management assumes employees are inherently lazy, will avoid work if they can, and inherently dislike work. As a result, management believes that workers need to be closely supervised and comprehensive systems of controls should be developed. With Theory Y, management assumes employees may be ambitious, self-motivated, and able to exercise self-control. They believe that the satisfaction of doing a good job is a strong motivator and seek to create the conditions for employees to develop their own strengths to be successful. I often call this creating the right habitat.

While this seems straightforward, how much time do we spend trying to change people on our teams rather than allowing them to grow—or, better yet, making sure that you have the right people for your particular kind of habitat? In reality, it takes practice to really embody this perspective and it takes time for it to build the kind of trust that ultimately bears fruit. However, this is the path toward freedom—the path to not needing to be involved in every decision or at every meeting. The command and control structure that defined business for so many years is declining. Yet, for some organizations, chaos is what reigns in its absence. This practice helps leaders to understand the method to tap into their peoples' greatest potential, while still developing a sense of order and mission that can propel the organization forward toward its goals.

It can be truly courageous to operate based upon this practice. Look at Tony Hsieh and Zappos. They chose to develop a whole new approach to their organizational structure and decision-making called Holacracy. While controversial, because of the radical nature of some of its processes, Holacracy replaces the top-down predict-and-control paradigm with a new way of achieving control by distributing power. It is a new operating system that instills rapid evolution in the core processes of an organization based on the belief that all employees want to have a stake and a voice in how they operate. It's also based upon the premise that line-level employees, not just managers, should be integrated into decision-making: https://www.zapposinsights.com/about/holacracy/10-ways-leaders-limit-success/.

John Mackey's approach to empowering small teams at Whole Foods Market has a similar Theory Y perspective. Zappos has had some challenges making this transition, but the company has an impressive track record of trying rebellious, humanistic ideas that become the norm. For example, in 2009, Amazon acquired Zappos and inherited their offer. During their primary training, new employees are offered $4,000 to leave the company (originally, it was $2,000). In his 2014 annual letter to shareholders, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explained that the company had added a program modeled after the one started by Zappos. After some tweaking, Bezos and Amazon aptly titled the program “Pay to Quit.” Old school, Theory X thinking would suggest that employees might try to get a job at Amazon or Zappos just for the bonus to leave. But these two A–Z companies both recognize that helping an employee depart on good terms, and get compensated for it, is better than having them stick around disgruntled and unproductive. Bezos explains the rationale: “The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want.”¹ He writes, “In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don't want to be isn't healthy for the employee or the company.” While editing this revised edition, Amazon purchased Whole Foods Market and it will be interesting to see how the fresh grocer evolves.

Here are a couple tips you can consider to address the premise behind Douglas McGregor's quotation that opened Chapter Two: “Behind every managerial decision or action are assumptions about human nature and human behavior.”

• Make a list of a dozen different examples of your employment practices—from time clocks to vacation policies—and then grade them on a one-to-five basis of how they fit on the Theory X (1) and Theory Y (5) spectrum. What was your average score and how can you create more practices that veer in the direction of Theory Y? Or, take McGregor's direction as outlined in Chapter Two: “Next time you attend a management staff meeting at which a policy problem is under discussion, or some action is being considered, try a variant on the pastime of doodling. Jot down the assumptions (beliefs, opinions, convictions, generalizations) about human behavior made during the discussion by the participants. Some of these will be explicitly stated. Most will be implicit, but fairly easily inferred.” Engage a conversation of your top leaders about the risks and rewards of developing a more positive view of human nature. Is it possible for you to test some new, human-centric approaches in some part of your company to see what the effect is on employee engagement and customer satisfaction?
• Peter Mullin is one of the wisest men I know. He started M Financial more than 35 years ago and it grew into one of the preeminent life insurance and financial services firms in the world. His underlying Theory Y belief is that his employees are smart problem-solvers, but they just haven't been coached to properly exercise that muscle. So, when an employee comes to Peter with a problem looking for a solution from him, he'll say, “You've been thinking about this a lot, what do you think is the best solution?” He waits for an answer, even if there's a long, awkward pause. Often, the employee comes up with an answer that isn't very plausible so Peter will ask them their number two and three ideas, which brings a panic to the face of the employee. Peter then suggests the employee go back and think through a few solutions with the idea that a week later they will review these together. When that future meeting happens, the vast majority of the time, the employee has developed two or three credible solutions that Peter can help tweak a little so that the employee feels a greater self-confidence in the ability to problem solve as well as the boss.

Practice 2: Create the Conditions for People to Live Their Calling

Abe Maslow wrote, “One can set up the conditions so that peak experiences are more likely, or, one can perversely set up the conditions so that they are less likely.”² Great leaders understand there are only three relationships you can have with your work. You can have a job, a career, or a calling. When you're living a calling, it energizes you, while a job tends to deplete you. Great companies create the conditions for employees to live their calling.

Most employees live in the bartering world of work. The company gives them a compensation package and recognition and, in return, the employee gives their time and energy. Yet, those who are living their calling have moved from external motivation to internal motivation. And, quite often, these employees are less focused on the specific collection of tasks they perform and more focused on the impact or purpose of what they do. This is true of all employees whether they be hotel housekeepers, tech engineers, or airline flight attendants. And, yet, there's a real skill as a leader in creating the environment where employees are compelled by a purpose as opposed to discouraged by task-driven rules.

Gary Kelly, the CEO of Southwest Airlines, explains that one of the principal reasons his company didn't start charging for baggage—like all the other airlines did when oil prices spiked in 2008 during the Great Recession—was because he recognized this decision would negatively affect the sense of calling his flight attendants have in their work. One key differentiator for Southwest is the friendly, casual, and genuine service the company's flight attendants provide. Yet, if passengers were now going to bring dramatically more baggage on the plane to avert the baggage charges (which is what ended up happening at the other airlines), this could affect the happiness and engagement of his customer-serving airplane personnel.

Southwest initially got beaten up by Wall Street analysts because they didn't pursue the short-term profits of extra fees for bags. But the airline's on-time performance vastly improved during this era, while their competitors were delayed due to all the extra bags being carried on and then escorted out of the passenger section of the plane. Southwest saw fast growth in their market share partly due to its decision not to mess with the happiness of their flight attendants.

Great leaders face difficult decisions. They holistically consider how their decision-making will impact the employee work climate and their employees' ability to aspire to living a calling. Here are two questions a Peak leader can ask themselves and their team to assure they're applying this practice:

• As you make any significant operational or strategic decision for the company, who on your team will be most affected by this decision, what is the potential collateral damage that could arise out of this decision, and how can you mitigate it if you are going to pursue this path?
• How are you regularly gathering insights from your various job functions in the company to determine what gives each of them the greatest sense of meaning in their job, as dishwashers will likely have different answers than bartenders but both work in the same restaurant? Once you've identified this mojo-creator, how can you amplify more of that kind of experience in that particular job classification?

Practice 3: Promote and Measure the Value of Intangibles

In business, we're taught that leadership is all about managing what you can measure, but what's most easily measurable is the tangible in life. It's easier to answer the question of whether your stomach is hungry (a basic physiological need) than whether your soul is famished (a self-actualization need). No doubt, the tangible is important. In business, the metrics that track the tangible are well known: your profitability, your cost structure, and your market share. Yet, in reality, these tangible metrics are the result of a series of intangibles that drive excellence: brand loyalty and reputation, employee engagement, customer evangelism and word of mouth, ability to innovate and create intellectual capital, or company culture. These intangibles are the inputs that truly drive the tangible output most companies use to evaluate their performance.

These intangibles drive business success and yet they are much more difficult to measure. Just because something is more intangible and difficult to measure, we often mistake it to be less valuable. Or, even more likely, we neglect it because it doesn't fit as easily onto an Excel spreadsheet. Yet, modern leaders recognize that the intangibles tend to be the ultimate differentiators of their company and brand.

In a world that is increasingly driven by the value of the intangible, Peak leaders are able to rise above their colleagues by tapping into a set of practices that values what truly counts in business, and, in life. A quote often attributed to Einstein reads “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted”³; yet Einstein never ran a business in the twenty-first century. Today, our visionary yet practical business leaders know that intangibles matter, but they also have to prove this with a new set of meaningful metrics that drive organizational performance.

I had the good fortune of traveling to the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan in 2009 to meet the prime minister and the country's Gross National Happiness Commission. Back in the early 1970s, Bhutan's young king, sounding like a Peak leader, asked why all countries are fixated with gross national product (GNP) when spreading happiness should be the aspiration of every effective governmental leader. With nearly 40 percent of the world's population on its tiny borders, like a tiny start-up surrounded by mature competitors, Bhutan has created the ultimate disruptive metric, a global currency of well-being, which has now been adopted in over 50 other countries. I came back from this transformative trip and gave a TED talk about learning to measure what makes life worthwhile: https://www.ted.com/talks/chip_conley_measuring_what_makes_life_worthwhile.

There are so many opportunities to create meaningful metrics in your company. At Airbnb, our recruiting team tracks the number of online applicants to jobs available each year as a means of understanding our popularity as an employer. This popularity index grew by more than 50 percent in 2016, after the company won the award—overtaking Google—in 2015 for being the best place to work (according to the anonymous online employee review site Glassdoor). Other companies track unique metrics like the percentage of employees involved in company philanthropic activities, or the percentage of employees referring friends or family to work in the company (with no financial bounty attached), as a means of evaluating the intangible of employee engagement. Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform, chose to become a public benefit corporation (known as a B-Corp) because they appreciated the metrics that B-Corps have to live up to while some other companies use WorldBlu's Scorecard as a means to track the democratic design of an organization.

Steps you can take to give greater attention to the intangible in your organization:

• Create a small task force of diverse employees in your company focused on the question, “What is valuable for our employees, customers, or community that we currently don't measure and need to start counting?” Airbnb has taken this question seriously and is looking at the variety of ways it can measure Beyond Anywhere, the company's mission for our guests and employees. We charted the Belong Here Transformation Journey that charts the moments and influences that help our employees belong at work and we redesigned the check-in experience to help employees feel that sense of belonging on their new teams almost immediately. Finally, we added a question to our twice-annual employee engagement survey asking their perspective on “I feel a sense of belonging.”
• Create your own meaning index in the Notes app on your smartphone. Each day, when you experience a moment of joie de vivre, make a note of what prompted it—whether it be someone complimenting your action plan that was just distributed or feeling accomplished about a meeting you just led. At week's end, gather the list of meaningful moments and start developing a list of categories that these moments fall into. Over the course of a few weeks, you will better understand what gives you meaning and can start developing an operating strategy for how you can seek more of that in your work life as well as a sustained way of measuring it.

Practice 4: Ability to Move Fluidly Between Being a Transactional and a Transformational Leader

Transactional leaders lead from the bottom of the pyramid, while transformational leaders lead from the top. Most management decisions require only transactional thinking because the goal is purely to optimize existing resources. But, in an era of constant change, transformational leaders visualize potential and actualize it into reality. And they do so in a manner that energizes and inspires the organization to greatness. A Peak leader is able to move fluidly between addressing people's foundational needs, while also helping them to see beyond the short-term, which motivates a compelling vision to help transcend their momentary challenges.

I call someone with this fluidity a Golden Eagle Leader. No other bird can fly to 10,000 feet or one of the fastest horizontal speeds, 80 miles per hour, like the golden eagle can. Yet, like a visionary who is able to dive deep into an operational challenge when he or she spots it, the golden eagle has the fastest vertical drop speed of any bird, 150 miles per hour. These leaders are adept at the left-brain, right-brain tango and able to shift from logic to creativity in a moment's notice.

I appreciate that many of the people I've worked with see me as a Golden Eagle Leader. But, I've witnessed those with considerably more fluidity than me. Barry Sternlicht, who created Starwood Hotels, could be rapping on the phone about a complex real estate deal one minute, and addressing a designer in his office with a critique of a new hotel room style the next (as he did when he launched the W and 1hotel brands). He could fly high or low in multiple disciplines of business.

Similarly, I've enjoyed flying side-by-side with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. His visionary perspective on making the company the “superbrand” of travel is matched by his superhuman ability to sit in on a design meeting to make small, essential changes to the Airbnb app. Many have compared him to Steve Jobs in his capacity to be both transactional and transformational.

Julie Hanna, the Egyptian-born technologist, entrepreneur, and executive chair of the board of Kiva, iteratively asks the Peter Drucker question “What business are we in?” to ensure Kiva is being guided by its mission to democratize access to capital. A peer-to-peer lending pioneer, and the world's largest crowdfunding marketplace for global entrepreneurs, Kiva targets underserved borrowers, most of whom are in the developing world. When the Great Recession hit in 2008, they saw a need and opportunity to also fund U.S. small business entrepreneurs who had largely been abandoned by traditional banks. Kiva received quite a bit of grief from stakeholders (lenders and employees) who believed it had strayed from its mission. The Drucker question helped give the leadership team the comfort to think more expansively about their mission.

If Julie and the team hadn't shifted from their transformational vision to the transactional question of how to address the pushback from stakeholders, this new direction might have died. By practicing what she calls “radical empathy” and going deep to understand what wasn't resonating in hearts and minds, they uncovered a hidden unconscious bias that blinded stakeholders to the unmet capital needs of small businesses in the United States. Once Kiva demonstrated that extreme lending cutbacks (44 percent drop with 8 out of 10 loan applicants being turned down) meant tens of billions of dollars—that used to fuel the U.S. economy and job growth while helping communities thrive—had been eviscerated meant they were able to shift and unite the market toward a Think Global, Act Local mindset.

Julie's actionable tips for moving fluidly between transactional and transformational leadership:

• If you tend to operate in a visionary way, make sure to always do a spot check around buy-in. Especially with teammates responsible for execution. Can they link their on-the-ground operating reality to what the company is trying to achieve? What do they need to succeed and what's blocking them?
• At least once a year, and as much as quarterly, ask your teams to do the following exercise as a group. Answer the question “How does our day-to-day work enable the organization's top line goals and reason for being?” In Chapter Six, we reviewed the idea that employees can have meaning in work and at work. This exercise helps to make sure your people feel they have meaning in their sense of impact, which supports the company's purpose. It can be a simple way of identifying gaps for teams between in and at. It also helps team members at all levels cultivate their capacity to become Golden Eagle Leaders themselves.

Practice 5: Nurture, Value, and Evolve Corporate Culture as Your Ultimate Differentiator

Transformational leaders can't do it alone. Studies show that approximately 30 percent of the difference in results between competing companies with similar products or strategies can be traced to the quality of the corporate culture of each organization. Corporate culture—or, in other words, the way things are done around here—is like a pond. There can be vibrant life under the surface or a stench from dead water. Throw a stone into the pond and it creates ripples, just as organizations are contagious with emotions. The number one emotion affecting most companies? Fear. But a healthy culture is your corporate inoculation against an epidemic of fear that can paralyze your organization.

Great leaders know that company culture is their secret weapon, that it needs to be nurtured and valued, and that it must evolve with the times. It takes years to create a compelling culture, yet you can lose it with just a few bad decisions. This isn't solely an HR department concern. It's relevant to all leaders within an organization because, just like overall corporate culture, there's also departmental culture that can either propel or stymie a team. The most valuable lesson in this practice is to become more conscious about what constitutes your current culture and what steps you can take to move that in the direction most appropriate for your long-term corporate or departmental goals.

When investor Peter Thiel made his $150 million investment in Airbnb, he famously said, “Don't fuck up the culture”⁴ to the three cofounders. Cofounder and Chief Product Officer Joe Gebbia took that advice seriously and interviewed hundreds of employees to understand what would give them a greater sense of belonging, and then he took a lead role in evolving the company's core values as a result. Joe says, “The more you have a vibrant culture that everyone buys into, the less process you need in the org.”

Airbnb's investment in culture takes many forms. There's a collection of core values interviewers who do their normal jobs in various departments of the company—from engineers to lawyers—but are also trained to interview new candidates for their core value fit with the company. A core values interviewer can veto a candidate if they don't think this person understands and appreciates the culture. There's also a Core Values Council that considers business issues that arise that may be at odds with the core values of Airbnb. The company also has a sizable Ground Control team whose exclusive role is to create a vibrant culture for the employees of each of the more than 20 global offices, but in a way that fits the local culture of that part of the world.

Airbnb's biggest investment in culture is likely its biennial One Airbnb and Airbnb Open. Imagine bringing every one of your 3,000 employees globally to the mothership to reconnect with the mission of the company. This requires a big commitment of time, money, and logistical prowess because you still have a company to run while this retreat is taking place. Similarly, due to the sizable success of this all-employee event, I took the lead in developing the Airbnb Open, which is our way of investing in the culture of our global host community. This movable feast has taken place in San Francisco, Paris, and Los Angeles, where in 2016, we had 20,000 enthusiastic evangelists from more than 100 countries tap into the culture. No doubt, this is a differentiator; as one host said to me, “I can't imagine Expedia [through HomeAway, their home-sharing subsidiary] or Booking.com putting this on for their host community. For that matter, they don't even have this kind of host community.”

How are you being an advocate for your culture? Here are a couple of ways you can ensure this practice in your company:

• One of the most important questions a Peak leader can ask when faced with challenging economic circumstances is “What do I want our culture to look like when we come out of this difficult time?” If you're leading during a recession, a merger, or some major reorganization, make sure this question is asked amongst your leadership team at least monthly during your regular meetings. If you want to emphasize how important culture is, put it in the title of the CEO. Liderman's CEO (profiled in Chapter Four) Javier Calvo Perez Badiola includes the title “Guardian of the Culture” on his business card and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has added “Head of Community” to his CEO title.
• Just like people have personalities, companies have cultures. The more clear and intentional you are in defining your culture the better. This is also true of various departments within a company that have subcultures. At a company retreat, ask employees to name an animal that first comes to mind when thinking of your company culture, along with a few adjectives that define the animal and culture. Converse about this as a group to understand commonalities. Then, break into functional departmental groups and define the personality of your team or department. At Airbnb, we even have graphic animals on large signs defining the workspaces of the various teams.

Practice 6: Calibrate the Balance Between Conscious and Capitalism

Business has quite often been seen as a zero-sum game. One person's win is another person's loss. Taken to a global level, some believe that capitalism's short-term gains are often to the long-term detriment of the environment and to certain communities. Yet, there's been a paradigm shift in the past decade, most noticeably evidenced by America's largest retailer, Wal-Mart. Peak-performing companies have to become conscious capitalists as the world has become much more transparent and companies have become more accountable. Many companies today believe that you can do well by doing good, but they also believe sustainability isn't just about being eco-friendly. It's also about having a sustainable business model, which assures you're in business next year.

My initial title for this book was Karmic Capitalism and John Mackey used the now ubiquitous term Conscious Capitalism for his. How does a great business teach the practice of conscious capitalism to their key leaders? Teaching leaders the value of leading with a long-term, systemic perspective is foundational to this practice. No doubt, leadership is all about balancing priorities. In the twenty-first century, the most profound leadership question will be how to balance being conscious about how your decisions impact those around you, and the world, while focusing on maximizing financial return for the organization. That may sound like the kind of concern only a CEO has to consider but, in reality, on a daily basis, midlevel leaders are faced with questions about how a financially motivated decision might affect the culture of their department, the motivation of those who work with them, or the company's reputation in the community. Think of the United Airlines gate agents who in April 2017 decided to send police officers onto a plane to drag Dr. David Dao from his seat because they were overbooked—a classic un-conscious capitalism case study. This practice helps create a leadership paradigm for leaders throughout an organization to use.

John Zimmer, cofounder and president of Lyft, is a great role model for this practice. A graduate of the Cornell Hospitality School, he says he was heavily influenced by a quotation on a plaque at Cornell: “Life is service. The one who progresses is the one who gives his fellow men a little more—a little better service.” This human-minded ethos is part of the reason Lyft's moral compass is often seen as more admirable than that of its chief rival, Uber.

How does this approach to conscious capitalism show up in Lyft's business practices? They value their drivers more by offering more humane education and mentorship options, allowing drivers to receive tips (more than $200 million has been collected as of mid 2017), which Uber doesn't allow its drivers, creating a driver community forum, encouraging passengers to round-up their fare to make a donation to charity, and the company is frequently more collaborative with municipal regulators. It's no surprise that more than 75 percent of Lyft drivers are satisfied with their experience while this number is less than 50 percent for Uber drivers. This conscious approach to being a disruptor has created great brand value to Lyft and, while they are today only a fraction of the size of Uber, their momentum and market share is growing because of their reputation.

Here are a couple of ways you can put this conscious capitalism practice to good use:

• Read the book Conscious Capitalism by Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey and Raj Sisodia, review the website www.consciouscapitalism.org, and consider going to their annual conference or getting involved in a local chapter.
• Move beyond the typical platitudes of corporate social responsibility. What are the specific things your company is doing to operate from a broader stakeholder perspective that none of your competitors are doing? How can you engage your employees to take a more active role in deciding which causes you'll support, and what operational changes can you make in your business to make it more conscious?

Practice 7: Disrupt the Customer Pyramid with Consistent, New Innovations at the Peak

The sixth practice helps a Peak leader look beyond the borders of their company, and this seventh practice furthers that expansive thinking. Transformational companies and leaders can often be contrarian by focusing on the higher needs of their obvious primary customers, but also with customers that their competitors hadn't ever considered.

Peak leaders often understand what the customer wants even before the customer has articulated it, and they realize that customer experience innovation requires a certain amount of mind reading and cultural anthropology. Like Amazon, this means finding new ways to observe your customers. Part of the reason Amazon is now creating physical stores is that Jeff Bezos likes his insights team to observe the interplay between shoppers and the company's digital platforms such as Kindle and Alexa.

The faster change is happening in your industry, the faster an unrecognized need becomes a desire, and then gravity shifts it to an expectation. This means you need to be constantly scaling the customer pyramid with innovations that could disrupt your core business, as Netflix's Reed Hastings did with its streaming product that hurt their DVD-by-mail cash cow.

Fred Smith learned this when he started FedEx. Initially, he introduced a product—overnight package delivery around the United States—that was unfathomable at the time. It led to FedEx becoming the leader in the industry until this unique product offering became a commodity and Fred and his company had to imagine his customers' newest needs. Fred ultimately realized that the new differentiator was minute-by-minute electronic tracking of the packages being delivered. FedEx moved into the peace of mind business from just being in package delivery. Peak leaders are constantly imagining what new customer needs may pop-up once their existing need has been satisfied.

Amazon was named Fast Company's number one innovative company in the world for 2017, partly because, while they're huge, they're also a start-up at heart and constantly scaling the customer pyramid to offer new products to address unrecognized needs. Often, they do this by taking the learning from one product offering and applying it to another. Amazon's Echo smart speaker rose from learning from the Fire Phone system, which wasn't all that successful. The latest version of its streaming music service, Amazon Music Unlimited, was hatched out of its initial music store, Amazon MP3. And their new media studio, which is winning all kinds of Emmys, sprouted from the crowdsourcing platform they created in 2010 for aspiring screenwriters. Be on the lookout for Amazon Go, a new kind of convenience store that retires the idea of waiting in a cash register checkout line.

A relentless commitment to innovation means that you're tirelessly climbing that customer pyramid to the peak, over and over again, knowing that gravity will take hold of any new products you launch and turn them into customer expectations. Here are a couple of ways you can seek the peak with new product and service inventions:

• Determine how you can become the world's best mind reader with respect to the unrecognized needs of your core customers. At Joie de Vivre, we used our process of defining a magazine and five adjectives to help us determine the identity refreshment we could offer to our bull's-eye psychographic customer. Intuit uses its follow-me-home ethnography approach to understanding the latent needs of its customers. Amazon is creating retail stores as insight centers. Create a persona with a name for your primary core customers and regularly refresh your definition of who they are and what new products in the marketplace are delighting them.
• Make a commitment that a certain percentage of your future revenues (let's say five years from now) will come from products, services, or businesses that don't exist today. Be careful, as these are empty words if they're not followed up with a roadmap for how you'll accomplish this. Making this kind of commitment internally and externally helps accelerate your momentum in building an organization that's constantly refreshing itself with new innovation, and it will likely force you to look at new pools of customers you haven't historically served.

Practice 8: Lead to Peak (In Other Words, You're Always a Role Model and a Sherpa)

Just as a Sherpa does in the Himalayas, great leaders meet their people where they are on the pyramid and help them to see the natural path up to the peak. Peak leaders embody loyalty and build an emotional bank account with their employees by championing personal development in tandem with corporate development. They understand the synergistic effect of having a self-actualized individual in the workplace. Peak leaders also unconsciously calculate the lifetime value of their customer, employee, and investor relationships knowing that investing in relationships builds trust, which is the ultimate lubricant for a well-run business.

Most importantly, Peak leaders embody authentic leadership by being, not just by doing. The essence of who they are helps incubate a collection of other leaders who see them as a role model and are loyal to them—both as a leader and as a person they admire. Ping Fu came to the United States at age 24 with just $80 in her pocket after being expelled from her homeland, China, because she spoke out about infanticide due to the strictly enforced one-child policy. Her path to acclimating in this new place wasn't easy but, ultimately, many years later, she started a 3-D printing company called Geomagic that was sold to a public company for tens of millions of dollars. Part of her success as a leader has to do with her presence—the sense that she was not just an awake leader, but she was also an inspired human who had scaled many peaks in her life.

Kip Tindell, cofounder, chairman, and past CEO of the Container Store, uses the metaphor of a wake, the trail of water left by a boat, to define this practice. Just like a boat's wake has an effect on everything behind it, each person also has a wake, and their decisions impact those around them more than they realize. He says, “Your wake, my wake, everybody's wake is far more vast and powerful than you think it is. It makes you realize how big and influential we are, and how much impact we have on the companies around us and the world around us. We're not just one grain of sand on the beach. In an organization mindful of their wake, good things tend to happen—it becomes an unassailable business advantage.”⁵ Kip's approach to role modeling the leaders' wake is part of the reason the Container Store is regularly on Fortune's list of the Best Companies to Work For.

Conscious people pay attention. It's true of spiritual leaders. And it's true of business leaders. Peak leaders pay attention to the higher needs while not neglecting the base needs that provide a foundation for their organization. Leadership is all about making conscious choices and knowing that the higher you are in the company, the more magnified your decisions and behavior will be throughout the organization. At the end of the day, a great leader has a profound impact far beyond their little end of the pond.

When I was leaving my day-to-day role at Airbnb, I was humbled at receiving nearly a hundred unsolicited notes from employees, hosts, and guests in our community. You might think that the primary message would have been an expression of thanks for some specific thing I'd done for them. But, far and away, the summarized messages say something like “You are an inspiring human being who expresses your radiant spirit universally, no matter who the audience is. You've helped me to see that being a great leader means being a great human.”

Here are a couple of ways you can hone your practice of being a role model and Sherpa:

• Leaders are the emotional thermostats of those they lead. The moment you truly own that sentence, you realize you're a role model. Stop calling yourself a leader and start calling yourself a role model. Truly, try this for a week. Ask your role model team (not your leadership team) what it feels like to be addressed in this new way. I'm sure it will be awkward initially, but you'll find it magical over time as being a role model forces you to realize the impact you have on others.
• Read Robert Greenleaf's classic book, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness, and look at all the ways you and your role model team can practice the principles that are outlined in this book.

In Sum

The eight practices that define Peak leaders can be summarized in one simple paragraph.

Peak leaders believe humans are basically good (Practice 1). Work is a powerful means for one to live their calling (Practice 2). Yet, what's most valuable in life and business is often elusive (Practice 3). Great leaders know that these elusive intangibles are found higher up on the Hierarchy of Needs pyramid and they try to lead from that transformational place (Practice 4). A healthy company culture can be transformative in helping a leader and an organization pay attention to higher needs (Practice 5). But, in the interdependent and transparent world we live in, Peak leaders recognize that they have to be conscious of higher needs beyond their organization (Practice 6). Delivering on the unrecognized needs of your customers—or your community—requires a relentless commitment to innovation (Practice 7). Peak leaders develop loyalty with all their stakeholders by operating as if they're a role model all of the time (Practice 8). Being a humanistic role model takes a leader back to Practice 1.

Leadership practice isn't something you miraculously learn by reading a book. It isn't something you learn in business school. It is an ability that develops throughout one's career and one's life. And it must be practiced to be learned. One of the aspects of a practice is that it has us bring our attention to something, make it more conscious than it might have been otherwise, and it breaks the unconscious or habitual cycle in which most of us languish. But these practices aren't confined to our business life, which is why we finish the book with a chapter on how to integrate Peak into your personal life.