CHAPTER 1
WHAT KIND OF LEADER DO YOU WANT TO BE?

The Ship Is Sinking

The sky is a blanket of black. It’s 2:30 a.m, and the moon has set; the stars barely light the few feet in front of him. The skipper can barely see the other twelve men on the boat. There are two other boats patrolling with his: they’re ghosts, trying to ambush the enemy. This is the passage their destroyers sail as they return home from battle.

One of the other officers is on the bow. He’s using his binoculars, scanning the dark to locate a target. The 80-foot motor torpedo boat is the perfect surprise weapon, faster and smaller than the enemy’s giant ships. The skipper is at the wheel, waiting. He has a quick daydream about sailing as a child. He’s always loved the sea. The skipper snaps back to attention, and he thinks he sees his fellow officer point. His skin tingles at the prospect of action.

Then the scout bellows, “Ship at two o’clock!”

Because the skipper is trying to prevent detection, only one of the boat’s three engines is fired up. He spins the wheel, hard; but it’s sluggish. The boat crawls. The night is so quiet, but suddenly he sees a 379½-foot enemy destroyer, towering 60 feet high and approaching at 40 knots. He doesn’t have time to hear the roar.

In the next moment, the skipper’s boat is split in half. The only thing visible are the flames from gasoline burning on the water’s surface. Frantically, he scans the scene. Men were thrown from the boat, and the boat’s wake spread them over an area larger than a football field. Some of them are hurt, and others can’t swim—their life vests barely keep them afloat. They scream for help. The skipper and four others are still on the bobbing hull, and he realizes the current is pushing the fire toward them. Because he is the commander of a sinking ship, his men’s lives depend on what he does next.

This vignette is a true story. Leadership experiment Number One: what would you do? Your ship is sinking; men are in the water, hurt and screaming; burning gasoline is about to overtake the only part of your boat that’s floating; and five of you are in its path. What’s the first action you’d take? If you’re hesitating, imagine. Imagine yourself on half a boat. It’s pitch-black. You have crew in the water. Feel the fear and tension of that moment. And feel the weight. Those men need you, and you have the courage and the strength to help them.

There is no wrong answer to this question, just like there’s no perfect way to lead. The three commitments we’ll teach you will focus your attention as a leader whether you’re directive or collaborative, in a strict hierarchy or a flat model. Each of us is different in our leadership style: what matters is who was included in your answer. If you thought, jump in the water, you’re right, but did you say anything to the other four men who were with you?

When a ship is sinking—whether it’s a business, a government, or a city or region facing a natural disaster—the first, completely understandable human instinct is to save yourself. Leaders want to save themselves too; this book is not about martyrdom, even though self-sacrifice is essential for leadership. The three commitments are about making sure our people always have what they need to thrive. The leaders we revere and the ones that get results, they pay attention: to how they lead, to the environment their leadership creates and to every person on their team.

In the actual story, the skipper’s first action was to yell, “Over the side.” He gave clear instructions that focused those around him, and when the destroyer’s wake moved the floating fire away from the boat’s remains, they climbed back aboard. Then he took account of his situation. He had four men on the boat with him and another eight in the water, at least a few of them seriously injured and begging for help.

Again, he was clear. He wanted to know exactly who was still with him, so he had every man call out his name. Of the 12 men, 10 were accounted for. Next, he told one of his men to blink a light so the healthy could swim to the boat. Then, pinpointing the direction from which one of the wounded was yelling, he took off his clothes and dove into the water. Over the next three hours, before the sun rose, he and those who were still healthy got every man onto what was left of the ship.

As dawn began to break, the men were scared. The skipper, of course, was scared too. He didn’t want to be in the middle of a disaster, but he was ready for it: he didn’t become the commander of that boat by accident. He wanted to lead. He used his connections to get into the war early. He didn’t want to sit on the sidelines, and he ended up in the Pacific theater during its most perilous time.

What he was doing for his men began when he was young. He was a Boy Scout. He ran organizations in high school, both official and the playful Muckers Club known for pulling practical jokes throughout the campus. He led drama and athletic teams in college—his captainship of the swimming team had been of particular importance when his men were in the water. He traveled the world, and his first book about leadership and foreign affairs had been published and become a bestseller the month after he graduated. When he found himself shipwrecked with men in the water, he had been preparing for this moment his entire life.

By the time he and the able-bodied tended to the wounded, the sun was rising. They were still on the remaining half of the boat, and in the distance, they could see numerous islands; they knew the enemy occupied all of them. They started to argue. There was nothing in their military training to prepare them for this. There wasn’t enough room for all of them on the boat; the wounded needed the space, so the skipper took over. He had to rebuild their trust in one another and create some kind of stability in the chaos if they were going to survive. Except for the two hurt seamen, he ordered everyone including himself into the shark-infested water. They spent the morning watching for enemy planes, shocked that no one had come to their rescue.

Then, at 10 a.m., their injured vessel began to creak—even the wounded men had to get in the dark water and hang on. The boat capsized, guaranteeing it would sink, and the skipper made the decision most people would have thought was insane. The men who could swim grabbed a piece of the boat’s timber and headed for the one island that, while further away, they bet was too small to be occupied. The skipper then cut one of the straps on the life vest of a man who was burned too badly to move. He put the strap in his own mouth, and began to swim. Every few minutes he would stop and rest and talk with the man in tow. It took five hours to reach the island, but everyone made it safely.

The stability of dry land, however, wasn’t enough. To be rescued, they had to draw the attention of a passing friendly ship without attracting the enemy. That meant preserving their energy as long as it took. The skipper helped them find an uncomfortable but necessary rhythm. Each day, he or one of his men or sometimes the two together, would swim out into the boat passage where they were most likely to be found. The others laid low: they watched dogfights in the sky, ate the coconuts that had fallen, and tried to keep their spirits up.

After four days, the skipper changed the plans. He knew they needed water and hope. He took the strongest man and swam with him an hour to the closest island. Reaching the beach, they saw one of the enemy’s shipwrecked barges, and two men. The two men saw them but jumped in their canoe and paddled away. The skipper and his man crept up on the barge and found what they needed: hardtack, water, and a small native canoe, which was big enough for only one man.

All day, they hid from the enemy and tried to explore the island. When night fell, the skipper left his mate and paddled back to the other men and delivered the rations. His crew told him that the two men he had seen during the day were actually natives of the local islands: they had visited and described where the Japanese were and how to avoid them. The next morning, the skipper headed back toward the island where they had found the food and he had left his mate.

But on the way, a strong wind arose. The waves were too big for him to prevent water from pouring into his canoe. In minutes, he was swamped. The canoe sank from under him, and he was alone in the water. After five days, almost dying at least twice, the skipper felt as though he couldn’t escape this time. He imagined home and the bay where he swam as a child. He remembered an image of being under rough water, the sun pouring through, and how calm he felt. He thought of his men. He wondered whether he had prepared them; if they would get home.

There will be moments, even when you’ve done everything right, that everything goes wrong. This is another reason why the three commitments are so vital. When you commit to the experience you want your teammates to have when they work with you, they notice. They absorb the way you speak and think; they model the behaviors you use because they are effective. The three commitments show leadership that people want to learn and that gets results, even if you never intentionally try to develop your teammates into leaders. If you follow the three commitments, when it looks as if everything is falling apart, you have a team of leaders ready to step up and keep the important work you do together.

We need others to help us reach any goal. As the skipper thought about dying, out of nowhere another canoe of natives appeared. They pulled him out of the waves and brought him to the island with the barge. They showed him where another two-man canoe was stored. Before they left, the skipper took out his knife and scratched a message on a coconut for the natives to deliver, praying it would find its way to his commanders: “NAURO ISL COMMANDER KNOWS POSIT HE CAN PILOT 11 ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY.”

The skipper, a young John F. Kennedy, knew what to do under pressure, and that’s what the three commitments do every time we get the privilege of leading: they reveal what to pay attention to so our teams never forget that what they’re trying to accomplish is worth the fight. Kennedy’s crew could have given up so many times. They could have missed the slim chances they had at life in the fear and real danger that surrounded them. Instead, he focused their energy, helped them feel secure and united, and generated a flow of effort that had only one purpose: getting home—and they did.

The natives who saved JFK had been working with the New Zealand Army. They had taken the message on the coconut to their contact and returned the next day with a stove and food for the men, and a letter for Kennedy. It read:

On His Majesty’s Service.
To Senior Officer Kennedy, Naru Island.

I have just learned of your presence on Nauru Is. I am in command of a New Zealand infantry patrol operating in conjunction with U.S. Army troops on New Georgia. I strongly advise that you come with these natives to me. Meanwhile I shall be in radio communication with your authorities at Rendova, and we can finalize plans to collect balance of your party. Lt. Wincote.

P.S. Will warn aviation of your crossing Ferguson Passage.

After surviving the sinking of his ship, Kennedy stayed in the war until 1945. His back was never the same after pulling his injured crewman five hours to safety. What never changed was his commitment to a way of leadership that helped him become the thirty-fifth president of the United States.

Before we dig into what the commitments are, a quick note on the examples we’re using throughout the book. We are not intending to hold up Kennedy or any of the other individuals we highlight as the ideal leader. The criticisms of how Kennedy and his men ended up in the destroyer’s path, fact or fiction, point to possible failures in leadership. As a human being, Kennedy had the same kind of weaknesses that live in most of us. There simply is no perfect leader, and we hope that inspires you. We hope it takes away some of the false perceptions of who can be a leader. No matter what your background, education, or present place in life, you can lead too.

What we’re emphasizing in this book is what leaders do in the moments that matter most and how they arrived at those moments: the way they prepared and practiced. We will hold up and examine what was eternally valuable about the thinking and actions of the leaders who so many of us admire. We will focus on how they led at their best in a way that shows how you can make the same commitments as they did. Great leadership is actually quite simple; we just need to know where to put our attention.

Leaders Create New Realities

Leadership is the act of creating new realities. And every leader knows deeply that creating new realities is grueling. No part of leadership is ever easy, but when the pressure rises and you know what to do, leadership can be the most rewarding experience in life. Conversely, when we don’t know what to do, leadership can be one of the most frustrating and painful experiences most people never want to repeat. There is nothing worse than being in the leader’s seat, with all eyes on you, and you feel helpless. We’ve been there, but by applying the three commitments, we hope to save each of us from ever having that experience again. The three commitments that make you the kind of leader people love to work with are clarity, stability, and rhythm.

When these three words become the focus of how you lead, you will always feel ready to act. In fact, when they become muscle memory—out of which you confront the daily challenges of developing a team who wants to work together and during moments of crisis when you need to take command— leading may even feel like what you were always supposed to do. Why are they commitments? They are the three realities that every human being needs each day to engage with their work while deeply valuing the experience.

The first commitment is clarity. Clarity is total awareness about the core knowledge of what we do, in ourselves and in every member of our team. If it sounds elementary, it is; too often as leaders, however, we have an ineffective habit when sharing information: we want to tell someone to do something once and then have it done. That, in and of itself, is not clarity. Dictating instructions and expecting performance can still work in such hierarchical environments as the military. But even if you have stars on your shoulder, they won’t value your leadership if you’re not willing to seek to understand who your people are and what they need to be completely clear about in where they’re going and in what you’re doing together. They will not freely and enthusiastically continue to follow you into the trenches.

Committing to clarity starts when we develop a personal state of total awareness: of where we’re going, what we need to get there, and why it matters. It is the first commitment because so many problems are instantly improved when we pay attention to where we’re confused. Clarity is also the process of creating mutual understanding with every member of our team. What is the biggest issue facing your team right now? Is everyone involved 100 percent clear on the where, what, and why of the action required? We can’t ever ignore the minor details or assume that everyone absorbed the exact meaning of every conversation, meeting, or e-mail.

True clarity happens in a group when every teammate knows what success looks like and has the confidence and the capacity to talk about it. We promised you could begin to apply the commitments after the opening pages. Where is your team underperforming? It is probably because some part of “what” they need to do, “why” it matters, or “how” to do it is unclear, and you can work on that immediately just by having a conversation about where they’re lacking clarity.

The second commitment, stability, is the promise to do everything we can so that everyone on our team or in our organization has what they need. To be successful consistently, each of us needs two things to feel stable: resources and a culture of trust. By resources, we mean everything from food and a safe place to work to tactical drills and coaching around the core skills of a person’s role. With stability, we can take risks—share new ideas, collaborate, put in the extra time—and believe the effort will be worth it.

But risk taking happens only when we trust the people with whom we work and the organizations in which we serve. In our busyness and fatigue, leaders and organizations are too often inconsistent, disconnected, and unavailable. Now even though we don’t mean to act this way, these behaviors destroy culture and create an environment of stagnation and underperformance.

Think about it right now: where is your team playing it safe? They can’t take risks when they don’t have the stability to jump. Even if your teammates have enough stability to keep up what they’re doing today, will flat growth and no improvement in their performance get you closer to the new realities you want to create? We can immediately begin the process of building a stable environment by asking each person what he or she needs to feel stable. In many cases, what is required may be free and something you can provide easily.

The third commitment, rhythm, is a pattern that leaders foster to produce more of the results we want. In sports, rhythm is the zone. In business, it’s peak performance—not just maximum efficiency but a place of heightened creativity and meaningful work as well. In psychology, it’s described as flow. Leaders have incredible power to create an environment that innately removes the roadblocks that get in the way of people performing at their best. Even more important, as we achieve with our teams, we can pay attention to whether they’re happy and whole.

When we are grounded as people and we feel that our efforts are part of a collective endeavor to do something important, we charge an environment with an energy and desire for excellence and progress. The commitment to rhythm—whether we do it through building efficiency, creativity, or that elusive place where everything just seems to work naturally (we’ll go into detail about that holy grail of the three commitments in Chapter 4)—is how we raise the rate, volume, and quality of the work we and our teams produce.

Committing to rhythm has an unexpected benefit too: it causes our teams to love the work we’re doing together. The simplest way to think about rhythm is to ask yourself where your people get stuck. It’s happening because they do not have rhythm in what they do, as individual contributors and as a team. Ask them what’s stopping their best efforts and you’ll know what you need to do as their leader to produce better results.

We created the three commitments because we know each of us can be the kind of leader people respect and want to emulate. People will still follow the leaders whom they detest, but not for long. They may follow them because they have to— because they control their paycheck or because they have a position of authority—but they won’t want to work with those leaders. In the French Revolution, the leaders whom people didn’t want to follow were sent to the guillotine. In some countries, citizens still kill the leaders who fail them.

That’s not going to happen to us at work. That’s not going to happen when we can’t balance the budget of our town as an elected official. We know our children’s sports team will not rise up in armed revolt if we yell at them rather than nurture their talent. But when we lead poorly, the people around us stop working. In the office, they will start looking for new jobs and do only the minimum. In our community, they will move against us. The team, even a team of kids, will stop showing up. The three commitments are how we lead, no matter what we’re trying to accomplish, so the people around us want to be on our team.

How We Learn to Be Leaders

Leaders are not born. Even though we’ve been trained to believe that certain individuals, especially the tall ones, were made for their role, the art and science of leadership is learned. We learn to lead by making commitments and from the experience of keeping them. A commitment is a promise and a pledge that binds us to what we’re trying to do. In leadership, a commitment is a declaration about what we’ll pour all our energy into making happen, and in some circumstances, even give our lives for.

Wait. Did we just write “give our lives for”? That may not be explicitly what you signed up for when you took on a leadership role, but when you look at the impact of what stress and long hours do to us, it’s what we do every day. We’re giving our precious energy to something; your energy is your life. Wherever you’re spending your time each day is what you’re giving your life to, and we don’t want you to waste a moment.

That’s why whether you lead at work, in government, or in your community, we’re not writing about simply becoming a leader who others follow; we’re writing about leading teams and entire organizations in which we commit to a way of working together that unleashes every person’s energy and talent. Too many leaders in every setting shut their teams down because they don’t know how to lead. The reason: the commitments we now need to make as leaders are evolving.

Throughout history, leaders committed to causes: unity, independence, discovering new lands, fighting evil, or building organizations that reached noble goals. They committed to defending their countries or growing their businesses. The commitment to what needs changing still can have lasting impact, but in the chaos and complexity of our modern world, where each second another problem to solve or another need to fill flashes across technology that fits in our hand, what we are committed to will too often not be enough.

The energy behind a cause—elections, caring for those after the devastation of a hurricane or tsunami, or keeping an organization from closing—will wane as all of our attention is called to hotter issues buzzing in our pockets. For instance, a robbery happens a few doors down from your house, and you commit to making your neighborhood of 50 families safer. You call a meeting to discuss options, and the room fills; everyone is angry and ready to act. Then at the next meeting, it’s only seven of you.

Your new team decides to canvas your neighbors, and when you get back together—five of you this time—you learn how diverse the people’s feelings are: some are too afraid to act, some don’t care, some don’t know what to do, and some of your neighbors are, in fact, the ones who are making the neighborhood unsafe. All five of you show up at the next meeting and you decide to reach out to local officials, but they don’t return your calls. You realize that if you plan to fulfill your commitment, just wanting to make the neighborhood safe is not enough.

This pattern of the cause not being enough is playing out in every arena where we have important work to do. At work, we put in more hours than at any point in human history. We’re working harder, and yet we’re not getting better results. To lead in a way that empowers our entire team to produce the results we all want, we can’t focus only on results. To be the kind of leaders who people will give their lives to work with, in addition to what we commit to achieving, we must also focus on the experience we create for the people we lead.

In this century and those that follow, the kind of leadership that our communities, our businesses, and our world needs must become a new, intentional way of interacting. What a leader promises and who the leader is will no longer inspire us more than briefly; the way a leader works with a team day in and day out, his or her natural tendencies and reactions, especially when the pressure rises—that has the potential to inspire us for generations.

Each of us learns how to lead through the practice of leading, by staying committed to others through the inevitable challenges of building a team that actually wants to work together and produce results. We discover our skills the first time we try to lead, and in each new opportunity to mentor, motivate, and guide the people who trust us, we refine and renew how we think and act. As our world continues to become more interconnected and complicated, learning how to lead demands a simple, unforgettable model.

We’ve discovered that game-changing leaders whose teams will follow them anywhere commit to more than just the goal; they commit to generating clarity, stability, and rhythm in everything they do. These three words are what we focus on in times of chaos so people have the grounding they need to survive. They are what we pay attention to every day with our teams and organizations so we foster an environment where people love showing up to work with us and nothing gets in the way of what we want to achieve together.

You Can Be a Better Leader Right Now

Learning to lead is never finished; even the best leaders can grow and improve. Too often as leaders—understandably overwhelmed by the speed, volume, and gravity of our work—we react to each new crisis rather than constantly preparing to adapt to our ever-changing new world. Despite the processes that are mapped on our walls and the detailed handbooks on our shelves, we do the first thing that comes to our minds. We react. Reaction, like Kennedy’s after the destroyer attack, can be essential. But his reactions were a result of years of preparation.

Too often we react based on what’s going to be best for us or what will solve the problem the quickest. Instead of being intentional about the way we lead, we do what’s easiest. At first we often have the option to either do things with speed or accuracy; while we can initially only choose one, with time and practice both become possible. The three commitments provide a way of thinking about leadership that becomes the muscle memory of how we assess what needs to be done, act in a way that creates an environment of success, and teach others how to become leaders too.

Let’s break down how you can apply the three commitments right now. The initial way to leverage the commitments is to use them as an assessment of your leadership or an environment where you’re on a team. Think of the place where you lead. Ask yourself three questions:

1. Have I been clear?

2. Have I created stability?

3. Does our work have rhythm?

This is how you figure out what kind of leader you are today. In your definitions of a leader creating an environment that is clear, stable, and rhythmic, have you done so? If the answer is no to any of these questions, you begin to recognize the work you have to do. If the answer is sometimes, and that’s the answer for many of us, the three commitments become a reminder of what great leaders need to pay attention to every day.

Now think of the commitments in a place where you are a teammate. Even if you’re the CEO, you still don’t run the board. In your personal life, even if you’re the leader at work, you’re the assistant coach of your child’s softball team or a parent volunteer at school. In that environment:

• Is everything you need to know to be successful clear?

• Is there a stability that prevents fear, stress, and drama?

• Is there rhythm to the way people work together?

As an assessment, the commitments are a lens; they allow a team to truly see and determine where leadership is not creating the culture we need in order to be our best. Then instead of just filling out a form with numbers that go into a survey and gets lost in a drawer or the cloud, every one of us as teammates knows what to ask for so that our leaders can help us create the environment for success together. Want to know what kind of leader your people think you are? Ask them the three questions on the previous page. The commitments become the foundation of your reflection about what needs to be improved in your personal leadership and in the team or organization’s work together.

The commitments can also be used to create an action plan that renews itself daily. Every time we present the commitments to a new group, each person in the room can describe what will create more clarity, stability, and rhythm for himself or herself and for the team. When that brainstorm is turned into a prioritized list of actions with responsible leaders and deadlines, meetings become the kind people want to attend; instead of people talking about what we might do, we have a filter to decide what we will do—and quickly get to work. The process is as elementary as gathering the team and creating three lists of what is needed to have more clarity, stability, and rhythm; number each need in the order that will make the biggest impact. Instantly, you know what’s missing in your work together and what to do about it.

For instance, in the example of making your neighborhood safer after a robbery, people stopped coming to the meetings because they had no reason to keep coming. After they expressed their feelings, they were satisfied and left the work of making the community safer to the organizers. If we wanted to keep more of our neighbors engaged, we could ask where people needed more clarity about how to stay safe, what would make the neighborhood feel more stable, and what rhythm of working together people could commit to. They would attend the next meetings because their questions would be answered (clarity), they could learn how to make a measurable difference in the neighborhood’s safety (stability), and they chose the pattern of working together that fit into their life (rhythm). You can repeat the same process as a leader in any organization over a few meetings or as a regular exercise.

Finally, as you apply the three commitments—and this will feel like true magic—they are not only a way to analyze leadership and prioritize how to work more effectively together, but they also are the fundamental structure of a development plan to help others become leaders too. We don’t really want to be the only leader on a team; the loneliness of the leader is a real symptom of taking responsibility. No one can understand what Atlas felt when he held the world on his shoulders more thoroughly than leaders who commit their entire person to what they do. There are days when we wonder if it’s worth it, when the burdens others pile on us or the stress of what needs to be done feels so overwhelming we want to quit. It’s in these moments that we have to remember we never need to lead alone.

We want a team of leaders, each responsible for outcomes that no one person can produce on their own. Can you imagine a team of leaders where every person can lead as well as you? When everyone can live the three commitments, we trust each teammate’s ability to deliver on their promises. When conflict happens, and it will, we know that we’re not the only one who can solve it. When we get stuck, a team of leaders is the engine that drives creative thinking and development. Instead of feeling like we have to come up with all the good ideas, we know that we have collaborative partners with whom we can discover the next opportunities and answers. We can all build teams of leaders, a team of people maximizing each other’s potential to achieve, when we recognize that everyone has the capacity to lead.

The reason we too often lead alone, however, is that our teammates don’t know how. Not knowing how to even begin fulfilling the leader’s role stops them from ever putting their hand up when they have a brilliant idea or when a project emerges that they know they could lead well. Or, if they do have the courage to try and lead, when they face the initial and inevitable stress of being in charge, they may choke on the pressure and never try again.

That’s a tragedy; the good news is, the three commitments fix it. When your people hear you talking about the three commitments, they’ll learn the language, and start to notice what you do to lead effectively. When they see you creating clarity, stability, and rhythm, they’ll recognize that producing extraordinary results doesn’t have to be complicated, and they will want to lead too. Leaders who make the three commitments continuously train their people to lead as well when they model and encourage everyone to make the three commitments in all they do. The next example will show you how to turn the theory of three commitments into a way of paying attention to your people that they’ll always remember.

The Other Jack

If we commit to creating an environment where teammates have the clarity, stability, and rhythm they need to see that their work results in something important, they will see it as an experience they actually want to have. Most people work because they have to; what if, as leaders, we could provide an environment that our people actually desired to be a part of? What if we could create a culture where every teammate wants to be his best for himself and his teammates?

We want our first case study to help you reflect on the kind of person who makes most leaders want to trade their chair for a seat on the next train out of town: underperformers. Whether now or at some point in our past, we’ve all shared the pain that underperformers bring to us as leaders and to our teams. The funny thing is they obviously didn’t start out that way or chances are they wouldn’t be on your team in the first place. At some point they had to add value, and without a doubt they had to be engaged in what you’re trying to achieve together. Applying the three commitments reveals what we need to do for our best people to keep them engaged, for our folks who might need an extra push to get to the next level, and for Jack.

You have a Jack in your life, and whether you lead a small team or a multinational corporation with 1,000 underperformers, he is driving you crazy. Jack graduated top of his class and came into the interview with an infectious attitude that made you wish you had a cloning device to spread it around to the rest of the team. Obviously, you hired him and expected great things. Jack was on the fast track—a hire you bragged about to your colleagues and talked about at the dinner table with your spouse.

After a few months though, Jack’s numbers began to tumble. In addition, he is now often late, and his attitude is dismissive on good days. Was Jack’s talent smoke and mirrors? Possibly, although odds are that Jack is lacking something he needs from you. Sure, he controls his own behavior, and maybe you inherited him onto your team. But Jack is still an opportunity. We have talented people on our teams who we know can produce more than they are. When they don’t, it is our problem. Too often, at least in part, it’s also our fault. Not that we’ve intentionally done anything wrong. We’ve told them what we thought and been as good to them as every other teammate. That is often the Achilles’ heel of a leader: we try to treat everyone the same.

No one on our team is the same. Each person has a unique way of thinking, working, and interacting. The leaders who we study, admire, and hold up to all generations as people we want to emulate treated everyone on their teams as individuals. Even when they were creating strategy, goals, and game plans, they never lost sight of the impact those endeavors would have on every person’s life. They committed to a way of treating people so when they made mistakes, their people still trusted them; together with their team, they were ready for the most difficult moments.

To meet the needs of every individual on our team, we first fulfill the commitments in everyday conversations. Leadership is not just about the big moments on stage, the championship victories, and the biggest of ideas; it’s about how we connect in ordinary times that make it possible for us and our teams to succeed when we’re in the spotlight. When we recognize that a teammate like Jack is struggling, we schedule two one-on-one conversations on back-to-back days with a primary, simple goal: help Jack find clarity.

Clarity Starts with Two Conversations

We’re not about to present a superpowered, one-size-fits-all method to fix every underperformer. However, this is an application of the three commitments that we’ve used thousands of times in various settings, and this approach (or your variation) can make leadership the kind of experience we want to have over and over—the kind of experience our teammates love to have with us.

If you have a big team, it might feel stressful to try to schedule two meetings with all the people you want to help improve. Again, you don’t have to do this overnight. And as leaders, we have to create the personal time with each of our teammates: so they know we value them and because we become better leaders every time we help develop a teammate’s potential. To start developing Jack, the first conversation is short, around five to ten minutes, and the second lasts for an hour and should be scheduled for the following day.

In your first meeting, you’re ready to set the stage for Jack to become the talented performer you know he can be. But when he walks in the room, you can already see in his eyes that he’s expecting a bad conversation. This is the point where most of us fail Jack and unintentionally sabotage our leadership ethos. We’re under pressure, and we just want Jack to do what we know he’s capable of doing. Instead of truly taking the time to listen, he experiences us as a parent disciplining a child. The stressed-out leader says something like, “Jack, what’s wrong with you?”

The leader who is paying attention to Jack, his potential, and the ways we can snap him out of his performance coma says, “You have been on my mind, and I want to reconnect. Jack, I want to get to know you better.”

His eyes will pop open. When you say, “I know you’ve got huge talent; that’s why you’re on this team, and I want us to figure out together what you need in order to be successful here,” he might actually sit up a little straighter. If you can do it authentically, you can go further and say, “I want to figure out how to help you do great things.”

Almost sounds too crazy—but not if we want to lead. Our teammates need us to loan them our confidence. They need us to believe in them so they can stop wasting their time wondering if they’re good enough and spend all their energy proving to themselves what they can really do. They need to be clear that we believe in them before they will take the risks to do what will be difficult or new.

In almost every case, Jack will be on the edge of his seat thrilled for a chance to make things right. If not, it means things have been going so badly that he doesn’t trust you or his personal life is so troubled that he can’t keep his chin above water. Whatever the reason, stay focused on the clarity you’re trying to help him experience. You can ask, “Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions to get to know you better?” Asking permission to have a more personal conversation is a critical step that’s not traditionally part of work culture, but it’s essential. Leaders who want to create clarity can’t do it by telling someone what to think. We have to discover what Jack thinks, so we can create understanding in what we work on together.

Next, ask him to think about two questions, but don’t have him answer them right away:

1. “What do you want to do?” If you are in a work environment, you might need to add, “What is your long-term career goal?”

2. “Why is that important to you?”

These questions are about getting clear on the person’s true desires. Before the end of the meeting, emphasize that you would like to have him spend some time on both questions and that you’ll meet again to discuss it. Because you believe in his talent, you need to know what he really wants so you can support him in realizing it.

Giving him the second question explores his true motivation, which will become invaluable in keeping him on track as you work through achieving these goals together. If he tries to answer either question on the spot, ask him to pause and reflect on the questions in the time between the meetings. Most of the time, especially when people know they aren’t living up to their potential, they will answer with what they think we want to hear.

Jack either doesn’t know the answers or believe his own answers, or he’d be performing better. The key here is that you have a conversation about what Jack wants, not what he thinks you want him to be, regardless of how it ties to his current role. There are no repercussions here if he’s being honest, and he needs to know that. Regardless of what he wants to do in life, there will be something that will tie back to what he’s doing today. The trick is that you can’t help him to make that connection unless he is entirely honest with his replies.

When Jack arrives for your second meeting the next day, he’s wearing a tie. He hadn’t worn a tie since the interview. You start by saying that you’ve been looking forward to the follow-up and ask how he’s feeling. Jack answers, “I am excited and a little nervous.” Some of the people you work with will be able to be this honest. Others will wear a mask, trying to give you the right answers in fear of retribution if their goals don’t align with their current role. The dialogue we’re about to give is an example of how the conversation can go. Notice the way the leader listens and responds. The goal is not to get the same answers from each person but rather to begin to build a connection where we as leaders can support each teammate as he discovers his answers.

You say, “So tell me, what have you been thinking about since our last meeting?” The question has to be open—meaning it can’t be answered with a yes or no—so he has room to express his point of view.

Jack says that he really appreciates having a chance to talk about this with you and has a few thoughts. He says, “I know I can do better. I’ve always tried to be the best at what I do. I feel like I have been trying, but I don’t really know how the business works. I know what I’m capable of and what I’m supposed to do, but I can’t see how it all fits together.”

Notice the numerous places in this one answer where you can help Jack find clarity. He wants to know:

• How he can improve

• The details of how the business operates

• The strategy and vision that ties the organization together

• Where he can help make the maximum impact

Each person you work with will express different areas where they want clarity. The key here is that if his answers appear to be genuine, then he trusts you. That trust can go a long way toward repairing even the most difficult situations, so you’re both already part of the way there. If your teammate doesn’t trust you, the first commitment reveals what you need to do: seek clarity. When you both have clarity, you can feel the trust building because there is nothing to hide.

As leaders, we usually like to solve problems or help people figure out what to do next. We like to take action. This is an exercise in analysis and getting to know your teammate, so don’t jump into solution-finding mode and begin to take on any of these opportunities yet. That’s often what kills trust. First, keep listening and keep building his belief in you; he has to be clear that your top priorities are what’s in his best interest and giving him the support he needs. If you problem solve too quickly, you won’t help Jack get to a place where he has full insight into what he really wants in a way you can both always refer to. He needs to know that you buy into what he wants to accomplish, not just mandate that it happen.

To keep creating a strong memory of the experience for Jack, the kind of experience he’ll thank you for years later, reflect what you hear. Say something like, “That’s the kind of energy and enthusiasm I saw the first times I met you. Tell me more.” Again, open-ended reflections and questions will keep Jack talking about what’s important; as he talks, that’s when he feels connected to you.

In some cases, the person will talk for a long time about past successes or things he has always wanted to do with his life. This doesn’t mean he is wrong for your organization—for instance, if he wants to open a restaurant and you sell widgets. He is telling you what he really thinks, and what matters most is that you pay serious attention.

When he begins to really show the enthusiasm, say something like, “I can see the passion you have for . . . ,” then ask to hear more. Every place you establish clarity—that you have heard him, that you value his thoughts, that you believe in his talent—it becomes a marker in time that he will always be grateful for and a marker in your work together that you can continually refer to in order to help Jack make progress.

When he finishes—not when you finish, but when he pauses and looks up expectantly after just having made himself vulnerable—ask, “What do you need to be successful?”

“I don’t know,” Jack replies. He doesn’t know, and few of us do when put in this situation. Here’s your chance to take the lead.

You say, “Jack, I hear a passionate, committed, articulate young man who wants to succeed. Am I right?”

He nods.

You say, “Remember when I asked why this was important to you? This is what truly makes you happy, correct?” He nods again. “What if we could find a way for the work we do to contribute to your happiness?” At this point, you notice that same infectious smile you saw in Jack’s face back on the day you first interviewed him. The smile and energy is your cue to move forward.

You say, “Jack, here is what I think we do next.” Now you can dive into the places you’ve heard where you can help him gain deeper clarity. Simply because you took the time to listen and get to know him better, he will now be ready to become the success you both want him to be.

This isn’t the only way to have this kind of conversation. Throughout this book, we’re not telling you exactly what to do; rather, we’re exploring why fulfilling the three commitments matters to you and your people. The examples and exercises we provide have worked in other settings, and they will either work for you or suggest a method that you can adapt to your situation.

The first two conversations with Jack illustrate the importance of seeking clarity. When it’s not a crisis situation, such as when Kennedy and his men were in the water, our first job is to listen. We want to truly understand what Jack wants to do; if we assume we know the answer from a few sentences, he will feel that we really don’t want to hear what he has to say. After listening, when we can feel his engagement, we can deliver our message with clarity: that we believe in him and we want to provide him with whatever he needs to be the rock star we know he can be. Jack’s new clarity provides the awareness he needs to be successful, but it won’t translate into results unless he has stability.

The First Move Towards Stability

Awareness is the first step, but until Jack’s behavior changes, he can’t produce the results he needs in any environment to have the life he wants—and we simply won’t enjoy working with him. Changing his experience and ours is about giving Jack the support he needs in order to feel confident enough to make a transformation. The second commitment we make as leaders: provide and help people find stability. The important next step, one of the fundamental ways to provide stability, is creating a development plan. We will give you a catalog of additional possibilities in the chapter on stability, but this is one of the first steps we have to take with every teammate.

You don’t run a marathon without a training schedule. As a musician, you don’t go on stage without a tuner, a bottle of water, and at least the first few songs of your set list. But remember, it’s not our plan for Jack; it’s his plan that we help him create. Our role, the way we commit to creating stability for him, is to make sure he has a plan; as with all three commitments, the real value is to make sure Jack owns his ability to foster stability in his own work and life.

If you’re already familiar with development plans, you may be thinking this is a management tool. Too often, planning can be a management exercise because it’s something we are forced to do once or twice a year because we are people who hold the title of manager. When it is done proactively and becomes a part of how we develop our people, it can also become the kind of experience we need to focus on as leaders.

The vision we provide to people is not just one of what we can do together as a team or in our organization, but it’s also one in which we see what each teammate is capable of. It’s the vision that differentiates management from leadership. Most of us need to be led to those first steps where we fulfill our potential. The development plan exercise is the intentional act of leading a teammate to his future self: the person he really wants to be and you need him to be.

In your next conversation, to create the right plan for him you ask:

• What are the most important tasks for you to do?

• What will you need (resources, support, opportunities) to be successful?

• How will we measure your efforts and results?

Usually you want to give the person these questions before this meeting. You want to have answers as well, as most of our people will stumble when planning in this manner. It’s hard, both because he may have never done this kind of planning and he knows this is serious. When a teammate struggles, we have to provide stability so he can overcome the inertia of his fear or doubt.

Most of us have never created a true development plan before. A lot of our plans are pushed down from the top: our leaders tell us what to do, and we’re expected to fall in line. Of course, there will be things the organization needs from Jack, but this is his personal development plan, so he can be of maximum value to himself and the organization. He owns and drives it; we create the environment for him to practice and ultimately succeed. When you’re finished with that conversation, create a list:

• What he’s working on

• The help you need to provide him, so he can hold you accountable

• The measurements you’ll both use to track his progress

Not only does the plan generate clarity and agreement about the steps of making the work we do together productive, we’ve proved as a leader that we’re committed to him.

Having this kind of conversation is not just for leading at work. When we’re coaching, it’s how we show teammates that we care about their progress. As a leader in a community, whether we apply this to a one-on-one relationship, a committee, or a movement, the information we discover together connects us to a person for life. When we ask people about what they want, how it can happen through your work together, and then the plan to make that work flourish, they’ll never forget the attention and they’ll always remember the way we led.

The Best Kind of Meetings

Most of the time, when we spend time fulfilling the commitments with our people, they’ll start trying to fulfill the commitments for themselves. The first three meetings create the clarity and stability we need to want to work together. To deepen the insight and strengthen the trust, however, the kind of conversations we had with Jack initially must become a repeatable pattern.

Regular meetings, whether formal or informal, monitor the progress and determine if adjustments to the plan are required: either what Jack’s doing, how we support him, or how we measure the results. Just as on a GPS in our cars, to get from one place to another we have to know where we are and where we want to go. When we’re clear and we have stability, we’re ready to move toward what we want.

The fourth sit-down is to figure out the regular meetings and ways you’ll work together. While the first two commitments provide the insight and behaviors a teammate needs to achieve the life he wants, if he can’t repeat them or if the repetition doesn’t happen with an ease that makes what he has to do habitual, he still doesn’t have the environment he needs.

The final commitment is to create a rhythm so natural that whatever the person has to do becomes a daily and weekly pattern—a pattern so fluid that it happens with minimal fear or worry. After a few weeks, Jack’s numbers are already better. But he comes into your office, and even though you’re happy, he’s not. “I know I can do more,” he says. You may not be used to this kind of enthusiasm.

Teammates want more when they experience a leader who commits to creating an environment where they can be successful. The easiest way to create rhythm for every teammate is a regular review of how things have been progressing, both positively and the things that need to improve, based on regular measurement. Most people are afraid of being judged. They don’t want to know the numbers that go along with how they are performing. Usually, that’s because they don’t have the clarity about what they’re doing or the stability from which to act. Measurement can also shut teammates down when it’s not part of the regular rhythm of working together.

In this case, you decide to have lunch with Jack once a week. That’s how easy it can be. (If you’re leading a team of 40, weekly meetings are impossible, but regular conversations are still essential.) It’s not a formal review, just a back-and-forth about how Jack feels about his progress and the places he gets stuck. You review the numbers and use that as a springboard into a conversation about how he’s doing. Then, at the end of each conversation, you reaffirm the plan (clarity), which also reestablishes your commitment to support him in the way he needs you (stability), and confirms the measurement you’ll use again at your next meeting as together you tweak the patterns of his work to a place where he truly loves what he’s doing (rhythm).

Again, an immediate critique of these meetings is that this is not leadership—it’s mentoring or management. Yes. Both disciplines are necessary, even for the leader; they are in fact tools of leadership. What qualifies these interactions with your teammates as leadership is that you’re committing to their talent. You’re not only reflecting and trying to bring the person along as a mentor; you also have a vision as leader that you need them to help you achieve. You’re not only checking on results, which is the function of the manager, but you’re also tying those results to why what you’re doing together matters. Leadership uses the skills of mentoring and management to maximize the impact, trust, and production of our work as a team, and ties it to the greater purposes we’re fighting for together.

What Kind of Leader Do You Want to Be?

It doesn’t matter where you are in your development as a leader. What matters is how you lead today.

Some people may say Kennedy was a failed leader because his ship sunk. In fact his brother Joe sent him a letter after reading about the incident: “What I really want to know,” he wrote, “is where the hell were you when the destroyer hove into sight, and exactly what were your moves?” We know Kennedy cried over the two men who died in the accident and then started leading again. He inspired a world of leaders through the leadership actions of a lifetime. Like Kennedy continuing to fight in the war, and ultimately becoming president, even though we make mistakes, we can all use the three commitments to lead our people to new realities.

This is like when we work with the other Jacks in our lives. No one on our team wants to underperform. No human being just wants to sit in his cubicle and collect a paycheck. As leaders, it is our role to help him find the place where he wants to and can make an impact. It is our job to be the kind of leader who believes in him even when he doesn’t believe in himself. It is our job to make the three commitments, to create the kind of environment where every person on our team can be the kind of leader we want to be: worthy of trust and capable of producing extraordinary results.