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LEAD YOURSELF ON THE OUTSIDE

As the leader, you are the emotional thermostat for your team.

—SCOTT BELSKY

EVP, Adobe, and Chief Product Officer, Creative Cloud
(Episode #276, The Learning Leader Show)

WHY SELF-DISCIPLINE MATTERS

It is hard to be disciplined. People who have discipline are able to do hard things. Why? Self-discipline gives them the ability to control their feelings and overcome their weaknesses, the ability to pursue what they think is right despite a multitude of temptations to abandon it. In the words of pioneering baseball mental skills coach Harvey Dorfman, it is through self-discipline that one “is a master of, rather than a slave to, his thoughts and emotions.”¹ Therein lies the secret to turning all the intellectual learning we discussed in Chapter 1 into real, tangible change in the physical world. This process starts with mastering what we do with our bodies, with our time, with our effort.

Self-discipline is even more important in leadership because of the impact and effect people in positions of leadership have on those around them. Leading is lonely. Leading is hard. This is especially apparent as a new manager. By virtue of your new promotion, you will instantly become the topic of conversation of everyone who reports to you. They will closely watch what you do, what you say, how you say it, how you handle adversity, how you respond to success, how you prepare for a big moment with the CEO. In short, they will be watching your every move.

Notice I didn’t say “the people under you.” I point this out to make clear that the eyes that will be on you as a leader, studying what you do and how you do it, will belong to more than just the people you lead. Think about tossing a stone into a pond and creating ripples across the surface as a result. Being given a position of leadership is like being handed a larger rock. The ripples your actions make are larger, but note this obvious but important truth: the ripples don’t just travel in the direction you threw the stone. No matter what your intended target audience, the ripples of your choices as a leader are seen by everyone around you.

This is why self-discipline matters.

As the leader of a team, you will be asking your team to do things that are hard. In order to make that ask with credibility, you must show a willingness to do hard things yourself. You must lead from the front. People follow leaders who they know will be there when it’s hard.

WHAT SELF-DISCIPLINE LOOKS LIKE

Disciplined leaders seek out opportunities to test themselves by purposefully and aggressively seeking out discomfort. You can’t know how far you can go without regularly putting yourself in situations where you are stretched beyond the known and the comfortable. One example of doing this with intention is by traveling alone to a country where very few people speak your language. This is a practice author James Clear has used to get himself accustomed to feeling uncomfortable and being OK with that. As Clear explained to me:

By definition, you only know how mentally tough you are as what you have to face at the time . . . Until you are tested, you don’t know if you have that capability. So the purpose of voluntary hardship is to test that every now and then, so that you develop the ability to be mentally tough, and so that you know that you are capable of it. I view mental toughness [as being] like a muscle. It atrophies without use. If you just live a life of ease, then you fashion a mind that can only handle ease. Traveling is one way to do that.”²

Discipline starts with yourself, by doing things like waking up early and making yourself stretch and sweat with exercise—and doing what others don’t want to at the times they don’t want to do them. There is no better arena for building the virtue of self-discipline and making it your own than what you do with your body: nutrition and exercise.

Now, I can almost hear the questions arise as I type these words: “What does my physical fitness have to do with my performance as a manager and leader at work?” The answer comes in two parts: external and internal.

Asking whether physical appearance should matter more than the substance of leading and performing is not an unreasonable question. Whether one thinks appearance should matter or not, it does. Whether people should judge others on their appearances or not, they do. And since leading is a results-oriented mission, I’m focused here on what is needed to successfully get others to follow your lead, not on what should be needed. Here, that means avoiding the contradiction of telling others to do hard things even as an undisciplined appearance indicates an unwillingness on the leader’s part to do hard things. This matters because people don’t follow undisciplined leaders for long. People stop listening if they sense you’re a fraud. People respect those who practice what they preach.

More important than this external factor is the effect of physical self-discipline internally. In other words, the self-discipline with which you maintain your physical body will affect the minds of those you lead, but it will impact your own mind even more. This is about building yourself mentally to be tough in moments of adversity.

David Goggins is a retired US Navy SEAL, ultra-endurance athlete, and author of the book Can’t Hurt Me.

I knew through working out, I started finding self-esteem. That’s when doors started opening up. Working out is not a physical thing for me. It’s a mental thing. I saw working out as a way for me to build calluses on my mind. I equate training to mental toughness. Waking up early, training, it looks horrible. It’s uncomfortable. It’s brutal. I don’t want to do that. Through that, I found myself. I started seeing myself very differently from the average human being. It was a great never-ending work ethic. This is what created my self-esteem and confidence as a person.”³

Mental callouses. Think about the value to a leader of the confidence built from doing things that are hard: waking up before everyone else, stretching your body, working out. The effect on your brain is about more than just mental fortitude. Your brain doesn’t work at an optimal level when you have a fatty liver, if your blood sugar is high, when your gut is unhealthy, or when you have inflammation.⁴ This is why it’s important to eat a whole food, nutrient dense diet, and work out on a regular basis. It’s not just about looking the part. It’s about feeling the part. Dare I say, it’s about being the part.

RESPONSE MANAGEMENT

A mind defined by self-disciplined thought is critical to responding to adversity. In his book Shadow Divers, bestselling author Robert Kurson writes about the riveting adventure of two scuba divers who risk everything to find Hitler’s lost submarine. It’s an amazing story, but what I found most compelling about Kurson’s book was totally unrelated to history or hunting World War II–era submarines. Kurson explains the difference between the successful deep-wreck divers (an extremely dangerous profession) and those who died while diving. “Rarely does the problem itself kill the diver,” Kurson writes. “Rather, the diver’s response to the problem—his panic—likely determines whether he lives or dies.”⁵

There isn’t a person on earth who won’t face adversity. Bad things happen. Adversity strikes. This is especially true for those who make the choice to lead. When you make that choice, you are now in charge of serving and helping other people. When issues arise and their lives get messy—so does yours. The difference between those who thrive versus those who don’t is not about sidestepping adversity. Everyone will face adversity. Succeeding comes down to how you choose to respond in those moments of difficulty.

Failure is part of life. As Adam Savage told me, “I don’t trust people who haven’t failed.”⁶ If you’re not failing, it means you aren’t pushing yourself hard enough. When I left corporate America to run the newly formed Leadership Advisory practice at Brixey and Meyer, I was well aware that making mistakes, getting knocked down, and failing were inevitable. I knew it was part of the deal, as I was looking to expand my zone of competency. Several of the programs we’ve launched flat-out didn’t work. I hosted a small workshop for a group of managers who were forced to go through it by their CEO. It was an epic failure. I had to take a step back and ask myself, “Why did I fail?” “What can I learn from this so that it never happens again?” I learned through reflection that I was not properly prepared, I didn’t have my content fully fleshed out, and the group of managers had no desire to be there. They were compelled to go because their business owner told them they had to. The next time I hosted a workshop, I was prepared, with properly developed content and a great presentation. I also did more discovery on the front end to ensure the people in the room wanted to be there to learn and had an open mind. It’s not about the failure; it’s about how you choose to respond and learn from the inevitable adversity you will face as you strive to stretch and grow.

There is perhaps no more critical time than when the eyes of your team and others are on you, and failure reaches out and hits you in the face. “I do feel quite strongly if you don’t experience failure at some point along the way, you’re going to be more scared of it,” says author Sarah Robb O’Hagan.⁷ “And as stakes get bigger, you need to have more of a tolerance for risk. I think failure is a really important experience to go through.”

Bouncing back from failure is central to Sarah’s story. After serving as an executive at companies such as Virgin, Nike, and Equinox, as global president for the Gatorade brand, and as CEO for indoor cycling studio company Flywheel Sports, Sarah launched her own motivational brand and book. But it wasn’t any of those corporate successes that she pointed to when we spoke. Rather, it was the painful experience of getting fired. “It was one of the most horrifying, humiliating experiences. Packing up your box, everyone staring at me. I felt like a criminal.” For O’Hagan, it was her response to that event that set the trajectory for her successful career arc. “The resilience I learned from it was remarkable. Years later, when I’m trying to turn around a $5 billion sports drink brand—a very public difficult battle—I tapped into that sense of resilience that I learned from the failures early in my career. Those experiences getting fired and making mistakes are so useful.”

YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUIRED

I am fortunate to be able to say that my parents are among my biggest role models. Despite leading a business and working hard to build it, my dad never complained when my brothers and I asked him to play sports with us. As a kid, it never occurred to me that he might have just finished a 12-hour day—he never complained or begged off because of stress. If we wanted to go to the batting cages at 11 p.m. or shoot free throws at 5 a.m., my dad was there putting coins in the machine or rebounding our shots. There are many lessons worth drawing from those memories, but the biggest one for me is the simplest: to be a great parent, you must show up. It is your presence that matters to your kids far more than any presents you could ever give them.

The same is true for leaders of teams, and it is doubly so for new ones. Being physically present with your team is critical to developing a rapport with them, as well as a rich understanding of what they’re facing. As a new manager, I remember finding myself chained to my desk on conference calls I felt obligated to attend. A wise mentor told me, “Get out of your office. Be with your team. You’ll be pulled in many directions for your time as a manager. Remember, the most critical part of your role is coaching, teaching, and leading your team. You can’t do that in your office alone on conference calls or reading email.”

Great leaders know that being among the people they lead matters a great deal. Abraham Lincoln maintained a practice of hosting “ordinary people” in his office, where he would talk with them and listen to what was on their minds. He would take the time to listen to have these discussions in person. Frustrated by the effects on his schedule, Lincoln’s aides tried to cut the presidential face time sessions short: “Mr. President, you don’t have time to keep talking with these ordinary people.”

“You’re wrong.” Lincoln would respond. “I must never forget the popular assemblage from which I have come.”⁸

In a similar vein, Teddy Roosevelt spent three months out of the year as president doing “whistle-stop” tours (six weeks in the spring and six weeks in the fall). During these travels, Roosevelt would sit down with the newspaper editors who were critical of him to better understand their points of view.⁹

If the team you find yourself managing is remotely spread across the country, then make like T.R. and prepare to travel. A lot. Get out and be with them in the physical spaces in which they work, or don’t take the job. Connect with them while riding in their car, experience the stress of rushing to the next appointment while sitting with them in traffic, and debrief the meeting over lunch at their favorite spot. You can’t coach people by looking at a map. To avoid falling into this management trap, keep in mind this simple but profound idea introduced and popularized by mathematician Alfred Korzybski: “The map is not the territory.” The description of the thing is not the thing itself.

Shane Parrish, a former defense security analyst and creator of the strategic thinking website Farnam Street, tells the story of General George S. Patton that illustrates Korzybski’s maxim quite clearly. As Parrish writes, “When he visited the troops near Coutances, he found them sitting on the side of the road, studying a map. Responding to Patton’s inquiry as to why they had not crossed the Seine, the troops informed him that they were studying the map and could not find a safe place to wade across. Patton informed them that he had just waded across it and it was not more than two feet deep.”¹⁰

You can’t build a plan, a strategy, or a business without spending time in the territory. There’s no better way to tell whether the river you have to cross is 20 feet deep or 2 feet deep than by wading into it yourself. Be in the territory. Show up. Your presence is needed to make better, more informed decisions. This will build credibility with the people you lead. Is it hard to travel to all the locations of your team members? Yes, of course it is. Managing a team is not for everyone.

But the challenge of presence isn’t just for the managers of far-flung teams. For leaders of colocated teams, it’s not as hard to be physically present, but know this: it’s just as easy to come up with excuses for why you just can’t do it. Fight the pull of those forces that would keep you away from face time with your people. Showing up for the people you serve and being there for your team builds credibility. Don’t sit in your office all day on conference calls and writing email. Be with your team.

There are similarities between your work leading your team and leading as a mom or a dad. Your team at work (and your children) value your presence more than your presents. And if they don’t, then you need to do a lot of reflective work on yourself to understand why. Your team wants clarity. They want their uncertainty to be moved to certainty. Your presence, and what you do while in their presence, will provide clarity and create more certainty.

MANAGING YOUR TIME

The great Peter Drucker plainly laid out the importance of how leaders work with the time they have, identifying it as the first of his five “habits of the mind that have to be acquired to be an effective executive.”¹¹ Drucker wrote, “Effective executives . . . do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes.” Knowing where your time goes and being strategic and intentional about what you spend your time doing represent a huge lever that turns efforts to lead yourself into successfully leading others. For Drucker, that meant applying a simple, three-step process:

1.   Recording time. Much like tracking one’s spending as a means of budgetary control, make an accounting of where you spend your time throughout the day.

2.   Managing time. Remove the unproductive tasks that take time but don’t produce value.

3.   Consolidating time. Manage the scheduling of time so that “discretionary time” (when your presence or attention isn’t required by someone else) occurs in the largest blocks of continuous time possible.

Without effort devoted to this process of time management, the natural currents of your organization will pull you away from valuable, productive work. Again, from Drucker:

There are constant pressures toward unproductive and wasteful time-use. Any executive, whether he is a manager or not, has to spend a great deal of his time on things that do not contribute at all. Much is inevitably wasted. The higher up in the organization he is, the more demands on his time will the organization make.¹²

Consolidating your time into larger chunks is an underused approach whose value can’t be overstated. It is only in these larger blocks of uninterrupted time that you can stay focused on a single task long enough to produce deeply valuable work. I’m a big believer in and a huge fan of Cal Newport and his concept of “deep work.” In his book of the same name, Newport explains that “Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time.”¹³ Deep work is characterized by the tasks that require calling upon your cognitive resources, harnessing your creativity, and maintaining your focus. Conversely, shallow work consists of the more mundane and mindless tasks that we can successfully accomplish without doing any of those things. Shallow work includes tasks like answering email or attending meetings that are related to our job but hardly productive in a tangible way.

When you perform an honest self-assessment, you may be surprised to find out how much of your time at work is spent doing shallow work. And a life spent full of shallow work is a dangerous path to mediocrity. That may sound harsh, but it is true. To make substantial progress in work and in life, you need to focus on deep work in a deliberate and meaningful way on a consistent basis. Literally, block out time on your calendar daily to do this. As Newport so powerfully put it to me when we spoke, “You should only do the amount of shallow work needed to keep from getting fired, so that you have the time necessary to do the deep work that will get you promoted.”

Get tactical on time management: Spend the last 30 minutes of each working day planning the next day and the rest of the week. Schedule at least one hour per day in deep work. While deep work is typically not urgent work, it is incredibly important, whether for professional development (improvement work on yourself) or for a critical work project. Put the phone away, and close your email application. Devote full focus on the task at hand.

Being from Dayton, Ohio, I love learning all about Orville and Wilbur Wright’s journey to create the first flying machine in their bicycle shop on the west side of the city. Despite being severely underfunded and undersupported in comparison with their contemporaries (both in the United States and abroad), the Wright brothers aggressively pursued their goal in one of the most competitive professional landscapes in the world (at the time).

Yet, even in the midst of this hectic race, Orville and Wilbur routinely spent long periods of time doing the kind of deep work that, frankly, looked silly to onlookers at the time. Take it from John T. Daniels, a neighbor who ultimately took some of the iconic photos of the Wright brothers in flight. “We couldn’t help but think they were just a pair of poor nuts,” Daniels said. “They’d stand on the beach for hours at a time just looking at the gulls flying, soaring, dipping. We thought they were crazy. But we just had to admire the way they could move their arms this way and that and bend their elbows and wrist bones up and down just like the birds.”¹⁴

When trying to build something that flies, why not watch something that already does? While standing on the sand dunes in North Carolina watching the birds appeared crazy to outsiders, it made sense to the Wright brothers. If the Wright brothers were able to dedicate time on a regular basis to stop building their machine in order to watch the birds, then I firmly believe all of us can and should as well. In fact, we can’t afford not to. What is your version of watching the birds? How can you do a better job implementing deep work into your daily calendar?

HABITS: THE POWER OF SUBCONSCIOUS ACTION

Excellent habits help us be more consistent. Haphazardly going about your day does not lead to consistent performance. When I talk about habits, I’m really talking about consistency through the creation of a system or a framework of behavior. Your team will not be able to trust you if you are not reliable. Do they have questions about your ability to be present and ready to lead on a daily basis? If so, then that lowers trust and will hurt your performance as a leader of the team. Excellent habits lead to consistency, which leads to reliability, which leads to trust. It all starts with your daily habits.

Habits are important because they harness the power of subconscious activity. Army General and Manhattan Project engineer Charles C. Noble said, “First we make our habits, then our habits make us.” Through habits, you enable yourself to perform tasks without jumping through the mental hoops and drawing from your limited reserves of willpower by having to choose whether or not to take the action before doing so. Waking up at 4:44 a.m. in order to complete my morning routine (stretch my body, drink 20 ounces of water, write in my journal, read, lift weights/run, have breakfast with my family, and drive my daughters to school) is not something I even think about anymore. It’s part of my body’s operating system now because I built the habit first. “We do not rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems,” says author and habit formation expert James Clear.

Creating a useful system of habits will benefit you in all aspects of your life. The habit of blocking one hour per day for deep work ensures that learning is part of each day. The habit of going through a gratitude exercise (writing 10 things you’re grateful for) every morning will transform your mindset and spark optimism and energy for you as a leader of a team. As my dad always said, “It is your duty as the leader to be in a good mood every day.” Nobody wants to follow a negative, cynical person. Through the building of useful habits, you will create a system that gets you in the proper (optimistic, energetic) frame of mind to lead people (and yourself).

Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.

—CHARLES DUHIGG

WIN THE MORNING

Jesse Cole and his wife, Emily, bet everything on their dream: they created a new expansion team in the Coastal Plain League in October 2015. They started in an abandoned storage building, and sold only a handful of tickets in the first few months after coming to Savannah. On January 15, they overdrew on their account and were out of money. They maxed out their credit cards, sold their house, slept on an air mattress, and worked to make ends meet. Something needed to change. After reading bestselling author Hal Elrod’s book The Miracle Morning, Jesse adopted the SAVERS method to “win the morning.”

Silence. Meditation, prayer, breathing. Quiet your mind.

Affirmations. Encouraging words to tell yourself to achieve what you set out to do and overcome fears.

Visualization. Imagine yourself doing what you aspire to do, step by step. Then imagine the feeling of succeeding. (I practiced this a lot while playing sports. It helped me feel more at ease prior to a big game. I would even say things to myself like, “All I have to do is execute my job. I’ve done it thousands of times in practices and games prior to this moment.”)

Exercise. Move your body. Sweat. Get the blood flowing. Dr. John Ratey, author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, says that “exercise improves your brain in the short term by boosting your ability to focus for two to three hours afterwards. This works on the cellular level through neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to improve itself with blood flow and levels of brain-derived protein. It’s Miracle-Gro for the brain, and it all comes from regular exercise.”¹⁵ According to researchers at Duke University, regular exercise can have as much of a positive effect on adults suffering from major depression as antidepressant medication.¹⁶ Your brain remembers more when you move your body. In an experiment published in the American College of Sports Medicine’s Health & Fitness Journal, students were asked to memorize a string of letters, and were allowed to run, lift weights, or sit quietly.¹⁷ The students who ran were quicker and more accurate with their recall than those who kept to their seats.

Reading. Learn from others’ experiences and lose yourself in a book. Put yourself in learning mode to start the day.

Scribing. Writing or journaling. This is a great way to document your belief system and create a more thoughtful mindset. It will help you be more self-aware and regularly spend moments in reflection.

Along with following the SAVERS method, Jesse also instituted gratitude as an additional aspect to his “win the morning” routine. He has written a thank-you note to a different person every morning for the past two years. In fact, I received one from him. It was one of the most thoughtful notes I’ve ever gotten, and I’ve been fortunate to receive a lot of very kind notes from fans of my podcast. Jesse’s was very specific and exuded gratitude. In response, I was moved to immediately reach out to him, and we had a long conversation. It all began from his mindset to “Win the Morning” and start it with gratitude. The “Thank You” experiment started January 1, 2016. He started with gratitude right as the hardest times and biggest struggles were happening in Savannah. When I spoke with him about it, he said, “I learned during those challenges I had to be the best leader to myself, if I wanted to be the best leader for our team. I had to start the day on purpose and show up every day grateful for the opportunities I have and the people in my life.”

In 2016, the Savannah Bananas were named the Coastal Plain League Organization of the Year after setting a new single season league attendance record. Jesse and Emily were named Coastal Plain League Executives of the Year. In 2019, the Bananas broke their own attendance record, extending their sellout streak to 100 consecutive games. In January, 2020, the Bananas announced that they had sold out all 2020 ticket packages.

PREPARATION: THE GREATEST MEDICINE FOR FEAR

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” This sign hung in my football locker room at Centerville High School. Our coaching staff ingrained in our minds that our practices would be harder and more challenging than the actual games. This proved to be true.

Our preparation process began in the cold of winter—lifting in the weight room, running and conditioning work, and watching film as a team. Once summer arrived and school was out for our classmates, our workload only increased: 4:30 a.m. workouts (lifting, running), followed by fundamental skill work (throwing and catching), and reviewing everything on film. During the season, we would practice the same play over and over and over until we had mastered it. We practiced while we were exhausted. It got to the point that we could perform each play perfectly without even thinking.

When the time for our game finally arrived, we were so utterly prepared for it that we had nothing to be nervous about. There was no reason to fear whether we could execute our plays as designed; our muscle memory of doing so had been built through those thousands of hours of preparation. I was fortunate to quarterback the highest-scoring offense in the state of Ohio for two consecutive seasons. Whenever I think of a daunting task (like competing in a triathlon or giving a speech to thousands of people), I remember that “preparation is the greatest medicine for fear.” Preparation is the ultimate confidence builder. Performing in the big moments as a result of that preparation turns that confidence into momentum, which is the first step to creating the flywheel to do it again and again and again.

When you lack confidence, your effective IQ and EQ go down because you’re being self-conscious when you could be paying attention and thinking proactively vs reactively. It’s one of the less understood aspects of a positive and productive culture—the conditions necessary to unleash someone’s potential versus saddling them with the cognitive load of fitting in or impressing peers/defending what makes them different.¹⁸

What is your current process to prepare for a moment in which you will need to perform? As a manager, there are countless moments in which you will need to be excellent at your craft. Your willingness to prepare properly for these important moments is critical to sustaining excellence as a leader. Tom Peters pulls no punches and makes it as clear as few can: “Like it or not, boss, meetings are what you do. Every meeting that does not stir the imagination AND curiosity of attendees AND increase bonding AND engagement is a P.L.E.O/Permanently Lost Excellence Opportunity.”¹⁹ To stir the imagination and curiosity of your team, it takes proper preparation.

How will you open the meeting? What is on the agenda? What story can you share with your team to evoke the emotion and spark the ideas necessary to succeed that day? Most people are not excited about going to a meeting. How can you change that as a manager? How will you prepare for your one-on-one meetings with each team member? Have you thought about the unique qualities and personalities of each person and how best to connect with them? All of that takes prep work. It takes intentional effort and thought. To do it excellently, a manager must put in the time to think and be ready for the moment. One of my favorite quotes about this idea of being ready for the moment comes from Gettysburg hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, whom we discussed in Chapter 2. He said, “We know not the future, and cannot plan for it much. But we can determine and know what manner of men we will be whenever and wherever the hour strikes.”²⁰ You don’t have to get ready if you stay ready.

Create a pregame ritual for yourself as a means of priming your mind to be ready to perform. For me, I have a couple of speech-only outfits. I know when I’m putting those clothes on, it’s time to give a keynote talk. I do not wear those clothes for any other occasion. I listen to the same music, I do the exact same stretching routine in my hotel room, and I have the exact same note-taking process before my speeches (I write bits, thoughts, stories, bullet points, and transitions on a piece of paper taped to a manila folder). These may sound odd, but they prime my mind to know it’s time to perform at the highest possible level. I owe that to my audience. As leaders, we owe that to the people we lead.

DETAILS MATTER

As a leader, there is no detail too small to care about getting right. On the way to leading the UCLA men’s basketball team to a record 10 national championships over his last 12 years of coaching, John Wooden began every season’s first team meeting the same way: he would teach his players how to correctly put on their socks.²¹ He even demonstrated it for them. Coach Wooden would carefully roll each sock over his toes, up his foot, and around the heel before pulling it up snug. Then, he went back to his toes and smoothed out the material along the sock’s length, making sure there were no wrinkles or creases. Coach Wooden had two purposes for doing this, he explained at an event honoring him. “The wrinkle will be sure you get blisters, and those blisters are going to make you lose playing time.” Having good players lose playing time for blisters is how games are lost, and, Wooden joked, “your loss of playing time might get the coach fired.” Second, he wanted his players to learn how crucial seemingly trivial details could be. “Details create success” was Coach Wooden’s creed.

The Importance of a Quarter Step

In the beginning of 2006, I had been out of college for less than a year, having graduated the previous May. After a couple of NFL tryouts didn’t pan out, I had expected that to be the end of my football playing days. A new career path lay before me in the corporate world of business-to-business sales. Then, seemingly out of the blue, I received a call from the head coach of the Birmingham Steeldogs of the Arena Football League. Suddenly, I had packed up my stuff and moved to Alabama to be the starting quarterback.

It didn’t take me long to realize that the style of football in the AFL was quite different from what I had experienced to that point. To start, there are only three offensive and defensive linemen. This creates less congestion among the linemen, providing better opportunities for the defenders to get to (and hit) the quarterback much more quickly. Because of this difference, the Arena League had proven to be a great training ground for teaching quarterbacks to anticipate throws (throwing the ball well before a receiver is open) and get rid of the ball quickly (because if you don’t, you won’t get the chance to before you are sacked). Kurt Warner had famously used his AFL experience to reach the pinnacle of NFL success only a few years before, leading the St. Louis Rams to victory in Super Bowl XXXIV in 1999 and twice being named NFL MVP (1999, 2001).

To succeed in this new style of play, I needed to figure out how to create as much depth in my drop-back as possible but to do it in the same amount of time and using the same number of steps as I did when I played in college. To find the answer, I studied film of other AFL quarterbacks who had done it well. One tiny thing I started to notice was that some quarterbacks used what a basketball coach might call a “drop step.” While under center waiting for the snap, these quarterbacks moved their left foot back about six inches from even with their right foot. This tiny little adjustment would create a staggered stance and give me a head start on my drop-back. In turn, this technique created more depth in my drop prior to me receiving the snap from my center. I would then pivot on the left foot and take my first step with my right foot, just like I had always done.

The result was dramatic. By changing this one small detail, my normal motion of dropping back to pass resulted in a gain of one whole extra yard of space between me and the oncoming rush despite taking the same number of steps (either a three-, five-, or seven-step drop). That extra yard of space created more time—about a third of a second—for me to find my receiver, anticipate his break, and throw the ball. That quarter turn of my left foot was the difference between me being tackled for a loss of yards and me completing a pass to my receiver for a gain of yards. Think about that: six inches led to a third of a second which led to a winning play instead of a losing one. Details matter.

How You Say the Words

An important phrase that my dad put into my mind from an early age was “Never leave anything important to chance.” My job as a leader will be so much easier if I study the fine details of how we make a difference to the end user, and communicate this knowledge with power. Too many people never truly learn what their company does for the people they serve. It is extremely important to practice “how we say the words.” Use the voice recorder app on your phone and say the opening words of your next meeting. Record it. Listen to it. How does it sound? Those details matter. Put yourself in your team’s shoes so you can feel what is happening from the perspective of the people you are leading.

Too many take for granted the words they use, not understanding their power (for good or for bad if done poorly). Excellent leaders craft their vocal messages with great care, just like they might craft a proposal to a potential client. They do this to better understand how to get the best reactions. An example of this comes from the “magic question” in Get-Real Selling, by my dad, Keith Hawk, and Michael Boland. What they call the “magic question” was carefully crafted and finely honed by my dad after he grew weary of hearing “What keeps you up at night?” That lazy question has been trotted out over and over to clients by sales professionals for years. Instead, they propose asking, “What are those few things that absolutely must go right for you to be successful?” This newer, better version of the question was born out of my dad’s practice of calling his voice mail and saying the words of his opening statement in a meeting.

I’ve found it incredibly useful to tend to the small details of human relations with the teams I’ve led. I utilize a “Get to Know You” document with team members and colleagues to better understand them as people. This has given me valuable intel, so that I can show love to the people who love my team member. I’ve built some lasting relationships with those I’ve worked with by sending their kids a video game from their Amazon wish list or some cookies along with a note that reads, “To Sarah and Jeremy, Your mom is absolutely crushing it at work. You should be very proud of her. I know she works hard to support you and your family. As a way of saying thank you, please enjoy these cookies and video game.” Too many leaders neglect the tiny but important parts of serving the people on their team.

As a manager and leader, it is mission critical to constantly analyze and pay attention to the small details. They add up and can be the difference between success and failure. Some small details in your leadership role that matter: the manner in which you greet your team (smile, ask about each of them personally, be direct); how you start a meeting (Are you boring? Do you have a plan? Is it impactful?); the cleanliness of your desk; your process for organization. The list goes on and on. Small details matter.

No Detail Is Too Small

Jayson Gaignard is the founder of Mastermind Talks, an exclusive, invitation-only community for entrepreneurs. In 2016, I flew out to Ojai, California, to attend my first Mastermind Talks event. From the moment I arrived at the hotel, it was clear that deep thought had been put into the entire experience. A handwritten note from Jayson and his wife, Kandis, welcomed me to the beautiful property. For a first-timer like me, the event’s first evening triggered a massive wave of imposter syndrome from knowing the caliber of people there, as well as hearing past attendees refer to “a family reunion” type of feeling.

Jayson makes his guests feel welcome with his careful attention to the smallest of details. When I got to my table for the first night’s dinner, I found myself surrounded by attendees with whom I shared things in common. Each person at the table was a dad who had a background playing sports and spent time sharing their message from a stage as a keynote speaker. “I spend more time than I care to admit putting together those seating charts,” Jayson told me later that night. “But carefully choosing those 150 seats is very important to me. I work to create an incredible experience for each person. And that’s hard. It takes a lot of time and effort.”

Jayson’s fanatical attention to detail doesn’t stop at seating arrangements. After the midafternoon break at a recent event, I came back to my seat and found a box of Tagalongs waiting for me. The chocolate and peanut butter Girl Scout cookies are my guilty pleasure snack, which was one of the questions Jayson had included on every attendee’s intake form. I looked up and around the room: each person had their own specific snack waiting for them at their seat. When organizing an event for 150 people, it’s much easier and cheaper to have a set selection of granola bars, fruit, and coffee. It’s a lot harder when you care.

Caring about the small, personalized details is what separates those who are pretty good from those who are excellent. Jayson lives by the “how you do anything is how you do everything” mantra, and spending time in his presence shows he lives that message daily by caring about the little details. I had a feeling he might after receiving my first email back from him (I asked him to be guest #1 on my podcast more than five years ago). In the signature of his email, Jayson displayed a quote from Danny Meyer: “Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.”

Charles Comiskey, founding owner of the Chicago White Sox, once said, “It is the small things in life which count; it is the inconsequential leak that empties the reservoir.”²² Think about the tiny details of your team, the organization in which you lead them, the dynamics of relationships among peers, the meetings you attend and the ones you lead, the emails you write and the ones you don’t respond to, how you choose to respond in challenging moments, the habits you are intentionally creating, the culture you are building, and the people you are hiring. Paying attention to them all is mission critical to your job as a leader.