I started on a ramp

Part time. Seasonal. Palm Springs airport, loading bags.

Two weeks in they made me a supervisor trainer. Eighteen months later, duty manager. Three years, general manager. Six, regional director. Ten years in I was an operations vice president.

Before that it was restaurants, retail and fast food.

I’ve been in some form of leadership for over twenty years, and almost all of it was spent leading people who did hard physical work for modest money in places most consultants have never stood.

Then I stopped running operations

Just under five years ago I moved into learning and development. Deliberately, and it looked like a sideways step to some people.

The reason was simple. In operations I could make one location better. In development I could reach every location at once.

Since then I’ve sat on advisory boards and spoken at leadership and learning summits, and I’ve spent a lot of time in rooms full of leaders from industries that have nothing in common with each other.

That’s where the thing I couldn’t stop noticing started to bother me.

It’s the same problem everywhere

Hospital, warehouse, airline, restaurant, bank. Different work, different pressures, completely different vocabulary.

Same problem underneath.

People don’t recognize what their daily actions are actually doing to the people around them.

Not the big moments. Not the annual review or the difficult conversation you prepared for. The ordinary ones. How you answered somebody in a corridor. Whether you explained the decision or just announced it. The tone of a message you sent in ninety seconds and never thought about again.

Those moments accumulate into something whether anybody is paying attention or not, and what they accumulate into is a fairly accurate record of what it’s like to work for you. Some of it good, some of it not, and nearly all of it invisible to the one person who’d benefit most from seeing it.

Every leader leaves a mark. Most never see theirs.

What existed already wasn’t enough

I’ve taken a lot of assessments. Most of them are well built and most of them do the same thing.

They tell you about you, and then they stop.

I’d finish one, read a description I mostly agreed with, and have no idea what to do differently on Monday. And nothing I took ever answered the question I actually had, which wasn’t about me at all. It was about the group.

How do you build a team out of people who are genuinely different from each other? How do you get the balance you need instead of hiring more people like yourself? What is this particular group of people going to be bad at, and what is that costing us right now?

Nothing I took ever told me that, so eventually I stopped waiting for something to and started building it.

Which is why this one measures three things rather than one: how you lead, where you end up when it gets hard and how far that is from where you normally stand, and what a team assembled out of people like you would be missing.

What I think about all this

I don’t have a grievance with the leadership development industry. A lot of people in it are doing good work, and some of the instruments I’ve criticized here are better built than mine is, today, on the evidence.

The way I think about it is wells and betters.

There’s a lot being done well. There’s also a lot of room to do better, if we choose to lead with intention.

So that’s what this is meant to be. Not a replacement for anything that already exists, just an attempt at the part I kept noticing had been left out of all of it.

What I’m actually after

I want people to see their own imprint. The mark they’re leaving whether they’ve noticed it or not, and the spark in it that’s worth building on.

Because most people have more in them than they’ve been told. And the ones who find it usually found it by being shown something specific and true about themselves that nobody had said out loud before.

Be the leader you’d follow.

That’s about as close as I can get to summing up twenty years of it.