We don't take leadership seriously enough

I was born in Conroe, Texas, northeast of Houston. When I was three, my family moved from Conroe to the big city of Los Angeles. But while I grew up in California, physically, I like to say my parents’ 1,400 square foot home was actually a Texas annex. Still is, twenty-nine years later.

With family all over the state, my mom, dad, two sisters and I would pile into a minivan every other summer or so and drive from California to Texas to essentially tour the state with a varying itinerary that sometimes included Mission/El Paso, Houston/Conroe, Dallas/Denison, Brownwood, Whitney, and Midland/Odessa.

They were long trips, sometimes two months, and they were thick with fanfare, seeing as my dad, grandpa, and four — or is it five? — uncles are pastors.

Churches with receiving lines where we would shake peoples’ hands and I would pretend to remember everybody. Stops at Sonic where I would drink way too many Big Reds because you couldn’t get them in California and my mom would get her fill of cherry Coke. Stops at schools, small homes in the middle of nowhere, roadside tourist attactions and places of significance to the family.

One such place was Howard Payne University, in Brownwood, Texas, where my parents met in college.

Brownwood is a town of about 20,000 people with a Main Street, corner stores, diners, dive bars (I wouldn’t find out about those until later), and country roads. People essentially shared backyards there, and the folks we’d go to visit lived behind relatives, so every night was a barbecue complete with bluegrass music and pie on the porch. Apparently my mother used to play the washboard with this bluegrass band, and I really wish I could’ve been there to see that.

As a kid, Brownwood was, let’s just say, about as exciting as the town’s name suggests. Inside the house there wasn’t much to do and you didn’t want to be outside in the summer because, well, have you been outside in Texas during the summer? Go outside uncovered and it’s death by one million mosquitos, but go outside covered and you’ll die of heat exhaustion. Better to stay inside and be bored than go outside and die, I always say.

I distinctly remember one summer in Brownwood, though. I was probably nine or ten, we had stopped in town for a few days, and I had beaten Pokémon Red and Blue on my Gameboy like two whole times. I had some books with me and skimmed through them periodically, but, as usual, dad had also given me a few books.

One of them was a book called “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership,” by John Maxwell — one of those essential, original business-leadership tomes from the late 1990s. Having raised a Charizard to full maturity multiple times already on this trip, I was bored so decided to pick it up and, you know what?

I was hooked.

I did whatever I had to do to read that book cover-to-cover two or three times, including pretending to sleep so I could wait until everybody else was asleep and turn a flashlight on in the living room to continue reading.

What stuck out to me then, as now, about that book, is that it sets up leadership as being about personal character and follow-through. It sets leadership up as a moral and useful and joyful task to be undertaken not because you’ve been given any particular position of authority, but because you feel a desire to serve and make life better for people burning deep in your bones. In fact, it was the first book that really teased out the difference between leadership and management for me.

The first book that made me feel like our culture’s obsession with wealth and status and charisma is all wrong: We shouldn’t be celebrating leaders who are successful just because they’re successful, wealthy, or have status. We should be celebrating people who are leading at all levels because of who they are. We shouldn’t be demanding more productivity and charisma of our leaders, we should be demanding better character and clarity.

Rereading the book now, the language feels a bit stale and corporate (and I certainly have my issues with Maxwell, himself, as well as with some of the results of the leadership “laws” he so surely boasted as irrefutable), but many of the concepts still ring true. And I credit my dad as well as those late nights pretending to sleep on the floor in Brownwood, Texas, with a flashlight and a book, with my obsession over what effective leadership looks like.

So this post is the start of a loose series.

An e-book, even, that I’ll be publishing periodically, with no set publishing schedule here on LinkedIn and on Medium. I want to share more about what I’ve learned over my last decade-plus in leadership positions, trying, failing, learning, and repeating. I want to share what I’m learning now. I’ve had some success, but I’ve not led any massive organizations and there are surely people out there that can give you more insight about what, specifically, you should do in a particular situation.

This won’t be a set of best practices, or a list of easy “hacks” for you to implement that will turn your leadership and your company or organization around over night. In my humble opinion, leadership doesn’t work like that.

This is going to be a series of stories that muse on what it looks like to lead when you feel like you’re succeeding, and when you feel like you’re failing; about what to do when you’re leading, but nobody’s following; about what manipulative leadership looks like; about what it’s like to not want to get out of bed; about habits and demeanor and expectation setting; about what it means to truly take ownership of your organization; about how you really need to be taking care of you; about how to take care of your teams so everybody (including you!) loves coming to work.

This stuff’s not science, it’s art. There aren’t any easy answers, and my answers won’t be definitive. But I think we have a lot to learn together, and that gets me going.