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    Smart Leadership
    Smart Leadership
    Smart Leadership
    Ebook304 pages3 hours

    Smart Leadership

    By Mark Miller

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    About this ebook

    Escape the mediocrity that ensnares so many in business and become a better, more effective leader.

    Have you ever wondered what it would take to be a better leader, or achieve your wildest dreams, or make a bigger difference in the world? The answer lies in the choices you make: about everything from how you spend your time to the way you view the world.

    Smart Leadership     is the latest essential business title from internationally bestselling author of Win the Heart and Chess Not Checkers Mark Miller. In this book, he shares the four research-based “smart choices” the best leaders make to scale their influence and results. 

    By teaching you how to Confront Reality, Grow Capacity, Fuel Curiosity, and Create Change, Miller will help you:
  • Bring fresh eyes and fresh thinking to your leadership approach.
  • Increase your confidence in your ability to make a difference.
  • Lead at levels you never thought possible.
  • Accelerate your learning curve so that all these benefits come faster and more naturally. 

    • With this guide, your leadership—and your life—will be transformed forever.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMatt Holt
    Release dateJan 11, 2022
    ISBN9781637740095
    Smart Leadership
    Author

    Mark Miller

    Mark Miller (BA, Evangel University) is executive pastor at NewSong Church in Cleveland, Ohio, and he consults for other churches on reaching postmoderns, creativity, and leadership. He is the founder of The Jesus Journey, an experiential storytelling retreat that makes the story of the Bible accessible to postmoderns. He is married to Stacey and has two daughters.

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      Book preview

      Smart Leadership - Mark Miller

      INTRODUCTION

      In the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , one of the most oft-quoted lines comes from the climactic scene. If you saw the film, you remember the moment.

      Indiana Jones, under extreme duress, has found the hidden chamber containing the Holy Grail, the cup of Christ from the Last Supper. As legend has it, anyone who drinks from the cup will never die.

      Now, the final challenge remaining for Indy is to select the correct cup from among the many on display. Ironically, based on outward appearance, the imposters all looked better than the real chalice. As Indy surveys the situation, he is joined by the villain, who also wants the cup. Having no apparent alternative, our hero relinquishes the choice to the bad guy.

      Confronted with the many options before him, the antagonist chooses a beautiful gold cup inlaid with precious stones. After drinking from it, he experiences a gruesome and painful death in a matter of seconds. The knight who has been faithfully guarding the cup for seven centuries utters the now famous line: He chose . . . poorly.

      Indy, driven by different decision criteria, points to a simple, more ordinary cup. That’s the cup of a carpenter.

      The knight concurs, You have chosen wisely.

      As leaders, most of us are not chasing immortality, but we do want to make a difference. What’s holding us back from accomplishing all we have envisioned? There could be several culprits: you may still be developing the fundamental skills required to lead well, or perhaps you have not yet become the type of leader people want to follow. The latter is an issue of leadership character. Although both are possibilities, they are not the focus of this book.

      Assuming you have the character and skills to lead, there is one more crucial ingredient required for you to reach your full potential: your choices. This book is dedicated to this simple truth:

      Your choices determine your impact.

      Why is it so difficult to make wise choices? The problem is multifaceted—the pace of change, uncertainty in our world, competing priorities, shrinking resources, increasing demands, staggering levels of complexity, and more. All of these factors appear to be conspiring against leaders who are committed to creating positive change. Many leaders seem to be swimming in quicksand. The most frustrating part is that the harder they work, the deeper they sink. A leader’s choices, however, can be his or her lifeline.

      Have you ever considered the real, tangible impact of your choices? Our poor choices may not result in an instantaneous mortal meltdown as Dr. Jones observed, but the consequences are all around us—the morale of those we lead, their level of engagement, the culture we’ve created or allowed to exist, the reputation we’ve earned in the marketplace, the brand loyalty we have or have not built, the sales, profits, and customer reports are all a direct reflection of our choices. Although this may be a sobering list, the actual list of what’s at stake is much longer and even more personal, including your health, your family, and your legacy.

      Anyone who has led anything knows that leaders make countless choices. How do we look past the next new shiny object, the mounting pressure to perform, and competing priorities to maximize our leadership impact? It’s about our choices. Our choices literally have the power to change our world.

      As you know, not all choices have equal value. This truth begs several questions: What are the choices that matter most? Which choices have the greatest strategic value? Which choices enable other choices? If you want the answers to these questions and more, please keep reading.

      I started writing this book decades ago. I just didn’t know it. As a young leader, I stumbled and bumbled along with a deep sense that I could be more effective, add more value, and have greater impact. I just didn’t know how.

      Then I read The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. If you haven’t read it, put this book down and go buy it. Although Drucker wrote his classic more than fifty years ago, much of the content is still spot-on today. I remember being intrigued by his statement:

      Effectiveness can be learned. Effectiveness must be learned.

      So wait. Is this a book on effectiveness or adding value or creating more impact? Yes. All of the above. Effectiveness is a lifelong quest to add more value. When you and I add more value to the organizations we serve, we generate more impact. It’s impossible to have more impact without becoming more effective. But never confuse the strategy with the goal—effectiveness is the strategy; the goal is impact.

      HOW THIS BOOK IS ORGANIZED

      In the opening pages, we will calibrate the magnitude of the challenges you and other leaders are facing. Often, we need to name a thing before we can conquer it. We’ll survey the quagmire, but we’ll not linger there—you are likely all too familiar with it. My intent is to stir in you a renewed desire to escape the daily challenges that are limiting your impact and eroding your quality of life. Some of you have tried but have become so exhausted and frustrated, it may have been a while since you last attempted to extricate yourself.

      I also want to use these early pages to remind you why our choices matter so much. In short, they give us agency, accountability, opportunity, and true power. For most of you, this will serve only as a reminder, but a very important reminder nonetheless.

      The balance of the book is organized around the four Smart Choices. After an introductory chapter on each choice, you’ll find two chapters, each devoted to what I call a best practice. These chapters are intended to help you activate your Smart Choice.

      These supporting chapters contain strategies and tactics that work. However, they are not intended to create a checklist. There are countless ways to operationalize each of the Smart Choices. My intent is to provide you with a proven place to start. All choices of consequence begin in the head but must move to your hands.

      I’m sure some of the best practices outlined in the following pages will not resonate with you or feel applicable in your situation. That’s okay. Perhaps they will stimulate your thinking as you create your own list of tactics. The value of the choice is only realized in the practices it generates.

      At the end of each chapter, you will see a short paragraph entitled Be Smart! The intent is to give you one or two ideas for immediate action—ways to move the choice from your head to your hands. I hope you’ll find value in these suggestions.

      THE PROMISE OF THIS BOOK

      For the last twenty years, my team and I have been talking to leaders. We have interviewed hundreds of them. These women and men represent some of the best organizations in the world, including Apple, Southwest Airlines, Google, the Navy SEALs, Zappos, Starbucks, FedEx, the Mayo Clinic, Disney, Clemson football, Cirque du Soleil, and many more.

      In addition to this qualitative work, we have surveyed thousands of leaders and individual contributors, invested untold hours on desk research, and conducted multiple in-field validation studies with real leaders, their employees, and their customers.

      We collected a mountain of data, actions, priorities, habits, and disciplines from leaders around the world; we also heard about successes, failures, and missed opportunities. We then added the collective wisdom of some very smart professionals and legendary consultants. All of this then coalesced with my personal leadership journey. It has been an amazing ride! From these many threads of inquiry and experience, we have created a tapestry of insight, inspiration, and action every leader can use to scale his or her impact.

      In the subtitle of this book, we deliberately chose the word scale when referring to your impact. I want to help you experience exponential growth in your impact in a very short period of time. The four Smart Choices we’re about to explore, if made consistently, can deliver on this audacious promise.

      Smart Leadership is not dependent on your IQ, your education, or your role or level in your organization. The choices are not bound by situation or circumstance. Therefore, these choices are within reach for every leader at every level. Smart Leaders make Smart Choices.

      Just as Indy surmised when looking for a life-giving cup, often the simplest is the most significant. The truth is these simple choices may well give your leadership the new life you’ve been searching for. Simple, however, should never be confused with easy. Focus and diligence will be required to consistently make Smart Choices and become a Smart Leader.

      I honestly believe each of these Smart Choices will stand the test of time, not because they are flashy, gilded, or adorned with precious stones but because they are simple and based on timeless principles. I think that is good news for you, me, and every leader on the planet.

      Here’s what I will promise you: There is inherent value in each of the Smart Choices—untold power you can harness and deploy at will. There is even greater potential in the choices collectively; together they form a virtuous cycle of life-giving insight, energy, and vitality. As you learn to make these four choices your default response on a daily basis, your life, leadership, and legacy will be transformed forever.

      SWIMMING IN QUICKSAND

      If I were to let my life be taken over by what is urgent, I might very well never get around to what is essential.

      Henri Nouwen

      You were just doing your job, enjoying the role, generating outstanding results, and then you received a raise (which you deserved), then another, and maybe another. One day, your boss, or your boss’s boss, called you into her office. The conversation may have sounded something like this:

      We’ve been watching you. You’re doing an outstanding job. You tackle every project with energy and optimism. Most importantly, you make things happen. Thanks for your contributions. We want you to lead this new team (or turn around a struggling one). What do you say?

      Depending on the size of the task and your level of confidence, you either said yes, or yes! And boom! Just like that, you were a leader. Or were you? You had the title, but chances are good you had to grow into the role. Leadership requires a fundamentally different skill set than being an outstanding individual contributor. But being eager to learn, grow, and prove yourself, you jumped in. Before you knew it, virtually everything changed.

      Along with the pay, title, and perks came a bigger job with more responsibility. Then, slowly at first, you began to realize you also had more work to do, more emails, more meetings, more people to serve, more projects to deliver, and more deadlines to meet. Somewhere along the way you started missing your kid’s soccer games or your best friend’s birthday party.

      With more and more pressure to perform at work and conflicts at home, you may have found it hard to be present in the moment; often distracted, you were present but only in body. Your mind and spirit were being torn between several realities. You wanted to fulfill your obligations to your employer and your team. Still, you may have also had a deep yearning to honor the relationships that really mattered most to you, specifically, those with your family and friends.

      Perhaps you began to ask sobering questions: Can I do this for another five years? Do I want to? You understood the seriousness of the questions and the implications of the answers.

      Before I go on, admittedly, your story may be very different from the scenario above. Hopefully, it is not as dire as what I described. Or perhaps at this stage in your life and career, yours is not a story of tension, conflict, and anxiety. Maybe you are a born leader or were destined for leadership from childhood; it’s entirely possible some of you entered an organization through a HIPO (high-potential) or leadership-development program with a promise of near-term leadership opportunities. But whether others chose you or you chose the profession, there is one thing I know to be true: leaders everywhere face monumental challenges on a daily basis.

      QUICKSAND!

      Do you ever feel like you are running in place? Does your work, which you actually enjoy, feel like it’s sucking the life out of you? Do you yearn for more progress, more success, but perhaps it always feels just out of reach? Is your career, and perhaps your life, an unfulfilled promise? Have you ever stopped to consider what may be holding you back from accomplishing your goals, dreams, and aspirations of a better future? What is preventing you from leading at a higher level? I am assuming there may be multiple forces at play. Let’s face it: most leaders I know are facing a growing list of challenges, many of them unprecedented. For our purposes, I’ve chosen to lump all these obstacles into one cold, dark, and lifeless metaphor: quicksand.

      The quicksand metaphor works well in several ways. First, we really don’t see it coming. People in quicksand arrive there by accident. No one plans to go there. Neither do you and I plan to have our careers derailed and our impact blunted by forces seemingly out of our control, but it can happen.

      Second, we feel helpless once we’re in it. With nothing to hold on to and circumstances appearing out of our control, a sense of helplessness can quickly emerge. Unlike one of the popular TV shows from the 1950s (which I’m not quite old enough to remember), Lassie, the trusted collie, will not go find help if you fall in the quicksand as she would have done for Timmy. Once you’re deep in it, you feel very alone.

      Finally, quicksand is a formidable force. I have read interviews with real people who were in actual quicksand. They explain the futility of the struggle. Getting out is really difficult. Quicksand has a tight grip. If you don’t move deliberately and thoughtfully, you will sink even deeper. Flailing around without intent is not the answer. You’ll discover the same principle will hold true when we begin discussing your escape plan—you must be intentional.

      PERIL AT EVERY TURN

      Rather than find a way out, most leaders just cope with quicksand—they learn to swim in it. Although learning to swim in quicksand is not the worst thing you can do, it has some significant downsides we will explore later in this chapter. For now, let’s just say no swimmer ever won a gold medal swimming in quicksand, and neither has any leader excelled while squeezed by its grip.

      In a natural setting, quicksand’s basic components are sand and water. I wish the elements of the quicksand we face as leaders were as few and straightforward. Here’s a short summary of what our adversary is made of.

      Meetings

      According to Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria from Harvard in their study of CEOs spanning twelve years, the average week contains thirty-seven meetings, accounting for 72 percent of their workweek.¹ You may not be leading a multibillion-dollar organization. Still, I’m guessing you attend a lot of meetings: meetings with your team, your supervisor, your department, your direct reports, cross-functional team meetings, project team meetings, meetings with vendors and strategic partners, meetings with candidates, and more. I’ve even spent a fair amount of time in meetings to plan other meetings.

      Just to be clear, I’m not anti-meeting. I actually love productive, well-led meetings focused on improving performance. If done well, meetings can significantly multiply a leader’s impact and results. Meetings to a leader are like the short game for a golfer: you drive for show; you putt for dough. The dough can be made in meetings better than any other venue. (More about successful meetings in the chapter Review Your Crew.) The best CEOs understand the power of meetings; nothing else could explain why they invest so much time in them. If meetings are not executed well, however, they can become the embodiment, and a tangible symbol, of the quicksand we are trying to avoid.

      You can lose much more than time in poorly run meetings. The less obvious costs are incalculable, including poor decisions, shallow thinking often masquerading as creativity, missed or underserved opportunities, and a loss of influence and credibility for you as the leader.

      Digital Communications (Email, Text, Social Media)

      Another set of growing challenges we face as leaders is in the arena of digital communications. Had I written this book a decade ago, this section would have been mostly about email. But the world has changed. Now, the dam has broken, and if we’re not careful, we could all drown in a digital deluge.

      How big an issue is this really? I’ve been trying to answer that question for myself. Following are a few stats to help quantify the challenge. I will confess: some of these numbers are so large they feel almost abstract but hopefully will give you a sense that what you are feeling is not a product of your imagination.

      •We tap, swipe, and click our phones 2,617 times per day.²

      •The average smartphone user unlocks his or her phone 150 times per day.²

      •We send or receive ninety-four texts per day, on average.²

      •Globally, there are twenty-three billion text messages sent per day! This number continues to increase at a staggering rate—the number per day doubling during a recent twenty-four-month stretch.³

      Regarding email: some might think email is to the modern world what snail mail was to previous generations. Yes and no. It may serve a similar purpose, but the volume is now approaching a debilitating level. The average office worker (which includes you and me) receives over a hundred emails a day and invests a quarter of every day responding to them. Estimates show 333 billion emails will be sent and received every day this year, and that number is predicted to reach 361 billion by 2024.⁴ The rate of the challenge we face is accelerating.

      Social media is also contributing to the whirlwind. As of July 2020, 3.6 billion people were active on social media, and that number is expected to rise to 4.4 billion by 2025.⁵ Here are some other stats that show how embedded social media is in our lives:

      •Adults spend an average of eleven hours, twenty-seven minutes per day connected to media.⁶

      •Instagram has five hundred million active daily users. More than fifty billion photos have been uploaded on the platform so far. An estimated 71 percent of US businesses use Instagram.⁷

      •YouTube users upload more than three hundred hours of new content per minute. Let me help you with the math—that’s 18,000 hours of new content per hour, and 432,000 hours of new content per day! Almost five billion videos are watched on YouTube every single day. The average viewing session lasts more than forty minutes.⁸

      What’s the impact of all this digital media? I think it is summed up well by Nicolas Carr in his Pulitzer-nominated book The Shallows.

      What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away

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