Tag / leadership

by Nathan Coumbe

Do you know a virtuous person?

Who do you know who is courageous?

Wise?

Disciplined?

Just?

Do you know anyone who embodies all four of these cardinal virtues?

How much better would things be if you had a boss like this? A coworker or employee?

How would the world improve if we had leaders like this?

It’s hard to succeed with only one or two. You need all four to be truly effective.

The German soldiers who steamrolled Europe were courageous and disciplined. But they were brave and disciplined for the most unwise and unjust of reasons.

You can probably think of several people who were incredibly wise… But who lacked the courage to stand up and do the right thing when the time called for action.

We need more virtuous people in the world.

They aren’t born this way. They make themselves so.

by Nathan Coumbe

You can’t lead everyone

Which means one of two things:

1. You must either improve your leadership abilities so that people will follow you where you want to go.

    Or, if you already have the skill…

    2. You must find the right people willing to go on the journey with you. 

    The right skills or the right people—figure out which one is holding you back.

    by Nathan Coumbe

    Courage comes first

    All other virtues depend on courage in their execution.

    To some extent, all worthwhile endeavors require going against the status quo or doing something difficult. This requires bravery.

    Being a courageous politician sometimes means opposing a tyrannical leader, even if that figure has mass appeal. But doing the right thing requires courage in this case.

    Acting justly (i.e., doing the right thing) is often unpopular. (How depressing!)

    Persisting in the face of opposition requires courage.

    Doing the right thing often requires someone “going first,’ also known as leading! You must be courageous to lead, as you must be willing to fail.

    by Nathan Coumbe

    Impresarios make softball happen

    The MLB is investing in the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, a long-overdue organization for the United States’ outstanding softball players.

    I’m sharing this article here, not because the MLB is investing in it, but for a different reason entirely.

    As I read this, all I could think was, “A group of impresarios made this happen.”

    Impresario: someone who organizes something, who brings the right people together to connect and make things happen that need to happen.

    A group of people (mostly strong, driven women) said, “Why isn’t there a professional softball league? Why aren’t softball players making a career of this after dominating in college like all the men in MLB get to do?”

    So what did they do? They made it happen themselves. Eventually, other groups, such as ESPN and MLB, took notice and decided to invest. But that isn’t the impressive part.

    What’s impressive is that a small group of people decided that something that didn’t exist should exist. And they made it happen, without permission, by bringing the best and the brightest softballers together to build something great.

    This is the work of an impresario.

    This is leadership.

    by Nathan Coumbe

    Leadership = Applied History

    There’s a line on the History Major page at the US Naval Academy:

    Effective leadership is applied history.

    Leadership, more than anything, is decision-making—specifically decision-making that affects other people, not only you.

    By studying history, you can examine the minds of other leaders and understand their actions and the resulting outcomes (good and bad).

    You can learn lessons from other people’s experiences rather than from your own failures and setbacks. This will not only save you time, money, and emotional labor—in some cases, it might save lives.

    As General James Mattis said:

    “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”

    Learn lessons from others by studying history. Don’t repeat their mistakes when you can simply read a book.

    by Nathan Coumbe

    You are the one you’ve been waiting for

    At the end of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (spoiler alert), Harry stands near the lake waiting for his father to appear and ward off the dementors attacking Sirius’s, Hermione’s, and his past selves.

    After waiting for an agonizing amount of time, he realizes that he was the person who conjured the Patronus and drove the creatures away, not his father. He was the person he’d been waiting for all along.

    Even without time travel, this is a relevant lesson to us. We often sit around waiting for someone to swoop in and save the day. We wait for someone else to act.

    The problem is that everyone else is doing the same thing—they are all waiting around for someone else to rescue them from whatever the problem may be.

    At some point, you must wake up and realize you are the hero of your story. You are the person everyone else is waiting for to act.

    Someone eventually has to take a stand, so it might need to be you.

    by Nathan Coumbe

    Leaders must let workers work

    The most beneficial thing a leader can do in 21st-century knowledge work is to allow employees to spend most of their working hours applying the high-value, high-return skills for which they were hired.

    They should be allowed to do this without being encumbered or distracted by the “busy work” of modern knowledge work, such as email, Slack messages, and administrative overhead.

    Imagine if it had been necessary for Charles Darwin to respond to 40 letters a day. How long would it have taken him to publish On the Origin of Species?

    Or what if Mozart had to deal with five unplanned visits from other musicians every hour? Would he have become the musical genius we now know him to be?

    Yet, between instant messaging software, email, and open-office pop-ins (for those not working remotely), these hypothetical scenarios are everyday occurrences for most of us.

    It’s no wonder we feel overwhelmed, overworked, and chronically unproductive, even with all the stuff we’re doing.

    The solution, then, is to build workflows and processes so that your teams can spend less time discussing tasks that need to be done and actually complete those tasks (while also having the slack necessary to think and rest).

    by Nathan Coumbe

    Make people better

    What’s the purpose of a leader?

    If you subscribe to Ryan Holiday’s “Daily Stoic” newsletter, you’ve probably seen he’s done a week-long feature on leadership and Stoic philosophy.

    One email he wrote earlier this week stood out to me… I’ve been able to think of little else since. It’s about the sole purpose of being a leader. Here are some of the quotes used in the email:

    “Happy is the man who can make others better, not merely when he is in their company, but even when he is in their thoughts. —Seneca

    Another one here from Seneca:

    “Nobody can live happy [sic] if he cares only for himself, if he turns everything to his own benefit: you have to live for others, if you want to live for yourself.”

    Then, near the end of the email, he sums up an idea from Marcus Aurelius:

    “As Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations, people are our proper occupation. ‘[My] job is to do them good.’ When we make others better, he writes elsewhere, ‘we perform our function.’“

    Summing up his newsletter, he makes this statement:

    Leaders make people better.

    We’re all leaders. And we’re all philosophers.

    So let’s make other people better.

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    by Nathan Coumbe

    You Can’t Lead Everyone

    This means one of two things: 

    1. You must become a better leader than you are right now. If you do, people will choose to follow you where you want to go. Or…
    2. (If you’re already a good leader) you have to find the right people willing to go on the journey with you. 

    More people or the right people? 

    The choice depends on you and where you want to go.

    Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

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    by Nathan Coumbe

    Motivation, management, and bathing

    “People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing, that’s why we recommend it daily.”

    –Zig Ziglar

    You cannot read a book one time and consider yourself done with it. You have not learned it all or digested enough of it to make any difference in your life. The same is true of motivation – one speech will change your life, but only for a day. You must revisit and remind yourself daily of the message that so inspired you. You must practice it daily. 

    I’ve found the same idea to be true of working with people in any sort of leadership or supervisory position. Managing people is also like bathing: you have to do it every day. 

    I found myself in previous roles aggravated by having to remind people of the same tasks, duties, and responsibilities. In my mind, if I delegated something to someone, that should have been the end of it. It should have been taken care of from that point forward. 

    It rarely was. I found myself constantly having to remind teammates to do this or remember that. This frustration had nothing to do with anyone’s  incompetence or irresponsibility and everything to do with my mindset. Managing people requires setting a goal and then helping your people along the path to that goal. They will not achieve it on their own with all the competing priorities set before them during a typical workday. It must be made fresh in their minds daily. Don’t let the need to remind your people daily of what you expect from them cause irritation or frustration on your part. It’s part of the job. 

    The lesson for today is to bathe every day, motivate every day, and manage every day. 

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