Twenty Years, Twenty Lessons: the Five Things They All Come Back To

Ask yourself: What do I look at? Because whatever that is quietly becomes what your team works on.

Serving the customer comes first, internal or external, whatever your role happens to be, and never losing sight of what they actually need is the one thing that still holds when everything else around you is in flux.

Keeping it simple matters more than most leaders allow for, which means questioning complexity wherever it appears and saying no to good ideas when they take you off track. Saying no to bad ideas is easy and nobody needs coaching for it, whereas saying no to genuinely good ideas that just aren't yours to do this year is the actual skill, and it's considerably harder than it sounds.

And whether it's a people problem or a process one, always get to the root cause rather than putting a band-aid over it, because a patched problem doesn't disappear. It returns later, larger, and usually at the worst possible moment.

Your team works on what you ask about, not on what you announced at the offsite. If you ask about the numbers every Monday and about your people once a quarter, you've told them exactly what matters, whatever the values on the wall happen to say.

Ask yourself: What do I accept? Because whatever you accept quietly becomes normal.

Hold yourself and your team to high standards and be excellent, not aspirationally but actually. Let people know where they stand, because certainty and clarity build confidence whereas ambiguity does precisely the opposite, and people will fill a vacuum with the worst available interpretation every time.

You'll make mistakes, so own them and come with a solution, since the owning is what earns you the right to expect the same from everybody else. Don't let people down, don't cancel meetings, and do what you said you'd do when you said you'd do it. That last one sounds small and it isn't, because it's the entire foundation on which people decide whether to believe anything else you tell them.

And don't be a dick! That one is pretty self-explanatory.

Your standard is not what you announced. It is the worst thing you have walked past, and everybody on your team knows what that is. Most of them could tell you the date.

Ask yourself: What still reaches me that shouldn't? Because the answer sets the speed of your team and the strength of your bench.

Empower your people, which mostly means not taking back the responsibility you hired them for in the first place, and then leave them to get on with their jobs without interfering. Those two are close enough that I nearly cut one of them, but the difference between delegating a task and actually letting go of it is where most leaders come unstuck, so it earns saying twice.

Never shirk your own responsibility either, and make the calls that genuinely are yours promptly, because empowerment isn't abdication and everything below you stalls while it waits.

When you're stuck, go to your peers first rather than straight to your boss. It builds your network, it develops your judgement, and it means the problems that do reach upward are the ones that genuinely need to.

Every decision that lands on your desk unnecessarily costs you twice over, once while it waits for you, and once because the person who should have made it didn't get the chance to grow from it.

Ask yourself: What pressure am I transmitting? Because that determines whether your team can think, and whether they can tell you the truth.

Have a system and a process for everything, because it removes stress for everybody involved. Structure isn't bureaucracy, it's the thing that lets people stop improvising and start thinking.

Work really hard, because there's no substitute for it, though it's worth remembering that working hard and transmitting urgency are two entirely different things and only one of them is any use to the people around you.

Stay calm and considered in meetings, and channel a graceful swan. That one took me years to get anywhere near right, and it's probably the most valuable single habit on the whole list.

People can't think clearly and manage your mood at the same time, and whichever of those you make more urgent is the one they'll do.

Ask yourself: What version of me do people get? Because that determines whether problems reach you early or late.

Get to know your people well, including what drives them, what motivates them and what matters to them, because everyone's reason for being there is different and assuming you already know is the fastest possible way to get it wrong.

Be kind, always, since people remember how you made them feel long after they've forgotten what you actually decided. Celebrate the wins as a team and give credit where it's due, constantly, because it costs nothing at all and it compounds.

Speak to everyone with the same respect you'd use with the CEO, whatever their title, because people are always watching how you treat those who can do nothing for you and it tells them more about you than any of your decisions ever will.

And have an opinion, along with the courage to share it respectfully, especially upward. Silence gets you nothing.

This is the most expensive setting to leave unchosen. If people can't predict which version of you they'll get on any given day, they'll bring you problems late, and late problems are the expensive ones.

Twenty lessons is a lot to follow, whereas five decisions is manageable, and you're already making all five of them right now, today, in whatever meeting you have after this one. You set them by what you ask about, what you walk past, what you keep on your own desk, what mood you carry into a room, and who you turn out to be on a rough Thursday afternoon.

So the question isn't whether you have settings, because you do. The question is whether you ever chose them.

Most leaders didn't. They picked them up from a good boss, or a bad one, or from whatever happened to get rewarded in the year they were promoted, and that isn't a failing so much as a description of how nearly everyone ends up leading.

Leading by default does not mean leading badly. It means leading in a way you never chose.

Take the five headings and answer each question honestly, not with what you'd like to be true but with what's actually true this month.

What do I look at? What do I accept? What still reaches me that shouldn't? What pressure do I transmit? What version of me do people get?

Then pick the one where the gap between what you intended and what's actually happening is widest, which isn't necessarily the one that seems most broken, because the widest gap is where the change is available to you.

Change that one thing.