The Point of Leadership

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” — John Quincy Adams

I thought I was enjoying not being in charge.

After I finished serving as president of the Tejas Storytelling Association, I finally had time to concentrate on my own stuff—my stories, my speaking, my writing, my projects. Nobody was waiting for me to make a decision. Nobody needed me to organize anything. It was freedom.

But something was missing.

I didn’t recognize it at first. Then I agreed to become director of our next storytelling festival, and suddenly there were meetings to lead, decisions to make, people to coordinate and problems that didn’t come with instructions.

And strangely enough, I felt like myself again.

For most of my forty-year career, I was either working on a project, leading a project or managing people who led projects. The same thing happened outside of work. I became a leader in the employee organization at Southwestern Bell, in my fraternity, and eventually in the storytelling association.

Maybe leadership is something I learned. Maybe some of it was already in me.

After all these years, I’m not sure it matters.

I just know I have always pictured leadership in an unusual way.

Imagine a triangle.

I’m standing at the point. On one side of me, I need someone who thinks logically—the person asking, What has to happen? What’s the deadline? What’s the budget? What are we forgetting?

On the other side, I need someone thinking emotionally, thinking about people—the person asking, How will this affect them? Have we listened? Does somebody need encouragement? Are we treating people the way we would want to be treated?

Logic on one side. Compassion on the other.

And the leader at the point has to listen to both.

I was reminded of that recently when I inherited responsibility for marketing our festival. Kim had handled much of this work for years, and when she started explaining everything she did, I could feel my brain filling up.

Documents. Publications. HOT Funds. Deadlines. Specifications. Invoices. Graphics. Proof that the advertisements actually ran.

I remember thinking, What have I gotten myself into?

Kim knew the system because she had lived with it for years. I didn’t. And because I wasn’t going to approach everything exactly the way she had, I occasionally wondered whether I was making a mistake.

That’s when an old leadership lesson came back to me:

Before you can manage complexity, you have to make it simple enough to see.

So I gathered the documents Kim had accumulated and, with the help of artificial intelligence, started sorting through them. I asked questions. I organized information. I broke one enormous, confusing responsibility into smaller pieces.

And suddenly I could see it.

We weren’t managing some mysterious advertising empire.

We had roughly a dozen or so publications we wanted to advertise with.

Carol could contact them, confirm their requirements, deadlines, prices and specifications. Karen, our graphic designer, could take those requirements and create the advertisements. I could coordinate the project, watch the budget, track the deadlines and make sure everything got done.

That was it.

I didn’t have to call every publication.

I didn’t have to design every ad.

I didn’t have to know everything Kim knew.

I just had to build the team that did.

My conversation with Carol sealed it for me. We talked through what needed to happen, figured out what she could own and what I could own, and what had seemed overwhelming suddenly felt manageable.

More importantly, it felt fun again.

For the first time in a while, I had that old feeling again—the feeling I used to get when a complicated project started coming together and everybody began pulling in the same direction. I hadn’t realized how much I missed it until it came back.

Maybe I hadn’t retired from leadership after all. Maybe leadership had simply been waiting for another project to call me back.

That’s when I realized what I had been missing since leaving the presidency.

It wasn’t the title.

It wasn’t being in charge.

It wasn’t having people report to me.

I missed building something with people.

I’ve been fortunate to have people throughout my life who taught me how to communicate, how to think logically, how to pay attention to people’s feelings and how to trust myself when a situation calls for leadership. None of those lessons came from me alone.

Which may be the most important leadership lesson of all.

Now there are younger people coming behind me, and maybe part of my job at this stage of life is to pass those lessons along. Not by teaching them how to do everything the way I did it, but by helping them discover what they can do—and then trusting them enough to do it.

Because after all these years, I’ve finally figured something out.

A leader isn’t the person at the point because he can do everything.

He’s at the point because he knows he can’t.