As I look to new beginnings at age seventy, this is the first of three blogs looking at leadership lessons learned over the decades of my life.
Ages 0 to 10: I was, essentially, an only child. I had loving parents and friends, but my siblings, much older, were in high school and college during my formative years. I spent a lot of time alone but wasn’t lonely. I engaged in a wide range of creative play, building baseball stadiums with plastic bricks, pitching nine inning games against the barn door and conducting Olympic track and field and swimming events on my vibrating electric football field. Later, I enjoyed using games, some I invented, for ice breaking, morale boosting, stress relief and team building for my leadership teams. They were effective in building camaraderie and a common sense of purpose.
Ages 11 to 20: When my dad died early in my second decade I escaped into a hardworking, competitive mode, striving to be tops in Boy Scouts, athletics and academics. By age twenty, I knew that hard work can produce excellence. I also realized that: competition for the sake of self-winning only, rather than achieving a higher purpose, can be self-destructive; and competition, which gets stiffer as life goes on, is also about losing. Learning how to deal emotionally with loss and minimizing the chance of loss while taking risk are important leadership skills.
Ages 21-30: My third decade was spent in formalized and on-the-job learning in law school and a law firm and trying hard to balance achievement in those environments with a new wife and first child. Focus, discipline and critical thinking became valuable assets achieved too often at the expense of my family, meaningful leisure, spirituality and other intangibles which make life truly joyful. Looking back, I can’t believe I paid that price. While focus, discipline and critical thinking are, indeed, crucial leadership traits, great leaders apply them in all aspects of life, not just their business lives. Doing so yields emotional intelligence and empathy and sets an example for people they lead.