Successful leaders usually are complex people, with many strategies for getting things done. Yet, according to an expert in leadership development, almost all of the same people share the same “simple code.”
Who knew?
Lawrence Polsky, a co-founder of the Princeton, N.J.-based firmed called Teams of Distinction (the other founder is Antoine Gerschel), knew. But it took a recent client engagement to truly bring it home.
“I’ve detected a code in successful leaders. It’s one they never state as a strategy per se, but it emerges like the sun breaking through the clouds on a foggy day,” is the way he puts it.
In fact, Polsky adds, it is so clear and simple that it would never be heralded as innovation. It’s an invisible concept that simply presents itself as a facet of the leader’s personality.
Simply, the code is: Success = Learning mindset + Making a difference.
The code became clear to Polsky, who spent 20 years in OD & Learning teaching more than 10,000 professionals worldwide along the way, recently while interviewing the executive team of a global chemical company.
The first executive Polsky met was highly accomplished, a former top sale pro and leader at an industry giant before he came to this company. The executive talked about the many challenges he faced. But it’s when the conversation turned to his “dream job” that the invisible code for success broke through.
The next interview was with a PhD research scientist leading R&D. She also faced many challenges, but unknowingly shared her code for success as well.
“Interesting,” Polsky thought at the time. “That is the same view as the first person.”
When he reached the third, fourth, and fifth executives and they all clearly shared the same code, Polsky realized he had stumbled upon something special. He had seen instances of the code before, but never everyone in on an entire executive team.
“Sometimes executives parrot their leader’s philosophy or the company values,” he says. “But I had never heard these specific words repeated verbatim.”
By the end of the day he realized that those words, the ideas the executives had articulated, are the secret to great leadership
Common traits
Polsky notes that after working with global executives for over a decade, naturally there are common patterns of thinking. All are very driven and as a result they work hard and long hours. Some are more humble than others, but by and large they know deep in their hearts that their success and the company’s success are in their hands. They expect results to be earned, not handed out.
Polsky asked each of them about 10 questions - about their team, their dream job, their performance levels and other topics – all meant to get to the heart of things. While no one answered each question the same, at some point in each of the interviews they all uttered a version of the same idea: “I got where I am today by being focused on learning and growing” and “I want to make a difference in the company.”
They all spoke from the heart about how good they feel when they are positively impacting the lives of employees. And they all spoke about how their careers were built: not by being smarter than the next person, but by being driven by an intense desire to learn and grow.
“It was not a line they were feeding me,” Polsky says. “Part of my job is to be a BS detector. This was them speaking their truth.”
It didn’t surprise Polsky to hear those answers from successful business people. However, that they all said it in their individual interviews crystallized for him an important pattern he’s seen over the years: executives that are operating from the belief that "success = learning + making a difference" are the happiest and most productive leaders.
“They are the ones who find the joy in the rough challenges they face,” Polsky says. “And they are the ones who can easily inspire their people from their actions and words.”
Polsky believes leaders who are considered great all created top cultures and very positive results living by living this same code: Steve Jobs, Bill Hewlett and David Packard, Tony Hsieh (Zappos), Alan Mulally and Richard Branson, for example
“Of course, leaders must be driven, work hard, and have talent to succeed,” he says. “But to be great, to raise their people and their organizations to new heights, they need to live by the code of learning and make a difference in everything they do.”