This Is Day One

TWO

The New Guy

You won’t hear from a lot of CEOs in this book. In fact, you won’t hear from a lot of people who would traditionally be given the title of “leader.”

That’s a conscious decision. Highlighting people in a leadership book creates an implicit indication their leadership should be emulated. However, I wrote this book to show you how to better live your leadership, not someone else’s. You may not be a senior executive, high-profile athlete, or influential politician but you are a leader. If you’re not consciously acknowledging or engaging your leadership each day, I hope to change that.

The leadership you put into the world won’t necessarily be the same as anyone else’s. It may differ greatly from the type you’ve seen celebrated or from the leadership you’ve chased your whole life. That might push you to dismiss or marginalize your personal leadership, and I want to make sure you embrace it.

I don’t know the nature of your leadership, but I do know it’s there. It may be different than the leaders about whom you’ve been taught, but it’s no less essential to the organizations and communities of which you are a part. I want you to hear the ideas of leaders to whom you relate and who represent your leadership reality, so there are a lot of different leadership voices in these pages.

As I chose the leadership examples for this book, I imagined a world where all money, jobs, titles, fame, influence, and our memories of who held them had been stripped away: a Day One where leaders were judged only by what they choose to do each day to positively impact themselves and others. I thought about a world where ideas and insights were validated by how useful they were, not by the title or bank account of the person delivering them. In a world like that, leaders may look a lot different than we’re used to. This book features those leaders and their ideas. It has to—it was one of those leaders who provided the title.

Mustafa

I met Mustafa at dawn on the outskirts of Doha, Qatar. It was my only day off on a speaking tour of the Middle East and I was heading out “dune bashing.” It had been described to me as “flying off sand mountains at 70 miles an hour.” I had to try it.

I walked bleary-eyed through the front doors of my hotel to see an incredible sunrise over the desert. Leaping from a nearby 4×4 was a beaming man who bounded around the front of the vehicle, threw his arms wide and, smiling broadly, bellowed:

“Mr. Dudley! Welcome! Welcome to Mustafa’s grand adventure!”

He brought his arms in to his chest and announced proudly, “I… am Mustafa!”

Everyone should introduce themselves with that kind of enthusiasm: it raises the energy of everyone around you. Unfortunately, my jet lag and lack of sleep led to the delivery of what I understand—in retrospect—was a profoundly inappropriate response. I grinned, threw my own arms wide, and bellowed, from the very bottom of my chest, my personal rendition of the Zulu cry that opens The Lion King:

“Nants ingonyama bagithi Baba!”

Mustafa’s smile disappeared instantly. His brow furrowed. His eyes grew hard.

“That,” he hissed through clenched teeth, “was MUFASA.”

He opened the door to the 4×4 with a violent jerk.

“Get in!” he demanded coldly.

Concerned that I had clearly made it far less likely this man would put his full heart into returning me home in one piece, I began to back toward the hotel entrance.

“Oh… well, perhaps it’s best if I don’t…,” I began.

Mustafa’s face split into a wide smile, and he let loose with a tremendous laugh.

“Mr. Dudley! No! I am just teasing you, my friend!” He said, clearly pleased with how uncomfortable he had made me. “You are very funny! Yes, it is like The Lion King, but not quite! Much like you Canadians are like Americans, but not quite, right?”

He stared at me expectantly.

“Um… well,” I began, not sure how to respond to that analysis. “I wouldn’t put it that way… there are a lot of subtle but important differences.”

I trailed off, thrown completely off balance by my obviously mischievous guide. How did he even know that I was Canadian?

Again, Mustafa laughed uproariously and gestured to the open passenger door.

“Well then,” he said happily, “you must teach me! Let us go, I am very excited!”

I climbed into the passenger seat and we were off. And my friends, he was not kidding about being excited: Mustafa vibrated with energy.

As soon as we pulled out, he began to talk, excitedly chatting about what we were about to “learn from the desert” and firing facts and stats about Canada at me (he had been told the night before I was Canadian and had done a little Internet research ahead of time). Stories about his youth, philosophies on life, the things he liked the most about Qatar, and, of course, jokes, jokes, and more jokes—it was a nonstop stream of exuberant chatter for over an hour.

It was when we started heading for the first dunes—100-foot mountains of sand emerging from the desert—that he took it to a new level. He was quite simply cackling with laughter and excitement as he pushed the accelerator toward the floor. We were absolutely flying toward what appeared to me to be a sheer drop and Mustafa was having the time of his life.

Bracing myself against the dash, I looked over at Mustafa and shouted: “Mustafa! You’re having a better time than I am! You do this every day! How do you stay so excited about it?”

Mustafa looked over at me, and with a smile that showed every one of his teeth, bellowed back:

“Oh! It’s my first day!”

I just about crawled out the back window.

Look, I understand that everyone has to start somewhere, but if your job involves driving me off of sand cliffs (hell, if your job involves driving me off of any cliffs really), I’d really prefer not to be assigned the new guy.

I’m going to assume that thought showed very clearly in my expression because Mustafa let out a laugh and hit the brakes. The 4×4 skidded to a halt maybe twenty feet from the edge of the dune.

At that point I had both feet on the dash and had pushed myself basically up to the roof. Mustafa put the vehicle in park and looked at me with pure amusement.

“Mr. Dudley,” he began, leaning in. “Don’t you realize? You want the new guy!”

My heart still in my throat, I managed a weak, “I’m not so sure, my friend.”

“Think about it, Mr. Dudley,” Mustafa replied. “Think about your first day of work! On your first day of work you show up early; you dress your best; you try everything you can to impress your boss. You are patient with your coworkers, even the ones you know right away you’re not going to like. You ask all the questions you have because there’s no shame in doing that when you’re new. You double-check everything that you do. You stay late. You are never more committed to your job than you are on your first day. You are never more convinced it is going to be the best job you have ever had than you are on your first day.”

He leaned closer and continued, “As soon as your second day of work begins, all of that starts to stop being quite so true, doesn’t it?”

He leaned back with a broad smile.

“The first day that I ever came to work at this job was seventeen years ago, Mr. Dudley. But I had such an incredible experience that I promised myself something. I promised myself that I would NEVER have a second day of work.”

He paused to look me right in the eye.

“Mr. Dudley, it has been my first day of work for seventeen years. Five years ago I bought this company. All I ask of anyone who works for me is that they treat every day they come to work like it is their first day. The customers love it. It’s why we are the best tour company in the country.”

Live every day like it’s Day One. It’s a concept that changed how I view leadership. I hope it will do the same for you.

THREE

Are You a Leader?

I estimate I’ve asked that question to over a thousand audiences in the past ten years. They’ve represented a wide range of backgrounds and industries: CEOs, doctors, teachers, emergency responders, customer service staff, students, and professors to name just a few. They’ve ranged in size from groups of ten to more than ten thousand. In fact, I estimate I’ve asked over a quarter of a million people on five continents to ponder that question for me.

You want to know how often more than half the people in any given room have raised their hands? Less than 1 percent of the time. Once every hundred audiences or so are there more than a handful of people in a room willing to say: “I am a leader.”

That’s a driving force behind this book. I’ve studied leadership my entire adult life and I honestly believe there is no shortage of leadership on this planet. However, we are systematically ignoring a huge percentage of the leadership that surrounds us each day—in our own lives and the lives of those with whom we interact—because we’ve chosen to define leadership too narrowly. This book will give you a road map for how to start changing that for yourself and the people you care about.

The older we get, the more we treat the term “leader” like it’s something we require permission to use: we hope that one day the money we make and our professional achievements will be enough for some external group or individual to bestow some title, credential, accolade, or degree we believe we need to deserve to call ourselves a “leader.”

We celebrate that permission once we receive it. We want people to know when we’ve “earned” the permission to lead. In fact, we advertise it on email signatures, LinkedIn profiles, and business cards. I’ve learned that until people have been given that external permission to position themselves as a leader, they fear that claiming the title for themselves (especially in front of other people) will demonstrate a level of cockiness and arrogance with which they don’t wish to be associated.

This is part of a society-wide tendency to make leadership into something bigger than us and something beyond us. The perception is that leadership is determined by money, titles, and influence, and therefore reserved for a relatively small subsection of the population. After a couple of decades in the world of higher education, I believe how we teach leadership plays a huge role in that perception.

Think about how you learned what a “leader” was. My guess is you were given examples to illustrate the concept, and I’m betting those examples were giants. They were presidents, scientific groundbreakers, titans of business, and conquerors of nations. I’m betting the vast majority were also white men. Young people today are being given the same sort of examples. We tell them, “Look at Warren Buffett invest! Look at Steve Jobs innovate! Look at Mark Zuckerberg build an online empire!”

As for our daughters and granddaughters—if you want a glimpse into the lessons they’re learning about what leaders look like, do a Google image search of the word “leader.” My first search revealed a penguin, a chicken, and two different types of fish portrayed as a leader before the first image of a woman appeared.

I shared that fact with an audience just a couple of years ago. Afterward a woman approached me to say: “Do me a favor, go home tonight and do a Google image search for the term ‘CEO.’”

The top search result? A photo of the “CEO Barbie” doll, complete with cell phone, laptop, and skirt that only the most generous among us would call “mid-thigh.” That image is problematic in more ways than I can list here, but I will point out three.

A consequence of using giants (notably straight, white, male giants) as the primary examples of leadership is that most of us begin to devalue the leadership that we demonstrate every day. We start to let moments when we embody leadership pass by without allowing ourselves to take credit for them or feel good about them. The problem is, for better or for worse, the things that make us feel good are the things that we find ourselves driven to do on a daily basis. When people around us demonstrate leadership and we fail to publicly recognize those moments as leadership, we’re making it less likely they’ll be repeated. When we fail to recognize the leadership that surrounds us, we effectively erase it from our organizations, our communities, and our lives. Most of the leadership on the planet is going unnoticed and uncelebrated—yours included.

And we need it. We need more hands to go up. We need janitors making minimum wage to recognize they have as much right to raise their hand and call themselves a leader as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. We need to teach our kids that money, titles, power, and influence aren’t appropriate criteria for identifying leaders because they exclude the vast majority of the people on the planet. We need them to know now so they don’t take the same thirty years I did to figure it out.

When I graduated high school in the spring of 1996, I thought that I was everything a student was supposed to be because I had done everything I had been told to do: I graduated with an A+ average as the valedictorian, prom king, and one of the captains of the football team. In my “spare time,” I was one of editors of the school paper and president of the Student Union (because only in high school can you control the government and the press at the same time and no one has a problem with it).

Everything I did was about looking good on paper. A very specific piece of paper: my résumé. My entire life was about filling up that double-sided sheet of paper. On it went my grades, my extracurriculars, and all my volunteer work, awards, and accolades. I evaluated everything I did based on how good it would look on that single sheet: the better I looked on paper, the more likely I’d get into a “good” school. The better the school I attended, the better my résumé would look to potential employers. My whole life was about impressing people I hadn’t met yet: admissions counselors I hadn’t met yet, bosses I hadn’t met yet, potential future spouses I hadn’t met yet. It was all aimed at helping me become one of the select few: outperform everyone, collect the highest numbers on the top right-hand corner of my tests and assignments—the most letters after my name—and one day I would earn the right to be in that special, tiny subsection of society who got to call themselves “leaders.”

Getting into that tiny percentage was my mission in life, until a single interaction messed with my perception of what “leadership” was all about, made me realize our lives should not be lived for people we haven’t yet met, and started the shift that led to this book.

The Lollipop Moment

In October of 2002, I was twenty-five years old, a year and a half removed from earning my bachelor’s degree and still living in the same small university town where I’d been for almost six years.

Your mid-twenties is the new puberty—full of big changes, plenty of angst, and more than its fair share of confusion and self-doubt. A few less hormonal changes than the original puberty, a whole lot more debt, and for a lot of people about the same amount of living with your parents.

I wasn’t sure what was next in my life, but faced with moving back in with Mom and Dad, I figured it was a heck of a lot more appealing to stick around a place where I had keys to the bar. I was comfortable, accomplished, and well known around campus—a big fish in a small pond. I’d graduated with first-class honors and figured I’d eventually get around to grad school and more letters after my name, which of course would eventually lead to impressive titles, a big staff, and more dollars in my bank account. That’s how life worked in my mind: if you wanted to be rewarded, you figured out what the person at the front of the room wanted (be it a teacher, professor, or boss) and delivered it to them better than the person next to you.

Then a tornado landed on my parents’ house while they were in it. They survived but my childhood home was flattened. Mom and Dad were homeless, and with my sister on the west coast and me on the east, dealing with it all alone. It was literally an act of God indicating it was time for me to leave the bubble of university and face the real world. A good-bye party was organized at the bar I’d help run and plans for your standard “last night before becoming a grown-up” festivities ensued.

Early in the party, I was approached by a young woman I’d seen around campus but had not to my knowledge ever spoken with.

“Hi, Drew,” she said.

“Hey!” I said with that “so good to see you even though I have no idea who you are” enthusiasm.

She laughed.

“It’s all right. I know you don’t know who I am, but I remember the first time I ever met you.”