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You cannot lead others until you learn to lead yourself
For most of us, being a successful lawyer would be more than enough. And for Robin Sharma, it was – for a while. The money, the big office and all the accompanying accoutrements were great social validations of success; an indication that he had been able to take a step up from his social station and become a better man. Despite what it might have projected on the outside, his newfound status left Sharma feeling empty.
After serious thought, he discovered that in achieving his picture-perfect life, he had sacrificed authenticity. He realised that his own success had been skin-deep, prompting a closer examination of his inner motivations.
With Sharma’s own transformation came an urgency to share his discoveries with others.
His resulting work was an intriguing fable entitled, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari.
But as an ordinary guy from a small town, the only way Sharma could become a published author was to self-publish his book. “My mother was my editor, I printed copies of the book at Kinko’s [similar to PostNet], and my father sold the finished product out of the trunk of his car to anyone who would buy a copy,” he recalls.
In order to generate a degree of exposure for this book, Sharma was able to convince some bookstore owners to allow him to hold book signings. As fate would have it, one of these signings was attended by Ed Carson, the president of the major publishing company, HarperCollins. Carson was so impressed that he offered Sharma a book deal. The rest, as they say, is history.
Organisations of the stature of Nike, FedEx, General Electric, IBM and Microsoft have taken his teachings and implemented them to help develop leaders in all levels of
their organisation.
Since The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari was published in 1997, Sharma has written an additional 10 books, conducted hundreds of seminars around the world and gained a reputation as a leadership expert.
“Leadership is my oxygen,” Sharma says. “I have spent years as a leadership coach to the very wealthy and have been able to get behind the eyes of some of the world’s best, studying the minute details of what makes a person great.”
His latest book, The Leader Who Had No Title, distills the lessons he has learnt over the past 15 years.
You were a successful litigator before entering your current field – why make the change?
Yes, I was. I have two Law degrees and I was a litigation lawyer for a number of years and I was very successful at it, [made] much money.
I had a beautiful office, but I was very, very empty. I became a lawyer for the wrong reasons. I became a lawyer to please the world around me.
But leadership is about being comfortable in your own skin, and leadership is about authenticity. I often say that leadership is not a popularity contest – it’s about doing what’s right.
So I decided to rethink my life and reinvent the way that I was living and working, and that change which I went through led to my writing The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari.
Material success, in and of itself, does not equal success. Would you say this is how you felt at that point in your life?
That’s true. Right now, I have a very simple mission to which I’ve given my life. I started this off as a business and then it became a mission and now it’s become an obsession. It’s travelling around the world, helping organisations grow leaders without titles. The fact that it’s a mission gives me so much energy and it gives me so much passion.
There are many airplanes, there’s a great deal of travel to many different countries, but the fact that I have the privilege to remind people that you don’t need to have a title to be a leader, energises me every single day.
Tell us a bit about that, about the concept of leadership without a title.
I have a new book that will be coming out in South Africa over the next few months and it’s called, The Leader Who Had No Title.
It’s basically the distillation of what I’ve learnt over the last 15 years, working with many of the best companies in the world – whether it’s FedEx, General Electric, IBM, Microsoft, Nike – and I’ve worked with many billionaires as a leadership coach.
So I’ve distilled all their best practices into this book, and the first point is simply: the old model of leadership is dead.
I don’t think that’s overstating the case. I think if you look at some of the time-honoured institutions that we thought would never fail – they failed.
If you look at some of the most highly regarded leaders in the world, many of them have lost face.
And so this old model of “Leadership in Business”, with the managing director on the top of the mountain, charismatically shouting out orders to the following masses, is gone.
And I’m not saying I want to be really crude, I’m not saying titles are not important. I’m simply saying that the companies which will succeed now in these dramatically turbulent times, would be the companies that do one thing: they grow the leadership capability of every single one of their employees, whether it’s the janitor or the CEO.
In other words, everyone now needs to show leadership within their specific role.
Are you suggesting that every member has some input in company decisions?
I’m not saying consensus driven. I still think that you require an executive team who will make the decisions and set divisions and, ultimately, holds people accountable for
the results.
What I am saying, is that within every employee’s role, he/she needs to stop playing victim and start showing leadership.
In other words, we used to think that only the executive team shows leadership. What I’m simply saying, is that every single employee – whether they work on the front line, whether they sweep out at the end of the day, whether they’re in IT, whether they’re in HR – they need to show leadership within their area of responsibility.
How do they do that? There are specific things. Number one: innovation. So whatever they do throughout the organisation, the best employees will be showing innovation within that role. In other words, they leave everything they touch better than they found it.
The second thing is to be a merchant of wow! In other words, if all they are doing every day is doing what’s expected, then they just may lose their job tomorrow.
So the new standard of success in business is being so good at what you do, that people can’t take their eyes off you.
Is that not asking too much? We have to accept the fact that not everyone is destined for greatness and that at some point, you have to accept your own mediocrity. Or is that simply a foolish thing to think?
The first line of the new book is: “We are born into greatness and we are resigned into mediocrity”, and that’s one thing I would never accept – the idea that we have to accept our own mediocrity.
You’re right, I don’t know if everyone is destined for greatness, but all are destined for our own unique form of greatness. To say that the other circumstances [in your life] have caused you to be mediocre, plays victim with your life.
I say there is not one person in any organisation across South Africa who can’t, by doing the things that I talk about in the book, take their work and the way they live to a completely new level of excellence.
And these are not merely motivational ideas. These are ideas based on empirical evidence that if other people can do it, then your leaders can do it as well.
So we will accept the fact that there is a limit to what every person can do, but the idea then is to push those limits as hard as you can?
Absolutely. I believe we have extraordinary capabilities, but most people haven’t owned their potential. Why? Because we’ve never been told that you don’t need a title to be a leader.
We’ve been told there are certain people with beautiful skin, nice teeth, excellent educational pedigrees – and those are the leaders and you need to be a follower.
And again, I want to be crystal clear. I’m not saying that the person working in the mail room will be making the executive decisions.
I’m simply saying that leadership is not a title on a business card. Leadership is a way of being, it’s a way of working, it’s a way of thinking – and every single employee within an organisation can show leadership. They can drive positive change, they can influence other people, they can show innovation, they can stand for excellence.
Imagine what would happen in organisations around the world if every single person showed leadership within his/her area of responsibility.
And leadership is not simply something we do at work. In this book, I talked about leadership being something we do at home, it’s something we do in our community. What would happen if every one of us in our communities showed leadership and started taking responsibility for results? Suddenly, you’re making a difference.
It reminds me of what Mother Teresa said: “If everyone would only sweep their own doorstep, the whole world would be clean.”
And we also need to hold others accountable for what they do and don’t do. Is that somewhat in line with your way of thinking?
Very much so. The “lead without a title” message really begins with personal responsibility.
Blaming others is excusing ourselves. There’s an importance to keeping your promises and ensuring that you’re walking your talk.
That may seem like common sense, yet how many leaders today – at all levels – actually are impeccable with their promises? How many people are so into their integrity that they would never say anything that they weren’t prepared to do?
The foundation of business is relationships, and the foundation of any relationship is trust. If you don’t keep your promises, you lose trust.
Imagine an organisation where the culture is such that people commonly don’t keep their promises. That is a low-trust culture, so the team isn’t very strong and the results therefore aren’t very strong either.
So how did the actual transition come about from being a lawyer and actually deciding to sit down and write the best-selling book, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari?
It was a gradual process; it wasn’t one revolutionary movement where I left Law and wrote the book.
It started off with my realising I was successful on the outside, but very empty on the inside.
So I pulled back from being a lawyer and I went through a period of time where I did much soul-searching.
I began reading many great autobiographies. I started studying the great leaders, I started interviewing elders, I started reading books on leadership, on psychology, on relationships, on success and achievement. I began implementing the ideas and I came up with a system that created some great changes in my life: not only in the way that I worked, but in the way that I thought, in the way that I interacted with people.
Given my own personal translation, I thought perhaps I should write a book that shares the system with other people. So I self-published The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. My father helped me sell it out of the back of his car.
My first seminar was attended by only 23 people – 21 of whom were my own family members!
So it was not a catch-fire success?
I started from a very, very humble beginning, roughly 500 books in my apartment. But I had a dream, and one of the things that leaders do so well is that they dream. When the world around them laughs at their dreams, they have the courage of their convictions to continue to pursue their dreams until eventually they become reality.
When people started reading The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, it resonated with them and they would tell other people about it and it became a word-of-mouth phenomenon.
It started off with those 500 copies in my apartment and it’s now sold over three million copies.
Zaid Kriel
