Why this, why now
It's time. I'm approaching the summit of my life, and I realized it's time to finish the climb, as they say. Meaning, it's time to share before I forget all that I've learned to better aid your ascent.
I've been on the rough side of that mountain of life, yet have experienced the blue skies of victory too and wouldn't trade any one of them.
This is an invitation to a weekly community which subscribes to a way of thinking. The readings will shape our work lives, heck, our personal lives for that matter, for the better. It's a safe space to ponder and pontificate, and praise. Perhaps even to renew a former perspective or gain a new one.
Do Right!
After decades of leadership, the principles that mattered most proved to be the simplest.
Over the course of a long career, you collect a lot of things. Leadership books. Strategic plans. Mission statements. Operating systems. KPIs. Budget models. Performance reviews. And acronyms—Lord knows, plenty of acronyms.
I've used many of them. Some were valuable. Some worked for a season. Some were probably forgotten before the ink was dry on the flip chart.
But after more than four decades of leading businesses, building teams, coaching executives, making mistakes, celebrating victories, and traveling what I call the jagged journey of life, one leadership philosophy has stayed with me more than all the others.
Do Right!
Legendary Hall of Fame football coach Lou Holtz shared three simple principles with his teams about Do Right:
- Do the right thing.
- Do the best you can.
- Always show people you care.
That's it. No 147-page playbook. No six-month implementation process. Just three simple principles. Simple, however, should never be confused with easy.
The First One Is the Hardest
Do the right thing. Most of us know what the right thing is when doing it doesn't cost anything. The real test comes when it does.
Do the right thing when admitting you're wrong is embarrassing. When nobody would know if you didn't. When an employee has disappointed you but still deserves dignity. When the easier decision and the right decision are standing on opposite sides of the room.
Leadership has put me in plenty of those rooms. I haven't gotten every decision right. Far from it. Experience is a wonderful teacher, although it can be one tough SOB delivering the lesson.
But I have learned this: You can recover from a bad decision much faster than you can recover from abandoning your principles.
Strategies change. Markets change. Companies change. Jobs certainly change. Your name follows you. So does your character.
Do the Best You Can
The second principle sounds almost too obvious. Do the best you can. Not be the best. Not beat everyone else. Not never fail. Do the best you can.
I've spent much of my career in businesses where scoreboards were everywhere—membership, revenue, EBITDA, retention, payroll, sales and budget variance. Results matter. I've been held accountable for them, and I've held plenty of people accountable too.
But numbers don't always tell you whether someone gave everything they had. Leadership requires knowing the difference between someone who can't yet and someone who won't. One needs coaching. The other may eventually require accountability. Great leaders learn the difference.
They also understand that demanding somebody else's best starts with bringing your own. Your team has an incredible ability to know whether you're asking them to carry something you're unwilling to pick up yourself. People watch. They always have.
Show People You Care
The third principle has probably become more important to me as I've gotten older. Always show people you care.
I have forgotten revenue numbers from clubs I operated thirty years ago. I've forgotten budgets, sales contests, and meetings that seemed monumentally important at the time. I haven't forgotten the people.
A struggling employee. Someone who needed another chance. Someone who needed to be challenged. Someone whose potential was greater than they could see for themselves. Someone carrying something at home that never appeared on the P&L.
Sometimes caring means putting your arm around somebody. Sometimes caring means telling them something they don't particularly want to hear. I've often described that as the velvet glove and the iron fist. Care deeply. Expect greatly. Those two things are not opposites.
Then I Realized I Had Heard This Somewhere Before
The older I've gotten, the clearer something else has become. Lou Holtz hadn't really introduced me to an entirely new leadership philosophy. He had given me memorable language for something my faith had been teaching me all along.
Matthew 7:12 tells us to do to others what we would have them do to us. Luke 6:31 teaches essentially the same thing. The Golden Rule. Something many of us learned as children—and somehow manage to make considerably more complicated as adults.
My unwavering faith in our Maker has guided me through tremendous blessings, painful disappointments, professional victories, professional losses, unexpected detours, beginnings, endings, and more than a few moments when the road ahead wasn't particularly clear. I wish I could tell you I always understood the plan. I didn't. I still don't.
Faith, at least for me, hasn't meant knowing exactly where the road leads. It has meant trusting Who is walking it with me.
Faith and Family have remained my foundation. "Do Right" became the business expression of those beliefs.
When I started Club Coach Services, I began sharing those principles with the teams and leaders I served. Do the right thing. Do the best you can. Show people you care. I didn't want them on a corporate values poster. I wanted us to live them. Sometimes we did. Sometimes we fell short. Then we got up and tried again. That's part of the deal too.
Leadership Isn't Complicated. It's Difficult.
After all these years, I think we tend to overcomplicate leadership. I love strategy. I love numbers. Give me a business problem, a whiteboard and a cup of coffee, and I'm a happy guy. But none of those things replace character.
Eventually, every leader gets confronted with some version of three questions by their team:
- Can I trust you?
- Can I count on you?
- Do I matter to you?
Holtz's three rules answer all three.
- Do the right thing. I can trust you.
- Do the best you can. I can count on you.
- Show people you care. I matter to you.
That's a pretty good foundation for a football team. It's also a pretty good foundation for a business. A family. A friendship. A community. Maybe even a life.
The Question
So here is the question I've been asking myself—and I'll leave it with you:
If the people you lead were asked what principles actually guide your leadership—not the ones hanging on the wall, but the ones demonstrated through your decisions—what would they say?
I know what I hope the people I've led would say about me. Not that I always got it right. I didn't. Not that every decision was popular. They weren't. Not even that every chapter of my career ended the way I hoped it would. Some certainly didn't.
I hope they would say: He tried to do the right thing. He gave us his best. And we knew he cared.
At this point in my jagged journey, that sounds like a pretty worthwhile scoreboard to me.
Do Right. Everything else gets built from there.
Originally published on Frank's Substack.