Ode to Lee
Updated: Jun 9, 2020
“Actual intention can be measured only by actual accomplishment.”
- Lee Thayer – Author, teacher, coach, leadership guru
If you’ve ever read my blog posts you’ve seen multiple quotes by a gentleman named Lee Thayer. I can’t begin to describe the influence he’s had on my thinking around leadership and life in general. In his over 60 years of thinking about, teaching, writing and coaching on the topic of leadership I’ve found no one else who comes close to understanding what great leadership is and is about.
In January of this year serendipity struck. I was asked to join what would be Lee’s last online class. I couldn’t believe my good fortune to be able to finally meet and talk with the person I held in such high regard. Unfortunately the time was excruciatingly short as Lee passed away, at the age of 92, this past week. The effect Lee had on the people and companies he worked with will be his legacy.
He didn’t believe in a “recipe” for becoming a great leader. If the “10 Steps to Becoming a Great Leader” were true, why isn’t the world chock full of them? Rather it was through deep curiosity and questioning everything where Lee’s genius lay. He believed that being a great leader meant that everyone around you was better for it. He believed that competence and the continual quest for being more competent was the path to a fulfilling life. He gleefully ripped the Band-Aid off many pop culture fallacies on what it means to be a leader. And he understood better than most that being “had” by a purpose in your life was the foundation of it all.
Lee wrote over two dozen books and was working on his latest at his passing. His seminal work, “Leadership: Thinking, Being, Doing” has no peer and if you truly want to become a great leader, I highly recommend gifting yourself a copy. But be warned. This isn’t your typical leadership book that you buy, read, get a couple ideas from and then place on the bookshelf forever. The book is full of provocative questions with no answers in the back. Many of us believe we do good thinking. Lee’s writing will jolt you out of that complacency in short order. There are individual sentences that will stop you in your tracks for hours if not days. One of my favorites is:
“Most people prefer a problem they can’t solve to a solution they don’t like.”
His comments and questions were designed to get you to dig deep, to understand at a fundamental level what great leadership is. Another favorite line is:
“If you know the difference between good advice and bad advice you don’t need advice, as the saying goes. But the only way you can know the difference is by having a purpose or cause that you can use to distinguish what’s relevant from what’s not.”
Lee believed how successful you are as a leader depends on how you think, because that determines who you are. He believed that unconventional results could never come from conventional ways of thinking. Here are just a few more of his pearls of wisdom:
If you want to know why people do what they do, ask a person who has done something. Don’t ask a psychologist.
Talk doesn’t cook rice.
When you’re talking to someone else, it is their thinking that constitutes their reality. Not yours.
Some people believe that communication is a way of solving problems. They forget: that’s how we got into the problem in the first place.
Success is the only measure of success.
What you don’t understand of your own values and beliefs will make you a mere victim of them. The ones you haven’t consciously chosen will penetrate you from outside sources.
The way your mind works determines who you are. Who you are determines what you do and how you do it. Fix the source, not the symptom.
My hope from this post is that if you’re truly serious about becoming a great leader you’ll take a hard look at Lee’s body of work. All of it can be found at: https://www.thethayerinstitute.org/
I’ll leave with one last “Thayerism”:
“People are going to take you where they’re going unless you lead them elsewhere. Make their competence and their growth necessary. Then they’ll take you where it would otherwise be impossible to go.”
With deep affection,
Jeff
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