Five not readily apparent steps to happiness for leaders
Jeff Wiener, the CEO of LinkedIn, tries to live as much as he can by the following rules:
- Live in the moment.
- It’s better to be loving than to be right.
- Be a spectator to your own thoughts, especially when you become emotional.
- Be grateful for at least one thing every day.
- Every chance you get, help others.
This from Cromwell Schubarth (@SVBizCrom) writing on Weiner’s being honored as the Silicon Valley Executive of the Year.
I really like these 5 rules which Weiner picked up from his mentor, Ray Chambers. Chambers is a Wall Street legend, who helped create the leveraged buyout in the early 1980s when he was partners with former U.S. Treasury Sec. William Simon at Wesray Capital Corp.
Chambers calls them “Five Not Readily Apparent Steps to Happiness,” not rules.
Schubarth shares that the one Chambers and Weiner spent the most time discussing is not feeling the need to be right all the time. From Chambers,
That’s a problem, especially for leaders. We tend to need to convince everybody in our lives that we are always right, but when we get our way, we don’t get much satisfaction and wonder why. That’s because being right isn’t always the most important thing and can breed resentment instead of respect.
I’ve been at various positions of leadership over the last 30 years, even some before graduating from college and law school. I’ve also been in lots of positions of being led over the same time.
Looking back I am guided by my gut, what’s right for the people I am serving – my team members and clients, how do I help improve the lives of the people I serve (team members and clients, again) – perhaps that’s love as Chambers describes it, and how to make the world a better place.
These guides may not be perfect, but they get me up in the morning and raise my head off the ground when I’m feeling the world is lost.
When I have been in positions where the leaders have been guided by accelerating their careers and by increasing revenue and profits, first, I’ve hated it. And so did many of the other people in the organization.
In the legal profession, we have quite a few companies and leaders who are not acting as servant leaders. Rather than improve the lives of lawyers and rather than improve the reputation of of the legal profession, the companies are guided by: ‘What can we sell? For how much? How fast? Who do we need to produce and sell, no matter whether they care about improving the lives of others?
LexBlog is a small company and more days than I can remember I felt like the farmer with the horse plowing one furrow after another. But no matter the challenges we’ll remain focused on helping improve the lives of others, making the world a better place, improving the image of the legal profession, and knowing that loving can be better than being right.