Difference Made – A True Story

The Story
Max took a $50,000 pay cut to become a civil servant because he wanted to truly make a difference on a national scale. Within a few months he had captured the attention of senior executives which translated into Max being selected to lead the program. So, with three days’ notice, he went from a division chief with 70 people to a director with over 200 folks spread from coast to coast. With this increase in responsibility he realized that the program was not a team but a group of highly skilled and focused individual contributors who had no real organizational identity.

Faced with this realization and 200 individual contributors who had not had a real leader in over a decade, he poured every bit of leadership knowledge and skill he had into that group to make them a team. First, he instituted a 21 week nation-wide video teleconference mastermind program based upon John Maxwell’s 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, examining one law a week. A few weeks later the team asked for more and Max added a second weekly mastermind based John’s 17 Indispensable Laws of Teamwork. Momentum built quickly and the team started coming together.

Ten months later Max was summarily dismissed by the same senior executive who had appointed him. He went home feeling he had failed. That night e-mail poured in from people all across the country telling him how his leadership had changed their life. The next day when Max went in to clean out his office it took three hours because of all the people wanting to shake his hand and thank him. It was during that time that Max realized he had not failed, in fact in just 10 months he had touched and changed the lives of dozens of people. He had come to make a difference and he did!

The Lessons
Although there are several lessons to be learned from this short true story, the greatest is perhaps not to measure your leadership success by what happens to you, but by the growth and success of those you lead. As John Maxwell has been known to quip, if you find it is lonely at the top then you are doing it wrong as successful leaders are surrounded by a successful team. Moreover, it sometimes takes a strong leader challenging the established system to ignite the spark of great leadership in their followers.
Another lesson that follows from this story is that while good leaders motivate, great leaders inspire. Although skilled motivation may show faster results, inspiration persists even after the leader has left. Although motivation can be powerful and moving, it is an external influence that quickly fades in the absence of the motivator. Inspiration, on the other hand, changes the follower from the inside and becomes a part of who they are – an effect that lasts a lifetime.

The last lesson, which is not readily apparent from our brief story, is that a leader must be very careful to properly frame and articulate their purpose in any given leadership environment. In the case of Max, he embarked on this leadership journey with what he thought was a noble ideal: “Go where you are needed and not wanted and stay until you are wanted but not needed.” Not surprisingly, his intention was achieved – as soon as he was wanted but not needed, he was dismissed! This framing of purpose which John Maxwell calls your life sentence (stating your purpose in a single sentence) is powerful and should be carefully considered.

These are just three of the many lessons to be learned from reexamining those situations where you may have thought you failed as a leader. In the final analysis the true success of a leader is measured by the success of their followers, not their personal position, power, or paycheck.

About the Author

David is a John Maxwell certified teacher, speaker, and coach residing in Northern Virginia.

 David is a retired U.S. Air Force Special Agent who now works for the Department of the Navy and teaches John Maxwell’s 5 Levels of Leadership to Department of Defense employees.

Contact David at : johncmaxwellgroup.com/davidlang