When I was 18 years old, I arrived at Brigham Young University as a freshmen football player. The prospect of playing Division I football was daunting. What lay ahead was the Burma Road. Over the next 30 days I would sweat away the equivalent of my body weight. Even more chilling was the realization that I was taking an upper division physics course. But in this course, you didn’t study physics, you did physics. I reflected on Newton’s second law of motion: force = mass x acceleration. I had entered a megaton realm in which the human species ran a whole lot faster and hit a whole lot harder.
That afternoon I walked out to the practice facilities and noticed a tall steel-framed tower in the middle of the field. Curious, I asked a teammate what it was. He told me it was the video tower. He proceeded to explain that at the college level practices are filmed. That was a new concept for me. In high school, they filmed games but never practices.
About two weeks later, I was sitting in a meeting with the other defensive linemen when my coach started to chastise me for allowing the offense to run around my side earlier in practice.
“Clark, you lost containment three times. You can’t let the offensive turn you inside. You’ve got to get off the ball and control the corner.”
I protested, “Coach, I only lost containment once.”
A hush fell over the room. All heads swiveled in my direction. After a long pause, my coach uttered seven magisterial words:
“The eye in the sky never lies.”
I met the sharp and penetrating glance of the gridiron general who then turned his gaze to the white screen in front of us. He pushed the replay button on the remote and there in living color, before the living and the dead, was Mr. Meat Squad, freshman Clark, losing containment. Not once, not twice, but three times.
I tell you this story because it left an imprint on my life. There are some activities that are performed in environments of total transparency. Football is one of those. Unfortunately, leadership is not. Leadership is played in environments that are only partially transparent. Business is this way. Politics even more so. The lack of transparency — this inability for all to see clear cause and effect relationships — has a tendency to encourage blaming, excusing, hiding and denying. You can’t do that if the performance environment is transparent. It’s opening the kimono.
In business and government in particular, I still see leaders who manage to survive only because they don’t visibly fail. There’s no eye in the sky. Leaders in this category typically project the appearance of success through rhetorical careers: They talk and represent accomplishment while nothing really substantive happens. Or they simply conceal their mistakes or incompetency from view and hide in the bowels of the organization.
I’m grateful for the team meeting on that defining day when I had to shed my bluster and bravado, my insecurity and my unreality, and was forced to have a truthful encounter with my own performance. What a priceless lesson. What a gift.
Leadership is harrowing, yet it can be supremely rewarding. It’s planned deprivation with only potential gratification. It holds out uncertain rewards. It’s a risk though not always a choice. It can be directed but not controlled.
The leadership challenge has not always been one of perform or perish because you could hide — and battalions of leaders did. They nestled into their organizations and lived out sheltered professional lives in cocoons of job security, courtesy of stable markets, incumbency or just plain ambiguity.
Too often we see leaders intoxicated with power, thirsting for adulation, vaunting themselves as if we were lucky to have them. No CEO is entitled to be a CEO. No professor is entitled to lifetime tenure. No elected official is entitled to office. The artifacts of leadership entitlement that have crept into our culture are the very antithesis of the principle. Perhaps the culminating test of leadership is simply to resist the temptation to believe you’re a little more special than the next guy.
Leaders serve at the pleasure of those they serve. We are all accountable even if there is no one to push the replay button.
Timothy R. Clark, Ph.D., is an author, international management consultant, former two-time CEO, Fulbright Scholar at Oxford University and Academic all-American football player at BYU. His latest two books are "The Leadership Test" and "Epic Change." E-mail: trclark@trclarkpartners.com