Page 23 - Roy W. Rice - CEO Material How to Be a Leader in Any Organization-McGraw-Hill (2009)

4 • CEO Material: How to Be a Leader in Any Organization

You can come from any walk of life. You can be tall, short, attrac-
tive, not so attractive, smart, or not so smart.
It’s easier than you think to be a stellar leader. Whether you
are trapped in a male or a female body, you can be a leader in any
organization—and not just a typical chief but a terrific one. It’s going to
happen to someone; it might as well be you.
Even if your current job is being the person who gets the coffee for
the person who makes the coffee, you can take on the ownership of your
career the minute you start reading this book. If you don’t take hold of
your work life, you’ll blink your eyes one day and say, “What the heck
happened in the last 2 or 22 years?”
If you do not stay on top of your business life, you’ll get older faster
than you’ll get better or wiser. In 365 days, you will have added another
year to your age. Or in 365 days, you will have added that year with height-
ened confidence, improved leadership expertise, and real opportunities for
promotion. Either way, you’ll wake up, and the time will pass when “noth-
ing has changed” unless you do something unprecedented in your work
life, starting now to get pulled up from above and simultaneously pushed up
from below. The good news is that it’s all doable by you—and it’s worth it.
Your boss, your boss’s boss, the human resources department, and
headhunters are not your career managers—you are. Now, sometimes
their endeavors benefit you, but if you wait for that impetus, you might
wait forever. They organize their efforts and resources around their needs,
not yours. They do not concern themselves as to whether you choose to
be a “B-player” or “assistant-to” for the rest of your life.
Unwavering desire, unshakable focus, and consistent effort are all
it takes. Believe me, it’s not nearly as hard as being an NFL quarterback,
professional pitcher, chart-topping singer, Olympic medal winner, or
ironman triathlete.
Scientific researchers say that it takes people around 10 years mini-
mum to excel in a field, whether it is brain surgery or selling computers.
That is, if during those years you put in 10,000 hours of deliberate prac-
tice. A back-of-the-envelope calculation breaks 10 years and 10,000 hours
down to 1,000 hours a year (19 hours a week) or 2.7 hours a day of delib-
erate practice required to excel. (Ironman athletes, for example, put in,
on average, 6.4 hours a day.) Being an exemplary leader is doable by you.