Andy Ellis - 1% Leadership: Master the Small, Daily Improvements that Set Great Leaders Apart

HAVE YOU EVER LOOKED CLOSELY AT A CABLE, ROPE, OR BRAID? EACH is made up of strandsseemingly in the thousandsthat are, individually, not that impressive. Yet when braided together, they create something inspiringly powerful. Each strand adds just a small bit of strength. That tiny bit of strength is almost meaningless on its own, but, when combined with all of the other tiny strands around it, lends itself to a greater creation.

Leadership is like that. It strikes me that a significant number of business books on management and personal development could be reduced from hundreds of pages to one argument: If you do X, then amazing things will happen. Each of those arguments is like one strand in a braid of advice, yet pretending to be the entire (and only) rope.

Advice rarely is so powerful as to transform everything about you; instead, it often merely makes a tiny improvement: for some set of people, this advice might improve their expectations of good outcomes, but maybe by no more than 1 percent. How important is that tiny improvement, though? It depends! The difference between the best player in a professional sports league and the worst is just a small collection of tiny effects. But me? A small improvement isnt getting me onto a roster. Understand where theres a cluster effectmaybe a piece of advice is useful, but the biggest effect is seen by people whove already invested in gaining a lot of advantage in a related area, and others might not notice much benefit. If you already have a strong braid, then a few more strands strengthen it even more.

This book aims to provide opportunities for those advantagesgiving you 1 percent stronger strandsin a number of related areas of leadership. Each of those opportunities has been provided in a short essay of just a few pages. If an essay doesnt resonate with you, skip it and try another; perhaps youll come back to it later. If it works for you, practice it until you get that benefit, and then see if youre ready for more. No lesson in here is going to make you a perfect leader; its going to be the collection of small, incremental improvements that, over time, build your leadership style. Spend a few minutes each Monday morning to focus on one lesson for your leadership developmentperhaps that lesson improves your performance by only 1 percent. Practice that lesson for a week. Revisit it from time to time, seeing if you can get 1 percent better at the skill each time you do. Its those accumulated 1 percent improvements that separate the best leaders from everyone else.

Ive collected these essays into three sections on leadership. In Personal Leadership, Ive focused on how to think about your own engagement with the world around you; Team Leadership is on the nature of interacting with other people, especially those that you lead; and in Organizational Leadership, Ive written about how to strengthen larger, distributed teams. Each essay is as short as possible while still capturing the pertinent message.

Cultural Language

One of the best uses of books in the business world is to assist with the creation of a shared cultural language . Organizations will often select a book or training package not just because of its content, but on the strength of the shared language it creates, because language drives culture. When an entire organization starts talking about a specific catchphrase (be it the growth mind-set, or hope is not a strategy, or crossing the chasm), it serves a number of purposes. It reminds everyone in an organization that this is a known and declared priority for the organization. It puts everyone into a similar frame of mind. It removes the need to spend a lot of time in every interaction rehashing the explanations of those words.