Why Bad Situations Are Leadership’s Best Teacher

Five miles or so from where Cindy and I have lived since we got married, there's a giant oak tree by a sharp turn on a gravel road that could have spelled my demise had I been two feet farther to the right. It was 1995 and I was on my way to meet some friends to engage in a variety of inappropriate shenanigans. Thankfully, I wasn’t drinking - yet - or the results may have been far different. Quite honestly, the fact that I was sober may be the only reason I still have such a vivid memory of that specific situation.

As I think about more than thirty years later, I could list dozens of scenarios prior to that and hundreds (possibly thousands) since that were far from ideal. Any one of those going just a little bit differently could have taken me on a wildly different journey. That said, I realize today that the way I chose to respond to each had at least as much impact.

Near the end of What’s KILLING Your Profitability? I shared a powerful lesson Terry Ward taught me when I was responsible for a local manufacturing facility’s behavior-based safety process. Me and the steering team, all of us being hourly employees except Terry, were growing frustrated about the numerous safety issues we had brought up but hadn’t received approval from management to address. Terry pulled us all together and emphasized how much we could get done in the grand scheme of things, but that would require us to control what we could control and let go of what we couldn’t.

For more than twenty-five years, I’ve heard that there are two things in life that we can control: our attitude and our actions. Everything else is, at least to some degree, out of our control - and even those two things are damn tough to control for many of us! A brutal fact of life is that each of us will inevitably be dealt a bad hand. Bad situations hit everyone -financial hits, moral betrayals, family chaos, health scares. All too often, those can feel like the beginning of the end.But what if they're actually the beginning?

Pause for a second: What’s one bad situation you’re carrying right now (or something from the past) that still stings? Jot it down, we’ll come back to it soon enough. Next, we’ll look at what Napoleon Hill said about these moments. Before that, let me be very clear: I’ll be referencing some tough situations I’ve had to work through over the years as we move forward. I’m in no way looking for your sympathy or attempting to throw anyone under a bus (even the ones who deserve it). And I’m certainly not trying to suggest that my path has been harder than anyone else’s. I know I’ve been blessed far more than I’ve deserved, but I believe with every fiber of my being that much of that blessing has come as a direct result of that lesson I learned from Hill in Think and Grow Rich more than two decades ago.