- Subordinates, more often than not, appear to do what
they believe they are expected to do.
Leaders expect the best of the people around them. Leaders
know that the people around them change and grow. If you ex-
pect great things, your associates will give them to you. Jaime
Escalante believed that students in a Los Angeles inner-city
high school could learn calculus. And they did.
At the same time, leaders are realistic about expectations.
Their motto is: stretch, don’t strain. Pretend you’re training
for the Olympics, where easy does it. If you pull a muscle in to-
day’s game, you sit on the bench for tomorrow’s.
Former Lucky Stores CEO Don Ritchey said, “One of the
real responsibilities of a manager is to set standards for people,
expectations. It’s a heavy responsibility, because if you set them
too low it’s a waste, not only to the organization but for the in-
dividual, but if you set them so high that a person can’t suc-
ceed, you destroy the person and the organization. So it doesn’t
mean that all of us shouldn’t fall short once in a while, but if
you structure something so that a person always fails, it’s corro-
sive.... I guess the ideal would be, stretch the person a little,
but don’t let them fall short too many times.”
- Leaders have what I think of as the Gretzky Factor, a certain
“touch.”Wayne Gretzky, the best hockey player of his genera-
tion, said that it’s not as important to know where the puck is
now as to know where it will be. Leaders have that sense of
where the culture is going to be, where the organization must
be if it is to grow. If they don’t have it as they start, they do
when they arrive.
Elizabeth Drew described a similar phenomenon in politics,
referring specifically to the 1988 presidential campaign: “A
great many people wondered why Dukakis didn’t haul off and
On Becoming a Leader