Pivot Points

Five Decisions Every Successful Leader Must Make

Julia Tang Peters

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781118894736
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118893951
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

A Roadmap for Transforming Ambition into Achievement

In the sea of thrown-together, stereotypical leadership advice, Julia Tang Peters' Pivot Points stands out like a beacon. This book is not the result of trite 10-step recipes or unstudied observations. Instead, its source is in-depth research conducted among some of the country's most effective leaders.

Intimate interviews and broad survey data reveal that the leaders who stand out are the ones who fearlessly face the decisions that characterize career turning points. Amazingly, the people who break through barriers to transform industries encounter—and effectively confront—the same five critical decisions. In Pivot Points, you'll read how five inspiring and approachable leaders made the choices that cemented their legacies.

Pivot Points is a unique opportunity to learn from the leaders you should learn from—authentic, independent-minded people with a genuine desire to help others understand how to lead. Tools developed from their candid accounts will help you measure and assess your own career trajectory. With a self-diagnostic questionnaire based on the book's unique framework, you'll be able to identify warning signs of stagnation and sustain the passion to achieve.  Gain practical insights from this valuable aid for professional development of high achievers in every career stage.

Pivotal decisions can turn an ordinary career into an extraordinary journey to success. The journey is a highly individual one, and Pivot Points will inspire and guide you in the processes of finding your own path to exceptional results. Take a rare look into the process of shifting from the science of management to the art of leadership, and let this one-of-a-kind book propel you toward achieving your best self.

Chapter 1
From Ordinary Career to Leadership Journey: What Separates Leaders from Managers?

Whether a leader is made or born, whichever you believe, we see in the making of the five leaders featured in this book that they grew and evolved, one pivotal decision at a time. Their stories show how five pivotal decisions clearly stand out—from hundreds of other important work decisions they also made—as the ones that determined their journey to leadership. For these leaders, pivot points served as career builders, although they often presented at first as career stoppers. That is the dynamics of pivot points: They can show up as positive or negative events, and pivotal decisions can turn out for better or for worse. They can be catalysts of growth or leave careers to languish. The difference is what this book addresses: What turns a pivot point from being a potential career stopper or career trap into a career builder? How do certain decisions separate leaders from everyone else?

The industry-changing leaders in this book faced all their pivot points by consistently making decisions that unleashed a surprising reserve of leadership potential and produced outcomes exceeding their own dreams. Each decision triggered a quantum leap of learning and growth. By proactively making and executing these decisions, each leader avoided the career trap of daily operational and environmental issues becoming blinders to what truly mattered.

The framework of five pivotal decisions helps us understand the strategies leaders use to keep moving forward. Based on intimate, in-depth interviews and validated by research, this perspective examines more than decision-making skills, process, or style. It shows how ­certain decisions catapulted these individuals to extraordinary success because they decided to change the story and hold themselves accountable for changing the course of events. At other times, they created a pivot point to change the status quo. These were decisions to lead—although the decisions they made were not explicitly about being a leader or jockeying for position. Ultimately, leading is a purposeful decision for making oneself accountable for fulfilling a worthy idea that requires out-of-the-ordinary responsibility and effort.

DECISION-MAKING LEADERS, LEADER-MAKING DECISIONS

At the beginning of this book project, I interviewed a few handpicked leaders. I simply wanted to bring attention to great leaders who don’t seek or need the spotlight. I ended up discovering that in all their ­journeys, a certain pattern existed in which a decision opened up ­possibilities that stirred their passion. They took on opportunities and challenges that involved skills to master, mistakes to make, and lessons to learn. Embracing this journey paved the way for the next career-defining ­decision, and that brought yet another new set of opportunities, challenges, and skills to master, mistakes to make, and lessons to learn. Each successive pivot point was not possible without the previous. Each pivotal decision built on the foundation the previous pivotal decisions laid and connected in a trajectory that turned these ordinary people into extraordinary leaders. Although each pivotal experience established leadership, it’s the journey that made them great leaders.

All the featured individuals are ambitious, but none started out with the goal to transform industries. Their stories show that incredible achievements and personal growth come out of a decision to change the narrative from the expected course of events. Each success built confidence in exploring options as a better strategy than working within the confines of the status quo. Many decisions defied conventional wisdom; others put at risk the success they had already attained to achieve what really mattered to them, which perhaps is one of the most difficult pivot points to journey through. In all cases, midcareer turbulence instigated decisions that would propel them to great success they did not know was ahead.

This developmental perspective focuses on the decision to lead conscientiously as distinctly different from decisions motivated by personal gain only. Findings from our survey show that some people, when facing a decision that weighs heavily, focus on what’s better for them, whereas others look at what’s best for the business and team. Some people see only conventional or comfortable options, whereas others come up with unconventional ones, perhaps outside the comfort zone of an individual, team, or company. And so, some people keep making decisions that do not play a pivotal role but accrue personal benefits. Other people make one or two pivotal decisions and then lose their verve—usually without realizing it. The leaders in this book kept making pivotal decisions to build real economic and social value.

Leaders often cite luck for pivotal successes because they could not take credit for the exact time, place, and nature of those pivot points of opportunity. They know that their real opportunities to break out of the crowd arose from the complex interactions of people and organizations and of marketplaces and social change. In many cases, what catapulted them to success were adversities turned into opportunities. As heavyweight champion boxer Mike Tyson said when asked what he knew about his opponent’s fight plan, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Plans serve a purpose but in boxing or business, the champion is the one who instinctively connects with the spontaneous opportunity.

How these leaders handled pivotal decisions shows us what separates leaders from managers. Although managerial decisions are part of a leader’s job, the pivotal decisions create and define the work of leading as distinctly different from the work of managing. By holding themselves accountable for a bold idea that changes the status quo, these leaders had to entrust others to manage all that is involved with business as usual. With each successive pivotal decision, they stood out from their cohort of high achievers; by the fourth or fifth pivotal decision, they were at the top of their game and their industry.

ARE FIVE PIVOTAL DECISIONS THE EXPERIENCE OF JUST LEADERS OR EVERYONE?

To answer the question of whether this framework of five pivotal decisions is a widely shared experience, I worked with a research expert to conduct a nationwide survey of 500 college-educated adults in professional careers, representative of 16 percent of US adults.

To study the relationship between pivotal decisions and leadership, we needed a new tool for measuring leadership decision making. Pulling from experience working with and learning about leaders, I peeled away all the values attached to leadership that are more descriptive than defining and zeroed in on its two most essential elements: accountability and ingenuity. Effective leaders hold themselves accountable to make something important happen; as part of taking full accountability, they also make others accountable for what was delegated to them. Ingenuity covers all the ideas, solutions, and vision that make up accountabilities.

When using these two variables in a matrix, four quadrants of behaviors emerge; I call these leader, manager, wanderer, and clock puncher. (See Figure 1.1.)

FIGURE 1.1 Four Types of Decision-Making Behaviors

The study tested three hypotheses about leadership:

1. There are five pivotal opportunities to make decisions that determine the course of a career.
2. Both accountability and ingenuity drive leadership behavior.
3. When accountability and/or ingenuity fall short, other behavior sets produce outcomes less successful than leadership behaviors.

The study not only validates the pivotal-decisions framework but also shows how the five pivotal decisions can be career builders or career stoppers. In the self-reported perceptions, we see which behaviors produced successful and unsuccessful experiences. Collecting data for the same questions from the supervisors of the respondents would add another layer of analysis. However, this study’s purpose is to understand the career experience of the decision maker as both story maker and storyteller.

Specifically, 78 percent (representing 29 million college-educated professionals) in the study have (1) experienced pivot points and (2) made pivotal decisions using the four behavior sets we postulated. Together, the findings, which I explain in detail in Chapter 8, identify the decision points where people need the most help.

As we can expect, men and women can experience pivotal decisions at different times; an obvious difference occurs when women make the decision to let go of, or postpone, the career they had at the time they opted to focus on parenting. Another important factor is that almost everyone in a professional career will encounter some of these pivot points, but not everyone will make an intentional pivotal decision. Some will not recognize the decision point, and others will simply not decide by waiting to see what happens. By the way, that is also a decision. People reporting they haven’t had the occasion to make more pivotal decisions commensurate with their years of experience may, in fact, have faced pivot points with passivity—which was a decision but wasn’t a pivotal decision.

The evidence strongly suggests that leaders walk the path to greatness by fully engaging with all five pivot points and that leaders make all five pivotal decisions with leadership accountability and vision. Between pivot points, they are human and can wade through times when they behave more like managers, wanderers, or clock punchers. At pivot points, however, they experience clarity and conviction about holding themselves accountable for fulfilling a worthy idea or vision.

The empirical study of the intersection of careers, pivot points, and leadership addresses the real needs people have for a new way to think about their careers in the changing world of work. Rare will be the career of our parents and grandparents with one or two employers over a lifetime, where tenure and long-term company relationships support career development. Instead, by defining leadership as holding ourselves accountable and tapping our ingenuity to fulfill our best ideas and our best selves, the individual is the self-aware decision maker who enrolls the support of supervisors, colleagues, and human resource executives in career development.

As technology, globalization, and social trends transform work, this worker-centric paradigm emphasizes personal responsibility for career development that counterbalances the traditional employer-centric paradigm. Shared responsibility benefits everyone.

PIVOTAL DECISIONS DETERMINE THE JOURNEY

In the journey of every profiled leader, pivot points do not mark events per se; they involve a chain of events building up to and immediately following a pivotal decision. At these decision points, these leaders responded with original critical thinking and were fertile with ideas. Some pivot points called for being a visionary leader, others called for being a crisis leader, and still other points arose from personal restlessness. Viewed as a whole process, the five pivotal decisions turned ­ordinary career paths into leader-making journeys.

“The measure of success,” according to former US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, “is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with but whether it is the same problem you had last year.” Often, senior ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: From Ordinary Career to Leadership Journey
• Chapter 2: IDEA: Bud Frankel, Founder and Former Chairman of Frankel & Company
• Chapter 3: CHANGE: Glen Tullman, Managing Partner of 7wire Ventures; Former CEO of Allscripts Healthcare Solutions
• Chapter 4: TEAM: John W. Rogers, Jr., Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Ariel Investments LLC
• Chapter 5: CULTURE: Al Golin, Founder and Chairman of GolinHarris
• Chapter 6: PASSION: Dale Dawson, Founder and CEO of Bridge2Rwanda
• Chapter 7: Lessons from the Journeys of Five Leaders
• Chapter 8: Lessons from Survey Findings
• Chapter 9: Your Pivotal Five
• About the Author
• Index
• End User License Agreement