Everyone Wants To Succeed, And Success Is Contagious

First, my best wishes for the happiest holidays to the growing RallyPoint community—all of the members, the RallyPoint team, advisors, fellow directors, and all their families. And let me especially acknowledge those still serving. Thank you for your faithfulness, your courage, your sacrifices, and your families’ sacrifices while you’re deployed around the world keeping watch, ever vigilant, doing the heavy lifting that keeps our country free. My greatest hope for all of us is that our nation can enjoy a peaceful, safe, and prosperous 2018.

Earlier this year, I shared my 10 Leadership Principles, and I followed-up with discussions about living a life of purpose (first principle) and doing well to do good (second principle). With a new year on the horizon and resolutions to be made, I wanted to pick up the discussion by elaborating on my third principle: Everyone wants to succeed, and success is contagious. Resolving to strive for success—success for ourselves and success for those we lead—is an excellent way to begin the year.

Everyone wants to succeed. It’s true. Success is personally and professionally fulfilling. It’s rewarding. It’s inspiring. And I have never in all my life, in any career, in any country, at any time, met a person who tried to fail. Everyone I’ve met wants to succeed. I want to succeed. You want to succeed. Your fellow service members, fellow Veterans, and your colleagues at work all want to succeed. The people we lead want to succeed.

We may be inclined to say, “Well, all that’s obvious, Bob. Of course I want to succeed.” But I think we’d do well to be more mindful of our desire to succeed. There’s a limit to how much we can accomplish each day, week, month, year. When we become very conscious of our deep desire to succeed, when we make a very deliberate effort to work towards success each day, it may help us be more thoughtful about how we’ll invest our time and resources, how we spend our morning, afternoon, and evening. Being aware of our simple desire to succeed helps us invest our time, effort, and intellect more efficiently in what will get to success in both the short- and the longer-term.

Those we lead want to succeed, too. And it is critical for leaders not only to believe this, but also to let it inform how they lead. To a great extent, the job of a leader is to help people he or she leads succeed. Leadership is about giving people opportunities to be successful. Opportunities to be successful can mean the time and resources necessary to get the job done. It could be the training, education, and encouragement necessary to rise to the next level. It can mean clear direction, clear guidance, a vision that’s inspiring and a strategy to achieve that vision. And remember, each person’s success builds team success, the organization’s success, and success for the people the organization serves, defends, or protects.

It’s important for leaders to catch people succeeding and recognize the success, even if the success is a small one. One success will always lead to another. One success grows confidence and builds courage. As courage and confidence grow, people are both more willing and more prepared for greater challenges, more excited about striving to make greater contributions, more invested in team and organizational success. And the more successes they experience, the tougher they’ll be in the face of setbacks, the better equipped they will be to brush themselves off and try again. So good leaders use small successes to build momentum, to build a virtuous cycle of greater successes.

And success is contagious. One successful person will always influence another to be successful, and in that dynamic leadership grows. So one of our most important jobs as leaders is to start the fire and fuel the virtuous cycle of success.

Have a wonderful holiday. God bless all of you, your families, and our nation.