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I have led soldiers. I have led teams at big companies. I have led churches. And I can tell you the hardest person I have ever had to lead is the one in the mirror. Nobody warns you about that part. We spend a lot of money on leadership training that teaches us how to handle other people. Very little of it teaches us how to handle ourselves. Here is what 40 years taught me. You cannot ask a team to do what you will not do. If you are late, they will be late. If you cut corner

I have sat in boardrooms in Silicon Valley. I have trained managers at companies most people have heard of. But some of the best leadership lessons I ever got came from a training room in Nairobi, Kenya. When we started building our work in Kenya, I thought I was the one bringing something. I had 40 years behind me. The Army. Management roles at Cisco, SAIC, Aviat, and Ivanti. I had slides. I had a plan. I figured I would teach and they would learn. That is not how it went. I

I do not lead with my highlight reel. I lead with my scars. If you only know the version of me that stands on a stage, let me back up the story a little. I have failed. I have let people down, including myself. And for a while, I thought that meant I was done. A long time ago I went through a season I do not talk about much. It was not one bad day. It was months of bad decisions stacked on top of each other. I lost trust. I lost ground. I lost the picture I had of who I thoug

Early in my Army days, I had a boss who never once said thank you. He barked orders and walked away. He got the job done, but nobody on that team would have run through a wall for him. I remember thinking, if I ever lead people, I am not doing it that way. That thought stuck with me longer than I expected. Over 40 years, I went from the Army into management roles at Cisco, SAIC, Aviat, and Ivanti. Different companies, different problems, but the question never changed. Am I l

Go to any cemetery and look at a headstone. You will see a birth year. You will see a death year. And between those two dates, there is a little dash. That dash is the whole point. Nobody remembers the birth year. Nobody remembers the death year. What people remember is what happened in the dash. That is where you lived. That is where you loved people, worked hard, made mistakes, and hopefully made things right. I spent a lot of years chasing the wrong things in my dash. I se

A while back, I took my grandkids bowling. We put the bumpers up. Every ball made it down the lane. Every kid cheered. Nobody threw a gutter ball all day. It got me thinking, and not just about how bad my own score was. Bumpers exist for one reason. Gutters are real. The lane does not care how good you think you are. Even strong bowlers throw gutter balls when they get tired, distracted, or overconfident. Leaders are no different. I learned this the hard way. In over 40 years

Years ago in the Army, I pulled a lot of night duty. Standing post at 2 a.m. is not exciting. Nothing happens most nights. You just stand there, awake, watching, while everyone else sleeps. But here is what nobody tells you about standing post. The job is not really about staying awake. It is about staying faithful when no one is watching. That is the whole job. And it turns out, that is the whole job of leadership too. Most leadership advice talks about the big moments, the