Today, I spoke with Steve Farber, who is the president of Extreme Leadership and author of the new book Greater Than Yourself: The Ultimate Lesson of True Leadership. In this interview, Steve talks about helping other people instead of self-promotion, why personal brands don’t scale, his leadership cycle theory, and networking.
A lot of people think personal branding is only about self-promotion. What are your thoughts on this, taking into account you’re all about leading/helping other people?
“A personal brand that’s “only about self-promotion” is just another way of saying it’s a lousy brand.”
Think of it this way: A company/product/service’s brand effectiveness is determined by its ability to convey unique value to the consumer. Coke’s brand would be worthless if its promise was something like, “Drink Coke so we can make money.” The same is true for your personal brand: it shouldn’t say, “Do business with me because I’m so awesome”; it should say, “here’s what I’ll do for you.” In other words, if your personal brand doesn’t convey the essence of how you’re going to help other people, you’ve missed the boat altogether.
Personal brands don’t scale, which is why teamwork skills are highly applauded and encouraged in the workforce and for entrepreneurs leading a group of employees. What are some leadership skills you recommend people develop?
The most significant leadership skill, in my estimation, is the one that requires your putting to use all your other leadership skills, wisdom and experience. And it’s the one skill that does make your brand scalable: your ability to create and develop other leaders who go on to become better leaders than you are. The truly great leaders at work–and in life in general–become so because they cause others to be greater than themselves. And if you do that in a conscious, intentional way, the greater leaders that you help to create will go on and do the very same thing for the people around them, and so forth. It’s the proverbial ripple effect. That’s leadership scalability, and if leadership is part of your personal brand, you’ve extended your brand’s impact well beyond your own immediate time-and-space-bound influence.
Can you explain your leadership cycle: Expand Yourself, Give Yourself, and Replicate Yourself?
If you’re going to take the idea of making others greater than yourself seriously (I call this practice GTY, for obvious reasons), you have to start, paradoxically by focusing on yourself. You have to Expand Yourself in order to have more personal resources to invest in and give to others. You need a deep and expansive sense of who you are, and you have to be getting better and better, more competent, smarter, more experienced and more connected to others all the time.
All for the purpose of Giving Yourself, because the real payoff comes not in the hoarding of the resources, knowledge, and experience you’ve expanded, but in the giving of those things to aid in another’s personal and leadership development. And, finally, you Replicate Yourself by getting the expressed, verbal commitment from others that they’ll go out and do the same for the people in their lives. Kind of like the “pay it forward” idea, but applied specifically to human development.
When it comes to networking, what is your take on giving value to others without asking for anything in return? Why do most people fail to capitalize on this gesture?
“We probably fail because we focus on the wrong perspective. We focus on the gold instead of the golden rule.”
This do-unto-others sentiment, otherwise known as the “ethic of reciprocity” exists in literally every religion and productive school of thought on the planet. (Including, by the way, humanistic atheism). Everybody says it in their own way, but it’s clear that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and atheists all agree that human beings should do good for other human beings simply because it’s the right thing to do.
And nowhere in any of these traditions will you find a footnote saying, “does not apply Monday through Friday between the hours of 9 and 5 or in any situation where a paycheck is involved.” But–again, paradoxically–the act of giving without an expectation of quid pro quo is what usually brings about the greatest material returns.
Throughout your career, looking back, what would you have done differently and why?
I would have started practicing the art of Greater Than Yourself a long time ago. I’m proud to say that I’ve helped a good number of people in my career, but I wonder how many more truly world-class, world-changing leaders I could have had a hand in developing if I’d have done my small part in perpetuating this GTY ripple 20 years ago. That’s a question that’ll never be answered, I guess. Ask me again in another 20 years.
———–
Steve Farber is the president of Extreme Leadership, Incorporated—an organization devoted to the cultivation and development of Extreme Leaders in the business community. His best-selling book, The Radical Leap: A Personal Lesson in Extreme Leadership was recently named one of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. His second book, The Radical Edge: Stoke Your Business, Amp Your Life, and Change the World, was hailed as “a playbook for harnessing the power of the human spirit.” His newest book, Greater Than Yourself: The Ultimate Lesson of True Leadership, has just been published by Doubleday/Random House. He was director of service programs at TMI, an international training consultancy, and then worked for 6 years as Vice President and Official Mouthpiece (that’s what it said on his business card) of The Tom Peters Company.
