Habit 2 - Part 2

The ‘Ladder of Success’ is a great metaphor to understand the distinction between leadership and management. If you’ve worked hard at something, only to find that that wasn’t really what you wanted - you’ve succeeded in climbing the ladder, but you had the ladder leaning against the wrong wall.

What is that a failure in? Management or leadership? Clearly leadership. Leadership has to do with having the ladder leaning against the right wall. Management had to do with climbing the ladder efficiently. They are two different capacities entirely. A person can be well managed but poorly lead, or well lead but poorly managed.

Both leadership and management are extremely important, but leadership should always come first. You’ve got to know where you’re going before you discuss how you’re going to get there. If you’re going to train for a new job, you’ve got to make the best choices you can about what that job is before you manage yourself to train effectively.

What can hold us back is old, ineffective scripts. We get scripted over our lives by our parents and culture, and the pressure of our circumstances. The first principle, or habit, teaches us that we can rewrite the script, but until we do we live by the scripts we have.

If you’re serious about being the leader in your life and exercising your personal leadership capacities, beginning with the end in mind, and you recognize ineffective scripts that you are living by, you’ve got a problem. You need to acquire new scripts, use them, exercise them, and practice, practice, practice until you’ve got a new script.

Anwar Sadat

Covey talks about Anwar Sadat, who made an enormous contribution to bringing peace with Israel in the Camp David Accords. Sadat was born into an average Egyptian family, and reared in a culture of unyielding hatred toward Israel. He spent a lot of time in his younger years in prison, in solitary confinement. There he learned personal leadership, and how to vacate old scripts and write new ones for himself. He drew heavily upon his own religion, meditation, and prayer. He had a dark spot on his forehead that he got from spending so much time praying. He gained a high degree self-mastery, and this is the greatest success one can have. When he was released, he was happy to have his liberty, but a bit loathe to leave the place he had learned so much about personal leadership. But he continued his practice, and chose to not live by the scripts he had been given as a youth. He eventually became president. He recognized that the cultural script of hatred toward Israel was destructive for all parties involved, and used the foundation of independence and self-mastery he had built to achieve and victory of interdependence. It was a miracle in modern political history.