The 100-Mile Walk: A Father and Son on a Quest to Find the Essence of Leadership

So why is "The 100-Mile Walk" worth your valuable time, when there are so many other books on leadership you can read? Well, it takes the age-old question – What makes a great leader? – and answers it in a new way. It's written by a father and son who have very different experiences of being business leaders, AND rather different approaches to life, shaped mostly by the generations to which they belong. Their main difference is that work is everything to Dad, while his son wants a much better work/life balance. In addition, the son tends to value the journey toward where he's going as much as the goal.

Having decided to explore the characteristics of great leaders, the two men hit upon a novel context for their discussions: they will walk a hundred miles together. But not just any 100 miles: Dad will choose 50 of them, and his son will choose the other 50. The locations they walk in are important illustrations of their different approaches to life. Dad chooses golf courses and the streets of Manhattan where he worked. The son, on the other hand, gets his father to buy his first pair of hiking boots and together they set off on the trails of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The 'stranger' in each place finds he has to get out of his mental box by being somewhere that is physically strange to him, and this helps him to understand the other man's view of leadership.

That's a great idea! How often do we talk about situations in a sterile conference room? How much more could we get out of our project meetings if we held them in the call center that will use the products and processes we're talking about, or even on the floor where the programmers and software testers are working? In Dad's opinion, "People should walk together; managers should walk with their direct reports, women with men, the 25 year-old technological whizz with the 52 year-old Chief Financial Officer". Right on. Introduce walking into your business life today!

But back to the book.

So what are these nine Ps that distill the key traits of good leaders? Well, here goes. The book doesn't say that they're in order of importance, but they might as well be, as several of the points made about the first few Ps are repeated in later ones.

The number one P is People. You can't be a leader unless you have followers, and you can't do anything without them. To be a good leader, the authors say, have the courage to hire people you would follow if you worked for them. Good leadership shouldn't just be at the top of an organization: it should be everywhere in it.

But they also remind us that when you're hiring these people, or trying to get hired yourself, you must be really careful not to mistake a bunch of qualifications for real ability. Find out what people can really do.

Dad gives a great example of a bookkeeper at a company he joined as CEO. She'd been there for years, and had no post-high-school qualifications, but she really understood the numbers and had a zeal for what the company was doing. Eventually, after going through three Chief Financial Officers who had great paper qualifications but couldn't improve the financial reporting or explain the company goals in financial terms, Dad appointed this woman to the job. She enrolled in night school classes to improve her business knowledge, but it was her approach and core skills that made her so good to work with.

But, having got great people into your organization, says Dad, you must teach them constantly. This doesn't just mean sending them on courses. It means listening to them, talking to them, and multiplying your impact as a leader by giving them the knowledge and skills that have made you a leader. One of the best ways to do this is by using one-to-one mentors. And maybe these mentoring sessions should take place during walks!

The authors talk a lot about the importance of teaching and learning, and a really important point they make is that you should always, always focus on people's strengths when you're teaching them. In the same way, when you're learning, work on what you're good at, not what you struggle with. This seems so obvious, and is the key point made in Hamel and Prahalad's famous book The Core Competence of the Corporation. Hamel and Prahalad found that organizations that design their strategies around what they're good at are much more successful than those that don't. Sadly, this so often doesn't happen. Now, remember the idea of only being a leader when you have followers? Well, Dad and son come back to this with their final point about People. Get to know your people, they say. And do it from the bottom up. You'll find out more about your organization in a casual exchange with lower-level employees than you will in a formal briefing with the VPs, and it also sends a really important message about respect to everyone else around you. Here at Mind Tools, we think this is great advice, and it applies to everyone, whether you're in a leadership role or not.

You heard at the beginning of this podcast that the first two Ps are probably the most important. So after People, we have Purpose. Both Dad and son agree that, to be effective, a purpose, mission or aim should not only be big, but it should be a way of life.

For your organization to start achieving the Purpose, all of your people need to know what the purpose is and they need to know what they can do to make it happen. This is true whether your purpose is ending world hunger, bringing good health to animals, or driving your client's products beyond their expectations, to take just three of the purposes of organizations discussed in this book.

But if what you're doing really isn't inspiring your people, change it, say the authors. This means that you need to keep checking if the purpose DOES connect with what makes them come alive. It's especially important to do this if you're a new leader. Don't just believe what your VPs tell you - ask the people on the front line.

The third P – Passion – builds on the importance of knowing what lights your people's candles. Good leaders have a passion for what they're doing, but they can also make room for other people's passions too.

Yet what this P is really about is the idea that you have to really love being a leader, because it's a tough job. Only doing it for the financial rewards and the kudos won't be enough to keep you committed to the purpose when other things are trying to bog you down. Dad quotes research that found that "the number 1 factor in determining a leader is how a person deals with adversity". So remember - when the going gets tough, you really will be called on to lead. And if you can't cope with that, you're not a leader – just someone with a job title.

Another important piece of advice the authors give is to focus on the benefit you're trying to gain, rather than the cost of gaining it. Of course, this might worry your financial people – even though the cost that's being referred to here is 'difficulty' rather than financial cost! There are more practical tips in the next chapter, which is about the fourth P – Performance. It re-emphasizes the absolute importance of focus if you are to be effective as a leader – or in any other role, for that matter. The four best tips are: First, never leave a task till it is A+ quality, although we would recommend you only put this level of perfection into your most important tasks. You should probably define A+ as "the right quality for the job." Second, re-do your prioritized "To-do List" daily. Third, check your messages at specified times only, or they will interrupt your focus. And finally, close your door when you're in a meeting, so you can focus. All these tips resonate with Mind Tools' articles.

The authors' final words on Performance are that leadership is not just about having great ideas, but about making them work in the real world. What makes a good idea good is that it performs once it's implemented. Oh, and measure everything, so you know what is and what isn't performing. And once again, if it isn't working, change it.

The fifth P – Persistence – can be summed up by the phrase "you can do it". Dad puts it another way: "No is only for today; fight for yes tomorrow". His Zen-inspired son explains how to do this: keep your focus and commitment to A+ quality, but persevere by being flexible until it works.

And for anyone who feels under-confident because they lack experience, the authors have one word of advice: Volunteer. You can't have an impact if you're not in the game, they say, and they're right. This may mean volunteering to get involved in a particular project at work, or it may mean doing some voluntary work outside your job. Either way, doing the right thing gets you noticed.

The next chapter is on Perspective – the sixth P – and it repeats a lot of ideas that appear earlier in the book. But the most important message is that it isn't the wind direction that dictates where a sailing boat goes, it's the way the sailors set their sails. What this means is that, sure, you should check the internal and external environment daily in this constantly changing world. And you should stay in contact with it, rather than working so many hours that you don't know how people spend their leisure time. But that doesn't mean that what's going on around you should dictate where you're going. If you know your purpose, the environment only determines how you're going to get there.

Dad and son differ a bit in their discussion of the seventh P – Paranoia. Dad emphasizes the competitive nature of business, and urges leaders to raise the bar before someone else does. Meanwhile, his son sees how we are all too easily paranoid, and that this just creates stress. He recommends we focus on creativity rather than competition to stay ahead of the game.

Whatever your approach, a great tip is that you should always investigate anomalies. Don't just say, "That's weird", shrug, and move on. It's only weird in the context of now. Anomalies can be the first indicators of change. Having said that, Paranoia is certainly the antidote to complacency. Big organizations use consultants on a regular basis to ensure that what they're doing in specific areas matches cutting-edge practice elsewhere in the industry. It's very hard for internal people to keep abreast of this, particularly if they have all been in post for a long time.

The final real P that all good leaders show is Principles. Good leaders are honest. They tell it like it is to their employees if they're not performing, but they also go out of their way to show their appreciation when employees are doing well, say the authors. Crucially, good leaders also admit their mistakes. They take personal responsibility for mistakes that happen – and take steps to correct them, making themselves as accountable as the people they're leading.

So those are the eight Ps of leadership, the eight things that great leaders all show. Does it seem like a lot to remember all the time? Sure! So how do they do it? Well, by also doing the ninth P – Practice, according to the authors.

We don't expect a musician or sportsman to give a tip-top performance at a concert or competition without practicing behind the scenes, learning new pieces or maneuvers, and improving existing ones. Well, it's exactly the same with leadership.

That, then, is what "The 100-Mile Walk" covers in what it calls "a quest to find the essence of leadership". It's a good overview of the essential qualities of a good leader. The many useful real-life stories that illustrate the points the authors make are particularly enjoyable. Stories are a really effective way to teach and learn. They're easy to remember, and people can relate to them.

The book is also easy to follow, and if the nine Ps are a little contrived, they're not much more so than the many other sets of letters used to help us remember things, like the Seven Ss of strategy, or the Four Ps of marketing. As a leader, you could do worse than pin them by your desk and try to practice them every day. You'll need a paper reminder as it's too long a list to bring to mind regularly.

So who will this book help most? Well, it's a book for leaders who need to see the big picture of what leadership involves. It's a book for young employees just getting to grips with what management and leadership are all about. And it's certainly a book for anyone who likes to learn from how real leaders succeeded in a whole range of situations.

As Dad worked most of his life in the pharmaceuticals industry, a lot of his case studies are from leaders in this field, so it's particularly fascinating if this is where YOU work. But there are also stories of leadership success in other big corporates, such as PepsiCo, universities, and the New York Fire department. "The 100-Mile Walk" doesn't claim to have answers to all of the questions it raises, but it does show older managers how the next generations think – that's Generation X and, increasingly, the Millennials, born from the early 1980s onward. This is essential, as these younger people are rising to increasingly responsible positions in organizations.

For years, business people in the West have studied cross-cultural practices, such as bowing and not crossing your legs in meetings, so as not to offend customers or colleagues from other cultures. Yet young programmers will turn up at a meeting with a senior colleague in their own company wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and not even realize that the older person is offended. This book will help both generations learn to see the other side.

And while we're talking about cross-cultural differences, readers who have not lived in America may, at first, struggle to grasp the various references to basketball and baseball, such as "Think Michael Jordan here. No layups in the game, no layups in the yard." Here at Mind Tools, we spent a while discussing whether these references made the book unsuitable for readers outside the US. In the end, we decided they didn't. In fact, they're a great opportunity to understand American business people, and the culture in which they operate. And in today's global business world, that's invaluable.

"The 100-Mile Walk," by Sander and Jonathan Flaum, is published by AMACOM, a division of the American Management Association. Click here to buy the book from Amazon.