After doing something for 27 years, you’d think that you could figure it all out and know how to “do” it really, really well, and gain fulfillment too.

That “something” for me is work (aka what we do to make a living).

And nope, I haven’t quite figured it all out yet - which I gather isn’t unusual given that a Google search for “Secret of Work” produced no less than 181 Million entries.

Keep in mind I’m not talking about the classic cause and effect here - that is, the objective results of the labor, which is in most cases contributing to profit or loss.

What I’m searching for looks inward, to the effects of the work on ourselves, our psyches, and our overall feelings about life.

Yep, the deep stuff.

The problem is, we can get so tied up in the “day-to-day” nuts and bolts activities that are part of our daily working lives that we rarely can come up for enough rarefied air to ponder those larger issues.

Occasionally, however,  this higher level reflection can happen, and this past week was one of those times for me.

It was the confluence of several things - a funeral, a business trip, a management meeting, and a conference - that created a perfect learning environment.

And here’s what I learned, in very simple terms:

• Work must be done with passion
• The work must be for a cause greater than ourselves
• It ultimately must be fun, or it isn’t worth doing

What’s more, these 3 are truly a set - that is, you can’t just get to 2 out of 3 and call it good.

We need to get to the fun part, and that’s all too often neglected.  It’s an underrated piece of the puzzle.

For example, how often does someone ask  “Are you having fun?” at your workplace?

I suspect it’s a rarity,  since “fun” is all too often associated with “unproductive“.    Where the work itself can’t possibly be the cause - if someone is enjoying themselves too much, it must be because they spent more time playing video games than cranking out spreadsheets.

In other words, there’s a “fear of fun”.

But here’s where my lessons of the past week come in.

I see “fun” when the passion and the cause are making a difference - when a group of people are continually hitting targets and raising bars - in other words, to use a sports analogy, they are “winning”.

And who doesn’t enjoy being a winner? Think of the camaraderie, the smiles, the feelings of satisfaction, the pats on the back, and yes, the celebrations.

That’s FUN, all right.   Better than getting a high score on Tetris.

I realized that I don’t fear this - in fact, I do regularly ask my team if they are having fun.

Because I’m confident that the foundations of the “secrets of work”, the passion and the cause,  are already in place.

I just need to get them (and myself) across the goal line to the fun zone.

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by James Michener

“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both”

Yipee!

Steve Farber is quite the dreamer when it comes to defining great leadership.

What I’ve always admired about him was his willingness to aim high - like for example, in his book “The Radical Edge“, where he dared to believe that we could mix great business with personal joy and in the process, “change the world“.

It’s not often that leaders try to think that way, but Steve challenged us to do that, passionately and eloquently.

But that wasn’t quite enough - there was more for him to say about leadership, something of an even higher calling and purpose

That something was love.

Now that’s really a radical leap - linking love and leadership. More precisely, Steve sees leadership as a selfless act of love - much like a parent and child.

This constitutes the core of his latest book, “Greater Than Yourself“ - the concept that leaders should “go beyond the tenets of the Golden Rule and help others to be better than they are themselves“.

Just like a mother or father expressing their love by doing everything they can to make their child’s future better than their own, Steve sees great leadership through much the same lens- and in a much more personal way than conventional leadership wisdom usually dictates.

Through the same “business parable” style he employed in his other two books (including “The Radical Edge“),   Steve himself tells the tale of a special guitar, and how his search for one of its previous owners slowly reveals the “Greater Than Yourself” philosophy (and a framework to use it) through a cast of dedicated practitioners.

It’s a fast, enjoyable read, and the use of storytelling brings his points home very effectively.    The author’s passion for the subject clearly comes through - I didn’t doubt for a second that he truly believes that what he presented represented “true” leadership, on its highest plane of existence.

The real test however, is whether his readers will believe it, and ultimately reach for it.  He ups the ante by presenting an Epilogue to the book that shows the principles in action (by the group Up With People), and also invites us to a new website where he is taking on his own “GTY” projects.

That’s where the rubber meets the road - can we too become so selfless, so loving, and so giving as leaders, like the characters in the book? The answer lies inside our own hearts and souls.

I’m sure Steve knew the degree of difficulty he faced here,  but this didn’t stop him from putting his personal feelings on his literary sleeve and trying to penetrate those inner sanctums that rarely see the light of day between 8 and 5, Monday through Friday.

I for one am quite glad he did. Read this book and I bet you’ll feel the same way too.

I recently read about the recent resurgence of the McDonald’s Corporation, and what struck me was how the leaders attributed it to going “back to basics”.

How many times have you seen that one? A company loses their way, and their profits, and then suddenly has an epiphany - “Jeepers, we need to get back to the basics!”.

Even my dear Starbucks and its leader, Howard Schultz, fell into that one.

What are these magical “basics” that so many businesses find, lose, find, and then lose again?

Quality and Service.

Think about that for a second - it seems so elementary, doesn’t it? It IS basic.

Alas, something so logical can become lost in the morass of short-term profitability, or a belief that marketing magic that could somehow hide product and service deficiencies.

In the end, however, the circle always turns back to “the basics”.

Once I came to that epiphany myself, many moons ago, I was determined to never let them out of my sight.

So I like to put little reminders everywhere. One of my techniques is the “bulletin board”. It’s any place I can put a message where I know it can be seen by a lot of people. It could be a written message, or an electronic message - whatever works.

And l like to keep those messages simple. I call it my “rally cries”. I figure if everyone sees them enough times they will permeate the brain, and we will “rally” around them.

Here’s what I use to represent “the basics”:

• We Will Not Sacrifice Quality at the Altar of Expediency

• It’s all About Exceeding Expectations

While it may seem too simplistic to reduce an entire operating philosophy into two pithy statements, the beauty of it is that when your teammates or partners consider going down the opposite path, you can point to the bulletin board and remind everyone of “the basics”.

Try it and you’ll see what I mean. You may not use these exact statements, but these kind of “rally cries” can really keep your business on the right track.

I don’t watch a lot of TV, but what I do watch is tilted towards the home improvement shows, since my wife and I are not big fans of what’s on the big networks these days.

They’re pretty relaxing viewing, actually, because there’s always a happy ending for the couple doing the redecorating or remodeling. Somehow they make the right choices, guided by the “experts” (and some very talented carpenters).

But there’s another thing about these shows that is very illuminating for the most unlikeliest of people - business leaders.

It’s in observing how the decorating decisions are made that the businessperson can find a great piece of advice.

The advice?

Use the process of elimination in making strategic choices – that is, find out what you don’t want before you figure out what you want.

You can see how this works on the home improvement shows by watching a designer guide his or her clients through the decision making process on colors and finishes. They typically start with a very wide range of choices, and then ask a simple question – “tell me what you don’t like”.

Before too long everything is narrowed down to just a few selections, and the end game becomes much easier (I wish I had done it this way when we decorated our house!).

Effective business decision-making ideally should follow the same process – laying out all the alternatives, and systematically eliminating the unacceptable ones.

This may appear to be perfectly logical, but it’s amazing how in practice I’ve seen it handled much differently in the boardroom - more of “which one do you like best”? This approach typically results in a much longer discussion, since it’s much harder to get a fast consensus on what’s best, versus what’s worst.

So the next time you are faced with a decision with many choices, think like those designers on TV and use the process of elimination– who knows, you might end up repainting your office or boardroom too!

About a month ago I was speaking at a training session for a group of our newer teammates, and I was asked this question:

“How do you know if you are a good leader?”

Now that’s a query that I bet has generated a billion answers, at least.

Leadership has been dissected, discussed, debated, deliberated, delineated, debunked, debased, and deified ever since the first human decided to tell someone else what to do, or show them how to do something.

Do a “Leadership” search on Google and you’ll get 187,000,000 listings (that’s not a misprint).

Do one on Amazon and you’ll see 266, 982 books on the subject.

So how did I answer the question?

The first thing that came to my mind was an image, rather than a concept. This is unusual for me for it is not my usual thought pattern (that’s why I went to business school instead of the art academy).

The image was a hoop of fire. I was channeling a lion tamer, training and guiding his charges through the flames like it was just another day at the circus. Is that leadership? I wasn’t convinced, because the image quickly faded from view.

Then I thought of a brick wall - I’ve often heard people describe their loyalty to a leader by saying “I’d walk through a brick wall if he (or she) asked me”.  In other words, potentially putting your life on the line because of leadership.

Plausible? Of course. Workable in most every context? No - I couldn’t imagine asking the people in front of me to risk their lives for our business cause.

My mind then went elsewhere for inspiration (fortunately the process had only taken a few seconds up to this point, so I hadn’t lost my audience), and I landed at the base of a large hill.

Somehow I knew I was now in the right place, and I began to speak. Good leaders should be able to lead their teams up any hill, but when do leaders know in their hearts that they are capable of doing it, again and again, without doubt or hesitation?

When they charge up the hill and don’t look back the whole way. Great leaders get to the top, confident that when they turn around, the whole team is standing right there behind them at the summit.

And they are - every time. Over-confident leaders can get to the top without looking back, but see people still at the base of the hill when they turn around. Doubtful leaders may get everyone to the top, but not without turning around often and zig-zagging up and down exhorting their teammates, perhaps even dragging some people with them.

It’s not a case of never looking back - as Randy on Twitter quoted to me the other day, “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. It’s when the stakes are high, and the challenge is difficult, that a leader needs to step up, gather the team, issue the call, and then climb the hill, always pushing forward. When the challenge is met, then the learning can take place.

If the groundwork has previously been laid, with all the many other traits of leadership that are illustrated in all those books and all those posts, the team will hear, and respond to, a call to climb. They will trust your leadership, and watch your back. Because they know that to get to this point, the leader was always watching their backs too.

It’s not a perfect summation of great leadership, but as I spoke about it out loud for the first time it rang true, at least to me. Maybe that’s the thing - as leaders, we all search for our own “Litmus Test” that benchmarks our progress and helps us determine where we need to go next in our quest for greatness.

What’s yours?