Cracking the Leadership Code

Chapter 1BECOMING A BETTER LEADERThe Basics

We're blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know.

—Daniel Kahneman

The ballots were all counted.

Final score: 38–6.

Thirty-eight votes to six!

And it wasn't me that won the 38. It was my opponent. How could this be?

…I lost? For real?

Wow!

Only six votes?

I sat in a puddle of disbelief.

That can't be true!

But it was true. When all was said and all was done, I'd lost.

By a landslide.

I'd been creamed.

This all happened in 1999, but it seems like yesterday.

I was living in New York City, where I was hoping to become the new executive director of a nonprofit leadership development organization. At the annual meeting the members elected new officers.

In my mind, I was a shoo-in for the job. No one else had worked as tirelessly as I had. No one else had the “feet on the street” experience that I had. No one else was more passionate than I was.

Committed to the cause, I was a “super-volunteer.” I'd put in countless hours, doing anything and everything. The outgoing executive director had called me the organization's newest rising star.

I had one competitor for the job: Gary.

Gary was a newbie: he'd just joined in the past year. Gary owned his own business in the construction industry, where he'd been quite successful. However, when it came to our nonprofit, he was still green.

Yet, somehow, Gary had trounced me. He'd captured more than 85% of the vote.

What was ...