In this conversation, a Nairobi CEO expresses a desire to eradicate the word "just" from her employees' language, believing it limits proactivity. The respondent praises this focus and explores how leaders can achieve it. He differentiates managers from leaders—managers motivate, delegate, and push, while leaders inspire, empower, and guide willing followers. He references Dan Pink’s research on autonomy, mastery, and purpose as key motivators that can replace limiting language. The discussion emphasizes that every role, from janitor to CEO, is valuable and that leadership is not tied to rank; a person can be a leader in their current position without promotion. An anecdote about thanking an airport restroom attendant illustrates leading by example and showing appreciation. The overall message is that eliminating "just" requires a shift to inclusive, empowering leadership practices that recognize and value all contributions.
Chapters
One of my clients asked me, or rather this was their comment, she said, you know, one of the top CEOs in the organizations in Nairobi here, she said, I want to eliminate the word just from my staff's vocabulary. I am just an employee. I am just a middle I am just an assistant. I am just this. She says it seems to cripple them and keep them in a certain little box where they cannot— they are not proactive in anything. What would you say to a leader who desperately wants to eliminate this just? And probably, where does that just come from?
Well, the first thing I'd say is I admire this person. Because that's an important thing to work on. That's an important thing to identify, to eliminate that word "just." So I definitely admire this person and her perspective. That was terrific. Now, how do you go about accomplishing that? One of the things we finally arrived at is this: there's differences between someone who identifies solely as a manager and someone who identifies as a leader. And here's 3 key areas. For example, a manager will try to motivate where a leader inspires. We're back to our keywords again, but here's the differentiation, right? A manager will delegate where a leader empowers, and a manager will drive or push where the leader guides, you see. So you can only really lead the willing, right? Our definition of a genuine leader is someone with the ability to attract and serve willing followers, an emphasis on the word willing, right? So if someone's unwilling, well, then we have another decision to make, and sometimes it means we're going to let them go, right? We're going to fire them because they may be negatively impacting the people around them as well. Nobody likes a negative attitude, negative mindset. So to eliminate that word "just," it's to focus on those people who— you have to provide the genuine opportunities, everything we just talked about, right? Opportunities for advancement, opportunities for, you know, for growth. I think it was Dan Pink who did a global study to identify what were the 3 key motivators, and he came up with autonomy, mastery, and purpose, right? So people want some control over their lives— there's the autonomy. They want Mastery. They want to be able to grow, learn, and develop. And that's beautiful because that's a perfect imprint to our martial arts definition of that word, right? And then that sense of purpose, that sense of purpose. So once we can identify people who really want to embrace those opportunities, then we can bring them along. Now specifically, it goes right to what we talked about when we talked about leadership at all levels. There is no just, right? All our roles are important and valuable. I don't care if you're sweeping the floors or you're sitting in the corner office running the company. We can't run an effective organization without everybody really embracing the common cause and purpose and without everybody, you know, really working in harmony, right? So it's a matter of value. That's one thing we can do as leaders is make sure people know they're valued at all levels. Now there's a little caution with this, and we just ran into it at a workshop this past week. Very interesting. Somebody brought me a challenge and she said, I have somebody that I'm mentoring and and this person, I want this person to take over my job because she wanted to advance and do another project, right? He said, but I can't get her to do it. She doesn't want to promote. And my question to her was, how good is that person in the role she's at right now? She said, wonderful. She's the best we've ever had. I said, and she's happy. She's satisfied. She said, yeah, she doesn't want more money. She doesn't want the title. No. I said, then why are you trying to force her to promote? Right? She is a leader exactly where she is. She's inspiring other people. She's influencing other people to do their best job. She serves without question, right? She serves people up and down the hierarchy you talked about. And so she's a very, very valuable person in that position. Again, we're not confusing rank, title, position of authority with leadership. So why promote this person, right? So I love the fact that this person, this leader is eliminating the word "just." And I'd say lead by example, right? The less you use the word, the less other people are going to use it, right? You're not just the janitor, you are the janitor. And we really appreciate— in fact, that's a funny little sideline because I was, you know, you fly a lot too. And I was in an airport as we were traveling last week. And this man was in the airport restroom doing a wonderful job. The restrooms were so clean, which is rare. Airports these days, right? And I thanked him. I said, you know, I said, you don't know how much it means to us as travelers to be able to come into a restroom and know that it's clean and it's safe. I really appreciate the work you did. And that man smiled. Oh my God, you would have thought I handed him $1,000, right? And that's the type of thing that we can do as leaders to make sure that people know that they're valued no matter what their job is.
