“The most striking thing about highly effective leaders is how little they have in common. What one swears by, another warns against. But one trait stands out: the willingness to risk.” (Larry Osborne, quoted by John Maxwell in “The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader,” p. 40.

Well, we all knew leaders are all different, but it’s good someone finally said it.

I’m so tired of this one-size-fits-all standardized formula for making effective leaders.

The most hopeful thing I’ve read about leadership in 2009 is this:

“If you look at the lives of effective leaders, you will find that they often don’t fit into a stereotypical mold. For example, more than 50 percent of all CEOs of Fortune 500 companies had C or C- averages in college. Nearly 75 percent of all U.S. presidents were in the bottom half of their school classes. And more than 50 percent of all millionaire entrepreneurs never finished college.” (Maxwell, “21 Indispensable Qualities,” p. 83)

Now, when John Maxwell cited those statistics (he didn’t give his source), he came to a different conclusion than the one that occurs to me. He said, “What makes it possible for people who might seem ordinary to achieve great things? The answer is passion. Nothing can take the place of passion in a leader’s life.”

Far be it from me to argue with John Maxwell, the guru of leadership on the American scene today. And I certainly do not dispute the importance of passion and focus.

For instance….

For four hours last Saturday morning, I sketched people at the Riverwalk in downtown New Orleans as a part of the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s annual outing. As often happens, someone stood by my right shoulder as I worked and made an occasional comment or asked questions. Saturday, it was a little girl, perhaps 12 or 13 years old. She said, “So, Mister Joe, how long did it take you to learn to draw like this?” I said, “Honey, I’ve been doing this all my life. I cannot remember a time I wasn’t drawing.”

The person I was sketching at the moment happened to be a cheerleader for the New Orleans Saints, a member of what they call the Saintsations. I said, “It’s like Samantha here. I’m guessing you have danced all your life from the time you were a little child.” She said, “Exactly right.”

That’s passion, and I’m all in favor of it.

More than passion 

But there’s more to be said than just passion about the high percentage of leaders who did poorly in school or never finished college.

On the surface, we might conclude this is just more evidence that our schools are teaching the wrong subjects and poorly preparing people for the real world. There is some justification for that point of view.

But take another look and see if you don’t agree that real leaders often tend to be late bloomers. They didn’t hit their stride in the third grade or even in high school, and so teachers and parents failed to see their potential and relegated them to some lesser status in life. (I recall Winston Churchill being so pigeon-holed by his father, who concluding Winston could never be a lawyer, said he’d have to settle for the life of a soldier.)

Leaders have always tended to come from outside the mainstream of the culture. They are outliers, says Malcolm Gladwell.

These late bloomers are the ones who thought differently in school, were bored in class, and saw things in ways not taught in the textbooks.  In many cases, teachers considered them trouble-makers.

Late bloomers who keep growing

And one more: leaders keep on growing. That to me is the great lesson of Maxwell’s “50 percent” statistic. Doing poorly in school was not the end of the world for them, but just the beginning. They found a subject they were interested in and threw themselves into that, leaving all the other stuff for generalists (who usually end up teaching. Hey, I’m a teacher, I know. I admit to being a generalist and sometimes even pride myself in it.).

In the decade after the death of President Kennedy, I read several biographies of the man. A college classmate named Red Fay made this observation: “In college, I was ahead of Jack Kennedy. I was a better student than he was. But the big difference in us  is, he kept growing and I quit.”

Don’t ever stop growing.

I say that about my wonderful dad, who quit school after the 7th grade to go to work in the coal mines. He had a mind as sharp as anyone in town and, even though he was sentenced to the next 35 years inside the depths of the earth cutting out bituminous coal, he kept growing. He learned all he could about the coal business, learned everything he could about his labor union, and read every magazine that came to the house. At one point when he was in his middle 50s, he took a correspondence course in becoming a detective. He had no plans to be one, just wanted to learn.

When Dad died in November of 2007 at the age of 95-plus, a half-dozen magazines were regularly coming to the house, everything from Fortune to the Reader’s Digest. As was said of a mountain climber lost in the Alps, “He was last seen going up.”

I’ve mentioned George Shinn on these pages previously. The owner of the New Orleans Hornets NBA team (at the time this was written) grew up in the small town of Salisbury, North Carolina, the only child of a single mom who took in sewing to pay the bills. George graduated dead last in a class of over 250 students. (He told his story at my daughter’s high school graduation and made a lasting impression on those students, particularly those who had done poorly in high school.) Yet, he kept growing. He attended a business college, then became a recruiter for them, and when the school was in danger of going under, assembled some investors and bought it. Later, he bought more business schools, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Occasionally, I encounter students who obsess about getting all As in school. Or, to be exact, they fret about the possibility of not getting an A.  Now, I’m in favor of good grades, don’t get me wrong. But straight-As are over-emphasized in our society and the students often pay a heavy price for this dubious achievement.

The bottom line about all this is simply, if you did well in school, fine, but keep growing. And if you did poorly in school, okay, put it behind you and keep on growing. There’s no penalty for being a late bloomer. Einstein was, we’re told.

Truly the dumbest commercials on television running at this very moment have to do with training your infant baby to memorize facts and learn numbers and identify presidents and such. What foolishness.

Let them be kids. Let’s not ask them to compensate for our own failures to study and apply ourselves.

There will be time aplenty for the children to learn to read and study academic junk. Until then, put them in the swing and sing songs to them. Get down on the floor and wrestle with them. Take them to the park and let them feed the ducks. Enjoy them and let them enjoy life.

And while you’re doing that for your child, try it for yourself.