The Best Leaders I Know Focus On Mastering This One Thing

This one thing will determine your success more than anything else:

The ability to delay gratification. Although it’s not quite that.

That’s how it’s tested.

You put a marshmallow in front of a four-year-old child. Then you tell them that if it’s still sat there uneaten after you leave the room and come back again, they can have two marshmallows.

Fast forward 30 years and the kids who managed to hold out for the two marshmallows are more successful in every measure.

We’re being asked to sacrifice now in order to obtain something better in the future.

Rather than eat the potato now, plant it and have ten when it’s time to harvest.

The wrong takeaway here would be that by age four you’ve either got it or you don’t.

That’s the obvious takeaway — and the study did play out that way.

You could say that what was being tested was the child’s ability to sacrifice.

You could also say that what was being tested was trust.

We make sacrifices in the present because we actually believe we will obtain something better in the future.

We start a diet or an exercise programme because we believe it’ll allow us to look, feel, perform better in the (hopefully not too distant) future.

We quit when we either lose that trust or believe it’s too great a sacrifice. We’ve lost faith that A will lead to B, or that life with A is worth B.

The kids either didn’t trust what the adult told them or didn’t trust themselves (perhaps because they’d been told they couldn’t be trusted — and believed it in the same way that kids believe in Santa Claus).

I go to great lengths with my clients to help them make promises they know they can keep. That’s how we build trust in ourselves (particularly in an area where we’ve lost it). And that trust, rewarded with evidence, builds momentum.

This mechanism is worth thinking about when it comes to leadership.

Each time you promise a second marshmallow and fail to deliver, you lose trust.

When you lose trust, people start doing what they feel like in the moment.

It’s easy to look at someone and say: they aren’t prioritising, they aren’t following the unwritten social contract (whether that’s coming into the office, doing the extra hours when there’s a deadline, speaking up in meetings, or whatever it might be).

It’s worth asking:

What promises did I make when I hired them that I’m not keeping?

People naturally seek to equalise, and people naturally avoid sacrifices that they no longer believe will produce the promised outcome.

It’s worth asking, if I took those four-year-olds that ate the marshmallows, then said: “You can have this one marshmallow, or walk across the room and have those two over there” — how many would have gone for the two? My guess: 100%.

And if you increased the distance or time incrementally, it wouldn’t be long before enough trust was formed between child and adult for all the kids to pass the test.

Which isn’t to say this would have been curative. It is to suggest that leadership is an exercise in trust.

Check your promises.
Make promises.
Keep your promises.
Repeat.

Trust is the ultimate leverage in leadership.

— Ed Ley