“Who’s the company that we keep?” asks Sanyin Siang. “What criteria do we choose them on? No jerks and weenies is a very strong criteria.”
In a leadership conversation that is often cluttered with science and pseudo-science, I find Siang’s vernacular refreshing. As she points out, a person can be rich, powerful and well-connected but if they’re a jerk or a weenie, they’re a liability to the team, not an asset. They are a drag on us, personally.
Sanyin Siang’s official title is Founding Executive Director, Duke’s Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership & Ethics (COLE). She is also an Advisor at Google Ventures.
“My mission is not to chase greatness, but to enable continuous greatness. ”
Siang is in the business of helping people—from CEO’s to undergraduate students—discover their superpowers and identify how to leverage them, and to help champions continue their winning ways.
It’s obvious that “team” provides the framework for how she encourages learning, leading, and “making things happen.” She is directing the Coach K Center, after all, and he is one of the perpetually great team builders in the team sport of college basketball.
Siang came to this role in her mid-twenties and in many ways inexperienced. She was tapped for her operational expertise; her background was not in sports or leadership. In fact, she admits that when she first arrived at Duke she thought there were three basketball coaches: Coach Krzyzewski, Coach Sheshefski, and Coach K.
Today, she is a passionate advocate for sports as “a key laboratory for people development” and “one of the most powerful platforms for societal change.” People pay attention to sports, amplifying the impact of its voices. When Colin Kaepernick takes a knee, she points out, a dialogue begins. When John Angelos, EVP and COO of the Baltimore Orioles takes to Twitter during the Baltimore riots, his message gets noticed.
For young people especially sports can offer resonant lessons for personal development. In any endeavor, says Siang, we can ask, “Did you win; did you lose? What did you learn?” “Are you looking for the short term gain or the long term triumph? What battle are you fighting, what game are you playing?” One of the essential lessons is that victories are rarely won alone; we run up against our individual limits. Sports, she says, is a place where we learn both to step forward and learn to assist and become a team player. The Coach K Center was launched in 2004; Siang was its founding managing director. “As with every startup—the Center was a startup—it’s going to grow. And that requires for its leadership to also grow and stretch in different ways I hadn’t thought about.”
Today Siang is focused on executive coaching and people development, engaging with students and a particular emphasis on identifying and recruiting leaders “who exemplify the way we thing about leadership and also the role of leader as a societal steward,” and bring them into the Center. Many of these are members of her personal team.
Influence is built on trust and credibility. She knows her team members are invested in her. She feels that she matters. They are among the “foremost leaders and thinkers in business, faith, sports but the commonality is that they believe in people.”
Siang is also the author of recently published The Launch Book: Motivational Stories to Launch Your Idea, Business or Next Career. The underlying philosophy: “Everyone is extraordinary.”
Through her work with the Coach K Center she has become a repository of stories about people and their successes and is a treasure trove of uplift that she felt selfish keeping to herself. Selfishness is the antithesis of Siang’s approach to life and work; writing the book provided a way to spread the influence of people who have influenced her.
Sometimes we have incredibly valuable people resources at our fingertips but fail to reach out to them. Siang offers the writing of her book as an example.
She was struggling with the process but didn’t reach out to her editor for help. “She is a person who is on my team, who has an aligned interest,” but Siang was embarrassed. “Our ego doesn’t want to admit that we aren’t succeeding by going it alone….” Though she enlisted the support of other associates, Siang admits, “The first time my editor saw the full draft was the day it was due. It was such a missed opportunity….The more we have success, the easier it is to think we have control. And it’s easy to get into this mess that hey, we did it all on our own and we can control the outcomes.”
In building successful team relationships with others, Siang emphasizes trust, gratitude and humility. “I think our language around resilience is only part of the answer. Our current language is ‘how much grit do you have; how much grit do you have within yourself?’ I think resilience is also tied to community and generosity. Just as we don’t succeed alone, we can’t get back up on our own.”
Surrounding ourselves with supporters who lift us up, and lift again when we fall or fail, is one of the most important investments we can make in our own success. No jerks or weenies allowed.
I asked her about the launch of The Launch Book which, at the time of our conversation, was already underway in Europe and Asia, with a countdown of less than a week to the North American lift off (September 5, 2017).
Like many new authors, Siang was confronting the reality that writing the book and getting it to publication is only half the battle; now she had to gather momentum to market the book as well, stepping out of her comfort zone to do interviews with people like me. This, too, is a load that is lightened by an effective team and generous network, willing to spread the good word.
Whitney Johnson is the author of the critically-acclaimed Disrupt Yourself, host of a podcast by the same name, and a co-founder with Christina Vuleta, of Forty Women Over 40 to Watch.