be encouraged

The High Jump Problem in Leadership

I want to tell you about a marine and a high jumper. Bear with me. They’re more connected than they sound.

A while back, I was listening to a science fiction audiobook. I won’t pretend it was great literature. It was one of those books that’s just good enough to keep you going, while you wrestle with the question “why am I still listening to this…” You’re not blown away, but you’re not turning it off either. The main character was a Marine who received a massive field promotion in rank due to a catastrophic event. Suddenly, he was responsible for things he’d never been responsible for before.

What stuck with me wasn’t the action. It was the reflection. In the quieter moments of the story, this guy kept coming back to the same thought: I need to be what the role requires, not who I’m comfortable being.

Not fake it. Not perform it. But choosing with intentionality to step into the identity that the role required of him, even when his instincts were pulling him somewhere else.

I was listening on a drive home from work and sat in my driveway for a few extra minutes when that scene hit me.

Because over the last 18 months or so, that’s exactly what I had been learning to do. Leave behind leadership traits and behaviors that didn’t reflect who I wanted to be or how I wanted to be seen. Not because someone told me I had to change. Because I finally got honest with myself about the gap between where I was and where I needed to be…who I wanted to be.

It wasn’t a leadership book that handed me that revelation. It was a marine in a mediocre sci-fi novel.

Growth shows up in ways you’re not always expecting.

The High Jumper Who Changed Everything

In the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, a lanky 21-year-old engineering student from Oregon named Dick Fosbury did something nobody had ever seen before.

Here’s a little context on where high jumping had been before that moment. The sport had gone through two major phases. For roughly the first 60 years of Olympic competition, jumpers used a technique called the Scissor Kick. Straightforward, intuitive, what you’d probably invent if someone pointed you at a bar and said “get over it.” Then the Straddle technique came along and became the standard. For about 30 years, the best athletes in the world refined it. Face down, stomach first, optimized to near perfection.

And then Fosbury went over backwards.

Head first, arching his back, practically falling over the bar face-up. Coaches and competitors were skeptical. The technique looked wrong. It looked awkward. But as he cleared bar after bar in front of 80,000 people at the Estadio Olímpico, the crowd was captivated, shouting “Olé” with each jump. He won the gold medal and set an Olympic record.

There’s something worth noting in that dynamic. The people most invested in the old way were the last ones to see the value in the new one. We’ll come back to that.

Here’s what makes this story even better: Fosbury had started developing this technique back in 1963 as a high school student in Southern Oregon, just down the road from where I live. He’d actually failed to qualify for his local club team using the conventional approach. So he didn’t abandon the old technique because he was great. He abandoned it because it wasn’t working, and he was willing to try something completely different.

Within a generation, every elite high jumper in the world was doing it his way. The straddle (the technique everyone had spent decades perfecting) was essentially retired. Not because athletes stopped working hard. Because someone changed the approach.

Here’s the line I keep coming back to:

The bar didn’t get higher because athletes tried harder. It got higher because the approach changed.

What This Has to Do With You

If you lead people (a team, a department, a family, a volunteer group, a small business) you have felt the bar rising.

More complexity. More change. More competing priorities. More is being asked of you and the people around you.

And if you’re like most leaders, your first instinct when the bar goes up is to work harder. Stay later. Push more. Move faster.

I get it. I’ve been there.

Here’s the question I had to ask myself, and maybe you do, too: What if the problem isn’t your effort? What if it’s your approach?

That’s the question that started a conversation with our team not long ago, and a presentation I called “Becoming Good at Growth.” Not good at working more. Good at growing. There’s a difference, and the difference matters more than most of us want to admit.

Out of that conversation came three areas where I think the approach has to change for leaders who want to keep up with a rising bar.

Three Areas Where the Approach Has to Change

Ownership. Not effort. Not activity. Not being the busiest person in the room. Real leadership ownership is completion, clarity, and follow-through. At the end of the day, as leaders, we are responsible for the outcome. And here’s a reframe I’ve been sitting with lately: Billie Jean King said, “Pressure is a privilege.” The pressure of leadership is no different.

Communication. Not as a courtesy. Not as a check-the-box activity. Communication (the kind that actually drives execution) is the operating system of how we get things done. To the people you report to, to the people beside you on the org chart, and the people you serve as a leader. Most of us are doing less of it, or less clearly, than we think.

Development. Leaders are learners. Rather than diluting that idea to a “motivational slogan”, view it as a personal standard. “Good enough” is a slow leak. If we stop learning, stop growing, stop pushing our development forward, the gap between what’s required of us and what we’re capable of will grow. Quietly. Until it can’t be ignored.

Over the next few posts, we’re going to go deeper on each of these. Not theory. Practical.

The same way Fosbury didn’t just think about going over the bar differently, he actually changed his technique, practiced it, refined it, and trusted it when it mattered. This is about what it actually looks like to lead differently.

Not just to know better. To do better.

The bar is higher. The approach has to change.

Let’s talk about how.

Be Encouraged.

This series grew out of a presentation titled “Becoming Good at Growth,” delivered to our leadership team at our Quarterly All-Staff Meeting. If you lead people at any level, I think you’ll find something in it worth carrying into your week.