The Signal I Was Actually Watching

A mentor client of mine asked me a question this week that I have kept turning over since.

He wanted to know if there was a moment when I knew I had made it. He meant it financially. Was there a number in the bank account, a specific figure that crossed a line, that told me I had arrived.

I told him the truth. There really wasn't.

I sat with the question longer than I expected to, because I wanted a better answer than "no." I went looking for the number anyway, the one that was supposed to be there, the one every story about success seems to require. It never showed up. Not because I wasn't paying attention to the finances. I was. But the number was never the thing that told me anything true.

What I actually watched was the people in my care.

If they were moving forward in life and in their roles, I already knew where the business was headed. Their progress was the leading indicator, not a trailing one. If someone on my team was growing into more responsibility, gaining confidence, solving problems they couldn't touch a year earlier, that told me more about the health of the company than any report on my desk. If my people were winning, my company was winning. If my company was winning, I was winning. That order mattered. It never ran the other direction.

I didn't have language for this when I was building the company. I just knew what I trusted and what I didn't. I trusted the look on someone's face when they solved something hard on their own. I trusted the moment a person who used to wait for instructions started making calls without me. I didn't trust a quarter that looked good on paper if the people producing it looked worn down getting there. One of those signals holds up. The other one doesn't.

Years later I found out Robert Greenleaf, the man who coined the term servant leadership back in 1970, had already put a name to exactly what I'd been running. He called it the best test of a servant leader, and he admitted it was a hard one to administer: do those served grow as persons? He asked whether they become healthier, wiser, freer, and more autonomous, and more likely themselves to become servants because of it.

Reading that felt less like discovering a new idea and more like finding out someone had already written down a test I'd been giving myself for years without knowing its name. I hadn't studied it. I'd lived it, because it was the only measurement that ever told me the truth.

That is the answer I gave my mentee, and it's the same one I'd give again. There was no number. There was a headcount of people who were better off, more capable, more themselves, than when I found them. That was the signal. It still is.

If you're asking the same kind of question my mentee asked me, wondering whether there's a number that's supposed to tell you you've made it, or a decision in front of you right now with no room for a wrong guess, I have a few spots open for mentorship. Coaching, if you want the label everyone else uses.

Let's talk.