Stedman Graham believes that you need to know who you are before you can become a good leader. And part of doing that may come down to something really simple: Writing it all down.
“The first thing I do is write down everything I love in my life, what I care about, my interests, and organize information around that,” Graham said at the Fortune Global Forum conference in New York on Monday. “Write down and be conscious of everything you want to achieve in your life, everything you’re passionate about. The question is: How can you leverage that talent to be the best person you could possibly be and create as much value as you were born to create?”
Graham—the chairman and CEO of S. Graham & Associates—told the crowd that identity leadership fundamentally means being able to understand and lead yourself. To do that, he says being able to teach yourself is critical.
“My life changed when I learned how to learn,” he said. Graham says he has dedicated his life to helping people learn to work on themselves. “The ability to maximize your potential based on who you are, to me, is one of the most important things in the 21st century.”
Graham is the chairman and CEO of S. Graham and Associates, a management and marketing consulting firm. He also previously worked as an adjunct professor at the Northwestern Kellogg School of Business, where he taught the course, “The Dynamics of Leadership”—a topic on which he speaks widely. He has written several self-help and business books, including Identity Leadership: To Lead Others You Must First Lead Yourself and Diversity: Leaders Not Labels: A New Plan for the 21st Century.
A former basketball player, and the longtime partner of former talk show host and business mogul Oprah Winfrey, Graham believes that leaders are developed, and that great transformation comes from a place of love, according to previous interviews.
In a commencement speech at Ball State earlier this year, Graham told students: “You cannot drink from an empty cup, and you cannot give what you do not have. It’s difficult to practice self-leadership unless you know who you are.”
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