Are You Good Enough to Sing Second?

THE PETERSEN PHILOSOPHY SERIES

What a Naval Academy tradition can teach us about leadership, winning, and legacy

There is a tradition at the United States Naval Academy that can be confusing if you have never experienced it.

After Navy plays another service academy in football, both teams remain on the field. The teams stand together as the alma maters are sung.

The losing team’s alma mater is sung first. The winning team’s is sung second.

So if you are a Midshipman, graduate, player, coach, parent, or Navy fan, there are two words you want to hear after the game: Sing Second.

It means we won.

But the older I get, the more I think those two words mean considerably more than the final score of a football game. They pose a pretty good question for anyone who wants to lead:

Are you good enough to sing second?

What does it mean to win?

We spend much of our lives trying to finish first. First in the class. First across the finish line. First to get promoted. First to make the sale. First to get the recognition.

There is nothing inherently wrong with achievement. I have spent much of my life around highly competitive people. I graduated from the Naval Academy, served in the Navy, spent decades in business, and have taught and coached leaders throughout my career.

I like to win. Most successful leaders do.

But leadership eventually forces us to confront a more difficult question: what does winning actually mean?

Is it winning if I accomplish the objective but destroy the team in the process?

Is it winning if I receive the promotion but never develop anyone capable of replacing me?

Is it winning if everyone knows what I accomplished but no one can identify the people I helped become better?

Is it winning if I reach the top and discover that I climbed the wrong mountain?

Those questions have become increasingly important to me as I have studied, taught, and written about leadership.

Where the model comes in

My Petersen Leadership Model begins with three dimensions of the individual leader: Character, Style, and Judgment.

Character is who you are. Style is how you lead. Judgment is how you decide. Together, they shape the Culture you create, the Execution and results you achieve, and ultimately the Life and legacy you build.

Singing second touches every part of that model. What follows walks through it one dimension at a time, from Character through Life.

Character: winning begins with who you are

It begins with Character, because winning the right way requires knowing what you stand for before the competition begins.

Character asks: who am I when nobody is keeping score?

Integrity, courage, humility, perseverance, service, and resilience do not suddenly appear when the pressure is on; they are developed long before the defining moment arrives.

The scoreboard may tell you whether you won the game. Character tells you whether the victory was worth having.

CONSIDER — Do you have the character to win without compromising who you are?

Style: leadership is a team sport

Then there is Style: how we lead other people.

I explored this idea through a rather unusual group of leadership teachers in my book Who Let the Dogs Lead?

Dogs have different ways of approaching the world, just as leaders do. Some naturally take charge. Some organize. Some motivate. Some listen and build relationships.

There isn’t one perfect leadership style, because leadership isn’t about getting everyone else to behave like you. It is about understanding what the team needs from you.

That is another lesson hidden inside Sing Second. You don’t sing an alma mater alone; you sing it together.

One player may score the winning touchdown. Another may make the tackle nobody remembers. Someone else blocks so the runner gets the glory. Coaches prepare the team. Trainers keep players on the field. Teammates challenge one another through months of practice when there are no television cameras and no cheering crowds.

The scoreboard records the team’s result. It doesn’t record every contribution that made the result possible.

Neither does organizational life. Some of the most important leadership contributions will never appear on a scoreboard.

CONSIDER — Do you have the style to bring out the best in people who are different from you?

Judgment: sometimes you still have to sing first

There is an important distinction. Singing second does not mean standing in the background. Leadership is not passivity.

There are moments when the leader must go first.

You speak first when everyone else is afraid to say what needs to be said. You accept responsibility first when something goes wrong. You step forward first when the organization is facing danger.

You establish the standard. You make the difficult decision. You absorb the criticism. And sometimes you simply say, “Follow me.”

Good leaders are willing to sing first when the mission requires it; they don’t need to sing first merely because their ego requires it.

That distinction is Judgment. Knowing which moment you are standing in is most of the work.

CONSIDER — Do you have the judgment to make the difficult call when the answer isn’t obvious, and to know when the moment calls for you to sing first?

Culture: the higher you rise, the more people you serve

One idea in a recent essay written by a Naval Academy parent particularly caught my attention.

As Midshipmen rise through the ranks, the author hoped they would not measure their success by the increasing number of people required to salute them, but by the increasing number of people they have the privilege to serve.

That is worth remembering far beyond the military.

We sometimes get organizational leadership backward. We assume promotion means more people work for us. I think promotion should mean something else: more people have now been entrusted to us.

That changes leadership. The question is no longer, how many people report to me? It becomes, how many people am I responsible for helping succeed?

That is servant leadership without the slogan. It is one of the differences between holding a leadership position and actually being a leader.

It is also how culture gets built. A team sings together because, long before the game, someone decided that the people beside them mattered.

CONSIDER — Can you create a culture in which people want one another to succeed?

Execution: the song comes after the game

Character, Style, Judgment, and Culture are not enough by themselves. Nobody sings before kickoff.

The alma maters are sung after the game because results are what earn the song. Good intentions do not put points on the board, and a leader who is admirable but ineffective has still let the team down.

Execution is where leadership becomes real: standards that are actually held, decisions that are actually made, commitments that are actually kept. It is the dimension that converts everything upstream of it into something a team can point to.

And there is a longer measure of Execution. Not only did we win, but does the winning continue when I am no longer the one leading?

CONSIDER — Can you execute so that good intentions actually become results?

Life: the leadership scoreboard changes

There is another reason Sing Second has begun to mean more to me.

This year marks 50 years since my Naval Academy Class of 1976 graduated and was commissioned. Fifty years changes your perspective.

Early in life, we tend to keep score by looking forward. What is the next assignment? The next promotion? The next goal? The next accomplishment?

Eventually, you begin looking backward as well. Not because the race is over, but because you finally have enough distance to see the course you have traveled.

And the questions change. What difference did I make? Whom did I help? Who became better because our paths crossed? What did I build that will continue without me? What did I teach my children, students, employees, clients, colleagues, and friends? What will remain after the titles disappear?

That is when leadership begins to become legacy.

CONSIDER — Are you building a life and legacy that will continue to matter when the titles disappear?

My 1,976-mile reminder

As my Class of 1976 approached our 50th reunion, I set a personal goal: walk 1,976 miles in recognition of the Class of 1976.

There were plenty of individual steps along the way; millions of them, in fact. But the significance was never really the steps. It was what they represented.

Fifty years of classmates. Fifty years of service. Fifty years of friendships. Fifty years of wins and losses, successes and disappointments, beginnings and endings.

And fifty years of discovering that some of life’s most important victories never show up on a scoreboard.

Maybe that is why the phrase Sing Second resonates differently with me today than it would have when I was a Midshipman.

At 22, winning often means proving what you can do. Later in life, winning increasingly means helping other people discover what they can do.

Are you good enough to sing second?

That brings me back to the question. Not one dimension at a time, the way we have just walked through them, but all of them at once, which is how leadership actually arrives.

Because perhaps the ultimate test of leadership isn’t whether you finished first. It is whether the people and organizations entrusted to you became better because you led them.

At the Naval Academy, singing second means you won the game. After 50 years of thinking about leadership, I believe it can mean something even bigger.

Leadership isn’t about being first. It’s about being good enough to Sing Second.

Jim Petersen, PhD is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate; Captain, USNR (Ret.); leadership author; executive coach; and creator of the Petersen Leadership Model. His work focuses on Character, Style, Judgment, Culture, Execution, and the connection between leadership, life, and legacy.