Tremendous Leadership | Merle Heckman | Price Of Leadership

True leadership requires a willingness to pay the Price Of Leadership. In this conversation, Dr. Tracey Jones and organizational development expert Merle Heckman dissect what it takes to guide teams through character-first principles rather than transactional management. They explore the painful reality of isolation at the top and how wise leaders survive seasons of intense fatigue. You'll learn why protecting your energy and focusing on the teachable few changes everything. They also discuss why a clear daily vision matters far more than empty five-year corporate projections. Discover how to transition your culture from tactical tracking to a lasting, tremendous legacy.

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Leaders on Leadership with Merle Heckman

Everyone, welcome to another Tremendous Leadership Leaders on Leadership show where we pull back the curtain on leadership, and we talk with leaders of all ages and stages about what it takes to pay the price of leadership. If you see me smiling with a big grin, it is because my tremendous guest, Merle, and I have been waxing eloquently for fifteen minutes. I thought I had the recording. Somehow it had stopped. We are going to do this again, Merle, and you are going to get to share your tremendous story again. First of all, I want to introduce you to Merle Heckman. Merle, tell us how we reconnected, because you have been a fan and a lover of books for many years.

Tracy, I will tell them a little bit. I read Life is Tremendous when I was a young person, junior high age. About five weeks ago, I was on a plane, and I was just scrolling through LinkedIn, and I saw your name in the information, and I thought, “I could be in contact and just let somebody know what a benefit the book had been to my life.” I wrote you just a bit to describe my background with that, and then you were nice enough to interact. It was the good old LinkedIn connections that we made that talk.

The message that Merle had sent to me was that, as a young man, as a pre-teenager, his mother had given him books to read to earn money and said, “If you read these books and write a book report, I will pay you,” which is one of the things that Charles advocates in Life is Tremendous and a lot of people do. Tell us about what she laid on the table and the books that she picked.

It is the school that just ended. Seventh grade is done. I am twelve years old, and I live on a grain farm in Missouri, growing corn, soybeans, and wheat. I had two plans for that summer. One, working my day on the farm, driving the green John Deere tractors, and secondly, playing baseball with my buddies. The very first day, my mother asked me a question, the first day of vacation. That question affected my life. She said, “What good books do you plan to read this summer?”

I drew a blank because that was not in my agenda. She said, “There are ten books around the house that I have that would be good for you to read that would help you. I will give you $10 for every one of those you read. It has to be this summer.” With my aggressive entrepreneurial spirit, I read a grand total of two. The two books were How to Win Friends and Influence People and Life is Tremendous. Those books and the messages from them have guided me, directed my life over 56 years of life.

Bitterness is the poison we take hoping someone else will die. Release it and stay in your lane.

Unbelievable. For our audiences out there, you see it is the beginning of summer. If you're tuning in to this when we first recorded, we are one week into summer. What a brilliant question for you to ask your kids, your grandkids, your great-grandkids. “What are you reading this summer? Would you like to earn some extra money?” My father did the same for me. We would rather do other stuff, but he motivated us and engaged us to do it.

Let me tell you a little bit about Merle. Merle is an experienced organizational development manager. He has a history of working in the industrial automation industry. Right now, his greatest love is encouraging others to discover and be confident in their best self. That is done through teaching, training, and understanding the humanness of every individual. I love that you're a teacher, Merle. Can you tell us where you're teaching?

For the last over twenty years, I was an adjunct at several different universities, Tracy, while I was doing full-time work. I had become in the last four years, a full-time instructor at Northern Kentucky University here in Northern Kentucky. I teach things like organizational development. I teach HR type things, and those are the other things I've taught all the way through. Along with that, then I have also, for the last seventeen years, been an instructor for the Dale Carnegie course and teach a lot of those courses also. Again, all of that came to fruition during that, because that crushed my moment.

I cannot, and for those of you who didn't say it, but How to Win Friends and Influence People was a Dale Carnegie book. Here you are, and here we are. Books get in you, and they become part of your DNA. Speaking of which, Charles, in addition to Life is Tremendous. He gave a speech called The Price of Leadership, and that is what we are really here to talk about. He gave this speech, and I transcribed it because it was one of his most famous speeches, and it's called The Price of Leadership.

He says, “There are four things that as a leader, you are going to have to pay the price if you're really going to be a leader and not just a leader in name only.” The first of those four, Merle, is loneliness. We have all heard that it is lonely at the top, but can you unpack for us throughout your career? What has loneliness looked like for you, and maybe a word to share with our audiences if they are in a season of loneliness?

Understanding The Pain Of Leadership Loneliness

Fortunately, Tracy, I have a lot of people around me, friends and family, and because I learned how to connect well with people, I like to be around people, and they like to be around me. Yet as a leader, there are times that you cannot just lean on what everybody else wants. There are times that you have to make some choices, and not even necessarily ethical choices, but you have to make some choices about what you want to do, who you want to be. There is a measure of loneliness with that. In certain positions, I believe you also find you have to make some choices. There is a gentleman, the head coach of the University of Georgia football team named Kirby Smart.

Now I am not even a University of Georgia fan, so I have no dog in the hunt with that. He said things like that. When you're a leader, you have to make some hard decisions that will affect people you love and care about. He also said, “You will be misunderstood about decisions you make, and you're not going to have the ability to explain your position.” The other thing he said is, “You will be misunderstood when you're trying to do your best to help the most of it.” There will always be people that say, “What's wrong with you?” That, I believe, really expresses a part of loneliness also, the reader's face.

I am so glad you brought that up, because that is a fact. Sometimes the people that you're there helping the most are the ones that are snapping at you. It is what it is. It is good to be that aware. What would you recommend? Isn't it great that you read How to Win Friends and Influence People, so you understood how the body and having people around you is that really what gets you through that time period when the very people that you're trying to help the most are the ones that are really giving you the most guff?

Certainly that support group that we have, and I have immediate family, but I also have friends that are wise friends that will be sounding boards to me. Another thing that has really helped me is that I ask myself the questions and try to ask them honestly. “Am I doing this for me or am I doing it for my well-being?” Another question I ask is, do I see things that are ahead that perhaps other people do not have the opportunity to see? I really look at my heart's motive. If I am doing it for my well-being. I look at even the classes I teach. Is it all about me, or is it about them? That helps me as I go through that loneliness.

As a teacher, that is such a beautiful thing because a lot of times we get very caught up in “Making our point or sharing,” but I love that you look at that. You have to look at them. Sometimes the more lonely we feel, it is because we are looking at just ourselves and turning our gaze away and realizing this is really not about you. I love that that is your secret sauce for pulling yourself out of that.

True vision isn't a complex five-year plan. It is seeing what needs to be done right now and doing it.

A good friend has made the comment to me. She says, “Less of me, my, mine, and I, and more of they, them, us, and we.” Those are words that have helped me. It is not about me. It is about the people. We do.

When you frame it like that, you include the body collective, which is how it should be. I love it. All right, so loneliness. The next thing you talked about was weariness. As you said, just like there will always be people that push back on you. He also told me, “Tracy, in life, you're going to have some people that go far and above what you expect from them, but you're also going to have a lot of people that do not do what is expected of them.” He was just being very pragmatic, not negative. This is dealing with people. He would tell me, “You have to be careful because it is very draining and you can get weary.” What does weariness look like to you, and how do you stay shored up and strong so you can lead these young entrepreneurs and your family?

Overcoming Weariness Through Dedicated Practice

Many years ago in college, I heard a statement by Longfellow. Now, I am not an expert on that literature, but it was a statement that stuck with me. It goes like this. The heights of great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night. You realize that sometimes you have to get up a little bit early, and you have to get up and stay up a little bit later.

At times you have to do some work when other people are playing, and it is not that you're better than them. Everybody likes a good product, Tracy. Everybody likes that. “I wish I could talk like that.” Everybody likes that, but not everybody sees what goes on behind. John Wooden, the famous basketball coach of UCLA, quoted a poem that I do not have word for word, but it was the story of a champion. It goes something like this.

“You look at how they play, you wonder how they do it, how they do all those motions or how they would choose it. If you look behind the scenes, you will see most of it is practice, and the rest of it is work.” You just realize if you want to do certain things and be an influence, there has to be some hidden time. Yeah, it can be a bit taxing, but you do learn to energize yourself in different ways. That is what a leader has to do. Cannot we knock everybody else to energize you? In your times of weariness, you have to pull in energy for yourself.

You have to change out your batteries when you need to. You mentioned what we were talking about before we hit record for the second time. The new common denominator is success. It is all about habits. Success is successful because success does the things that failure does not want to do. It is wearisome, but I love what you said. By doing that, I can remember my dad telling me, because I would be like, “Don’t you get tired of this, isn't it?”

He would speak 250 days a year and speak in the morning, speak in the afternoon, and, almost like Elvis, three showings every day forever and ever. He is like, “I know, Tracy, but when you're doing what you're supposed to do, work is more fun than fun. You just have to take care of yourself, but that becomes its own self. Closed-loop system where you're pouring in, you have others pouring into you, and you're pouring out.”

Tracy, I always find what you said there about doing what you're wired to do. I always wonder how many people in life are able to do that? I ask that question in barbershops and different places. I will say, “How many people do you think really get to do something they really enjoy?” A lot of times, we think it is probably about 10% or 12% of folks that actually get to do that. Where I worked, I used to have this evaluation test. We would give new potential employees, and we were trying to decide whether to hire them. We would give a list of the tasks that they were going to be doing in that job.

We found, Tracy, that there were certain tasks that people would do that were termed as energizing tasks. They got energy from them. There are other tasks that they do that are draining on them. When every one of us can look at what we do and say, “I have always got to do some draining. That is life.” When you can do the things that bring you energy, as Tracy, I teach folks, I said, “If you put me with spreadsheets all day long, I would figure out how to do it, but I would be pretty drained.” When I get to do and interact with people, that brings me energy. In the weariness, it is finding energy. In those ways.

The Power Of Pure Focus and Emotional Abandonment

Around people that are, what do they say? Some people brighten a room when they enter it. Others when they leave, so it is kind of one of those things. Protect your energy and give energy to other people because people are looking for it. Somewhere we talked about loneliness. We talked about weariness. The next term he used was abandonment. It is not like alienation of abandoning a marriage or a pet. Abandonment was singular soul focus.

You'll be misunderstood when you're trying to help people the most. That is the price of leadership.

I can remember again when I was in high school going down, and my father was kind of reflective in his basement office. I am like, “What's up?” He is like, “Tracy, on any given day, I do more to contribute to my failure than my success.” His point to me was, every day, you must take every moment, every thought. The Bible has a term about seizing it, holding it captive, and making sure that your energy is really dedicated to that thing and abandoning what you like and want to do. In favor of what you ought and need to do. How do you stay focused, Merle?

In the writings of Viktor Frankl and his book that he wrote on finding your purpose in life, there is a great statement that he made, Tracy. It said, everything can be taken from a person, but one thing. If somebody would read about my life that he wrote, they would see that he went through the Holocaust, he lost his family, lost his business practice, lost his house, everything. He said everything can be taken from a person. One thing. The power to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. Whenever I hear that, I am very much rebuked on the inside when I start to moan, groan, and complain about why me.

I said, “I really do not have much room to talk after it's here and that man says that.” I get to choose the attitude, and the quicker I make the choice to choose the attitude that is best and right, the less that I waste emotion and time and energy that goes back to energize myself. You have to choose the right thoughts. It does not mean that we are unrealistic. I think there it's fake positive-ness, but it's just learning, “This is what I got. This is what I can do. I go with it.” That has been a huge help for me.

Probably one other thing, Tracy, along that line on abandonment is sometimes the people we teach, the people we do our best to help, do not choose to follow. Sometimes people that we're close allies with decide to go a different way. I really had to struggle with that. There was a statement I heard years ago that helped me teach the teachable and reach the reachable. Teach the ones that want to be taught, present to the ones that are open, and the ones that are not. They're not bad people. There are other ways.

I am not the guru of all knowledge in the world. It is okay, but do not focus on the ones. It's like when I was a young man, Tracy, we would have training, and maybe there were supposed to be 25 people there, and 12 people show up, and I am like, “Where are all these other people?” One day I said, “Merle, come on, man, talk to the people who are there, take good care of them, do not ignore the others.” You will have some abandonment sometimes, but it is okay. You teach the ones you can teach.

I love that. Teach the teachable, reach the reachable. For those of you who have not read, yes, you must read Life is Tremendous. You must read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. You must read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. That is the book that he is referring to. When you read that, I can tell when people have not read that. I am like, “Before we do, read that book first, if you will.”

That is one of the top five books that has changed my life and so many other people's lives. You talked about people showing up. Charles would say that he would do meetings and maybe there should have been a thousand, and maybe there were a hundred. They're like, “Sorry, Charlie.” He goes, “Thank God those thumb suckers did not show up. They would have ruined our time together.” He is like, “It is what it is.” Whosoever here is meant to be here. We are going to have a more direct, more intimate time.

I am thankful for it. That was always the greatest. I am so glad you brought it, and the other thing I get a lot of moral people is, “How come we're doing this and somebody else isn't?” I do not know. Do not compare yourself. You're not God. You do not know. If God's told them to do this, you do not know if they're trying to do it and they have just not received favor. Just abandon that. All you can answer for is your heart, your modus, and your attitude. As Viktor Frankl said in Charles, “You can be happy, miserable, or miserable miserable. It is your choice.”

I would add just one other thing on that is I believe that many of us as people get very drained when people disappoint us. We get bitterness that just eats away at us, wears us down. Just a couple of thoughts on that. There is a very pungent statement I heard years ago that really makes sense. It said, “Bitterness is the poison I take in hope that somebody else will die.” If I get all wound up and I get all bitter and angry, I am the one that's hurting. I am the one that's hurting myself.

The other thought is the biblical reference where, in Romans, Paul said, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay.” When there are people that have done wrong, I do not like it. It bothers me, but I am not the judge and jury. I do not know everything. Why do I want to try to do what God says was His job? I think He's capable of handling a situation. “Merle, you just take care of it. You stay in your lane, take care of your stuff.” That has helped me calm down over things.

Success is built behind the scenes. It is simple practice, focused work, and rising while others sleep.

Defining Vision As Daily Operational Action

That's really abandonment, not just focusing on what you need to, but putting down what can really poison your spirit. It makes you weary and it makes you, and it's a distraction. It's all those things. Thank you. We need to abandon the bad stuff. Not just to focus on the good stuff, but really get rid of it. Merle, last is that he talked about was vision. Again, I would, as a little girl, hear vision and think, “These guys, these Dale Carnegie's, these Ziegler's, these Norman Metson Pales, they're visionaries. That's not me.” My father would always say, “No, Tracy, vision is just seeing what needs to be done and then doing it.” A lot of people see what needs to be done, but very few will end up doing it. What keeps you on point for what is to come and where you're going?

My best is to wake up every morning with the idea that it's a brand new day and to realize that different people across my path that day, some for five seconds, some maybe for longer. How can I be a part, be a help to that person I meet? It could just be a word. It could be a connection that could start a long friendship. There are a variety of different ways, but I've been fortunate enough to believe in the fact that there are divine interventions, and we do not always know the power of the words that we have. Example. Tracy, when did your father pass away?

October 16, 2008.

I first read the book in about 1969 and all, so there were several years, but your father had no idea the influence it had on my mother to promote reading. He had no idea. He could not see where it goes on. We do not always know the effect. That type of “I am not really the long-term vision guy. That does not really fit me.” Are there other people that good at that? I say my vision for today and my vision encounters. How can I be a benefit to the person I come in contact with? Sometimes I know I did. Sometimes I do not know that, but that is okay.

I love that you brought vision right to just today, because today is still unknown. I think sometimes, where are you going to be in a year, 3, 5 years? I am like you. That is just not in my coding. If you made me sit down and do that, it is just not my thing. I can really get intent on today and who's passed, and I really like that approach to it.

Also, Tracy, when you mentioned that, I am sure you can do this, and I can do this, and the audience can do this. You can look back to some, if you want to call them divine appointments. I can look back to some people I crossed paths with, and because I had conversations, it opened up doors of opportunity to me. There was an opportunity presented, say, “We need somebody to do this.” I thought, “I do not know how to do this, but I will try.” That opened up doors of opportunity. It is a little bit like that joke that they tell about the guy that stuck up on the roof, flood coming. Everybody's heard that joke.

They send different boats by, and he says, “No, God is going to take care of me.” God drowns and all. He had two or three opportunities and took advantage. Gets to heaven and he says, “Lord, you did not protect me.” He says, “I sent 2 or 3 people to help you. Let's try to help you.” We're looking for this pie in the sky or this signal. It is really what's right there. What's in your hand that you can do. That is great. That has worked well for me. It may not work for everybody else, but it's worked for me. What's here right now?

I love that word tangent. That's good. It is almost a parable of the sower. You do not know where the seeds go, and you do not know when the vision may not be in our lifetime. Certainly, we have the hope that everything we do is stored up where moths are not going to eat it. These are not going to steal it, and rust is not going to destroy it. That's what our great hope is, our great vision is. Huge. Excellent. We covered loneliness, weariness, abandonment, and vision. Is there anything else regarding the price of leadership that we have not touched on that you would like to share with our audiences?

When we realize the opportunity to make a difference for a person's life, I believe it was D.L. Moody said, the best monument that you can have for your life and what you do is another person whose life has been changed and influenced by you. I understand that we live in an economy, have to be businesses, and have to be profitable. I have got that. At the same time, leadership, far from being the title, is influence. It's, could I use my life and the gifts I've been given to be a benefit to another person to make their life better, not because of me but just to pass on the gifts I began with. That, if there is a price, that is worth the reward to say, “I made a difference for someone.”

You did. I love that, Merle. Merle, how can people get in touch with you?

Leadership is influence, not a title. Use your gifts to make someone else's life better.

They could certainly find me on LinkedIn, Merle Heckman on LinkedIn. There is also the email address, Merle.Heckman@DaleCarnegie.com, as another way to get in touch, but probably LinkedIn is the quickest and easiest way, and I will always respond to people who reach out. I would be honored to.

He does. Merle, I just cannot thank you enough. I am so thankful that we connected who to thank all those years ago. That is just the blessing of our lives that this just keeps paying it forward. I know our audiences out there have heard some tremendous things of encouragement. I want to thank everybody out there for tuning in. If you like what you heard, please be sure and share this with somebody. We love a review that really helps other people find out. Merle said it earlier.

Remember, you're going to be the same person five years from now that you are today, except for two things. The people you meet and the books you read. Just met the tremendous Merle Heckman. I know you're more tremendous already. We've talked about many tremendous books that he shared. Please, everybody, keep on changing the world one book at a time. Merle, thank you again, brother. I look forward to many more conversations on this side of heaven.

My privilege. Thank you, Tracy.

Thanks, everybody. Have a tremendous day.

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About Merle Heckman

Merle Heckman is an experienced Organizational Development Manager with a demonstrated track record in the industrial automation industry. He encourages others to discover and be confident in being their best self. This is done through teaching, training, and understanding each individual's humanity.

Episode 207 - Leaders on Leadership with Merle Heckman