NO MORE MR. NICE GUY

MARCUS LEMONIS USED TO POUR ON THE LOVE. NOW IT'S TIME FOR STRAIGHT TALK. IS THIS THE EVOLUTION OF LEADERSHIP?

- JASON FEIFER

Marcus Lemonis came home feeling crummy. After eight years of hosting his hit TV show The Profit, in which he helped turn around struggling businesses, he'd just finished taping a show for HGTV called The Renovator—where he helped families with their home renovations. “I didn’t really like that,” Lemonis told his wife.

Then he asked her: “Why didn’t I like that?”

“Because people didn’t need you for that,” she replied. “They could renovate their own home, or they could get somebody else to do it. The world wants you to help them make more money, or fix their business, or crack the code to something inside them. And absent that, the world doesn’t really need you.”

This was 2022, and she was right—the show ran for only four episodes.

Lemonis is recalling this story as we sit in his living room, in an elegant townhouse in Manhattan. “It was a pretty harsh thing to say,” he says of his wife’s words. “But she was telling me: Don’t do something everyone else can do. Do what only you can do.”

When Lemonis said that, something hit me. “So,” I said, “what she was really telling you was: You have a function. Lean into that function.”

Leaders love having a mission. But they rarely think about having a function.

Consider the difference in those words. Mission is grand. Noble. Self-imposed. Great humans have missions, and those missions animate them. LeBron James said: “My whole mission in life is to speak for my people.” Maya Angelou wrote: “My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive.” Mission, mission, mission.

Function feels different. It is flat and structural and unsexy. Just one part of a larger system. Machines, tools, teams— these things have functions. They are needed now but replaceable tomorrow. LeBron James and Maya Angelou do not speak of functions. No great human wakes up in the morning aspiring toward a function.

But what if it’s exactly what great leaders need?