Interviewed by Dr Andrew O’Brien, Gary Ryan, author of the new book What Really Matters For Young Professionals!, shares insights on each of the 15 practices featured in the book. This interview includes practical tips to enable you to accelerate your career.
Find out more information about the book at www.orsgthatmatter.com/WRMFYPBook
Gary shares three key lessons from his work with children that adults
could do well to understand. The three lessons are:
1) Everyone is a leader
2) The Figure 8 of Leadership
3) Being responsible for your choices
Over the years I have had the good fortune to have been asked to provide some leadership development sessions for children. I usually work with adults and many of those adults are highly educated so we often go into quite complex areas when we facilitate leadership programs. Working with children therefore poses a considerable challenge. How do we distil quite complex information into an easily understood format for children?
The answer lies in having the capacity to understand leadership in such a way that it can be focussed into some simple concepts. Through some trial and error I have discovered some concepts that seem to work, with interesting feedback from the adults who have witnessed the programs.
Three key concepts have emerged as being the ones that children seem to be able to embrace:
1) Everyone is a leader
2) The Figure 8 of Leadership
3) Being responsible for your choices
1) Everyone is a leader
Over time I have found some interesting trends when working with children. When I have asked them to raise their hands if they believe that they are a leader or could be one in the future, virtually all the children raise their hand. When I then ask them, “Who are leaders?” they unanimously respond, “We are!”.
What response do you think that I usually hear from adults?
Very few adults raise their hand to indicate that they think that they are a leader.
For children, the concept that everyone is a leader and they have to lead themselves seems relatively natural, yet for adults it seems (for many) quite foreign. When we facilitate leadership education for adults one of our key themes is that you can’t lead others if you can’t lead yourself. My experience has taught me that children understand this idea, so we adults have a responsibility to continue to help them understand this concept by re-enforcing that they are, in fact leaders. To do this, find them making positive choices and recognise them for it. The importance of choices is explained in the second lesson below.
2)Leadership for Kids.pdf The Figure 8 of Leadership
The attached file Leadership for Kids includes a diagram outlining the Figure 8 of Leadership.
While my experience with adults is that it takes them a while to comprehend that leadership can be for bad reasons (equalling poor leadership) just as it can be for good reasons (equalling good leadership), children seem to understand this concept quite easily. This raises the important issue of self leadership, which feeds off the first concept above, that we are all leaders.
In simple terms self-leadership starts with choices. Some choices are good choices and lead to good behaviour, while other choices are poor choices and lead to poor behaviour. The good choices represent good leadership, and the poor choices represent poor leadership. On many levels this is quite simple. And it is! Children seem to understand it and can easily provide many examples of good choices and poor choices which result in good leadership or poor leadership.
The simple power of the model lies in the fact that children have the capacity to start making good choices even if they have made some poor ones. In other words, the start of good leadership is only a choice away. Clearly the reverse is also true; poor leadership is only a choice away as well. I recall a child in one session raising his hand and saying,
“I’ve been making lots of bad choices at school such as not listening to teachers and picking on other kids. I thought that I was a bad person and I didn’t realise that I was a leader. But what you’re saying is that I only have to start making good choices and I can be a good leader. I like that idea. I can do that.”
None of us are perfect. We will all make poor choices. Overall leadership is dependent upon the balance of our choices. Are they generally on the good half of the model, or the poor half? Over time we can consciously develop positive habits to enhance our good leadership through making good choices. Maybe this leadership stuff isn’t so hard after all, which leads to the third and final concept.
3) Being responsible for your choices
Rather than blaming other people or circumstances for our choices, personal responsibility for our choices increases the probability that we will make good choices. Once again children seem to easily understand such a statement. Maybe they see the consequences of their choices more clearly than we adults do because they have so many adults around them monitoring their behaviour. Yet when we become adults often we stop getting that sort of feedback because of many complicated reasons. What if we adults were to actively seek out feedback on the choices that we are making and our resultant behaviours? Maybe such feedback would assist us in better leading ourselves. And we never know, the better we lead ourselves the more likely others may be to follow.
In summary, the key features of Leadership for Kids that may provide some lessons for adults include:
1) We are all leaders;
2) Our choices lie at the heart of effective leadership; and
3) Personal responsibility for our choices will enhance our capacity to lead ourselves and others.
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Dee Hock, founding CEO of VISA International was the driving force behind the creation of one of the most dynamic, complex organisations of our time. Despite being pragmatic in its pursuit for profit, VISA is also a highly values based organisation. Dee Hock was a Servant Leader and his approach is an example to us all.
Dee Hock is one of the most influential people of our time, yet few people are aware of his extra-ordinary influence on creating sustainable organisations through an approach known as Servant Leadership.
Dee Hock was the founder and CEO Emeritus of VISA International, an organisation that to this day is regarded as the most profitable business on earth. Yet most people know very little about VISA such as where it is head-quartered, what its history is, who created it, why it was created and who works for it. To many people’s surprise when they do commence their research on this amazing organisation they discover that it was founded upon an interesting paradox. First, VISA International is an organisation grounded in solid values, second it is an organisation that has a pragmatic pursuit of profit. How can two seemingly opposite pursuits co-exist?
One of the ways that these two opposite pursuits can co-exist is through the concept of Servant Leadership. Robert K Greenleaf first penned this concept in 1970 in an essay titled The Servant as Leader. In many ways the deep concept of Servant Leadership is captured by the test that Robert described in his essay. The test is as follows:
“The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?”
Many leaders practice the opposite of Servant Leadership. They see the people who report to them as being truly ‘sub-ordinate’ (the origin of this word means, “Sub – order”) and they believe that their direct reports exist to ‘serve’ the leader. In contrast Servant Leaders consider that the people who report to them are people who should be served. But service in this context is not about ‘doing their job for them’. Rather, it is about creating an environment that enables a leader’s direct reports to be the best they can be in their service of the organisation.
Servant Leadership also extends to serving the people to whom you report, serving your key stakeholders, your customers (or clients) and the broader community. So this means that while the formal leader is serving their direct reports, their direct reports are also serving them. Another interesting paradox! In addition Servant Leadership does not have to be limited to people who are in formal leadership roles. Servant Leadership can be practised by anyone, at any time, in any role.
Dee Hock published a book titled The Birth of The Chaordic Age in 1999. In 2005 it was re-published under the title One From Many. The book is exactly the same and both versions are currently available through Amazon and other good book-stores. It is well worth adding this book to your personal library.
For many people the concept of Servant Leadership seems natural yet they are not sure how to practice it. Please share your experiences and/or ask questions to enable us all to extend our understanding of Servant Leadership.
