In less than three hours after it was released in the USA this ebook has been made available to members of The Organisations That Matter Learning Network. Seth Godin is one of the world’s marketing Guru’s. No wonder when he is able to attract the calibre of people like Tom Peters to contribute to a free book! Enjoy!
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Recently a participant in a leadership development program for managers asked, “I’ve discovered that ‘respect’ is a core value of mine. What are some practical ways that I can ensure that this value is present in the way that I behave as a manager?”.
The following is the list of suggestions that emerged from the conversation that was conducted with this participant and another four people at their table. It is important to note that the following behaviours can be conducted irrespective of the culture that exists within the organisation.
This list of examples is just a start. Once again it is important to note that these behaviours can be adopted irrespective of the overall culture within the organisation.
What are your examples of how, as a formal leader you have practiced the value of ‘respect’ in your role? How have you catalysed Conversations That Matter®? Or, if you would like more information about how to practice the examples provided above, please let me know.
Again, please add your comments to this article as I would like to learn from your experiences in putting the value of ‘respect’ into action.
Organisational values are too often left to gather dust on office walls. If you are a leader and your organisation has values, how regularly do you bring those values alive in conversations with your team members? The usual response is, “Not very often.” Yet when we ask leaders if they believe in their organisation’s values they reply with a resounding, “Yes!”.
So what is the problem? Why is it that so many leaders struggle to host conversations with their team members about their organisation’s values?
The answer often lies in two issues. Firstly leaders simply forget to take responsibility for keeping their organisational values alive by talking about them with their team members. Such behaviour is simply not on their radar.
Secondly, many leaders aren’t taught how to tell effective stories. It is assumed that leaders know how to tell stories. In part this is true. People DO know how to tell stories. However, telling effective stories is different. Telling effective stories requires some structure.
Thankfully most storytelling structures are quite simple. Here’s one that most of you will remember from your childhood. The structure was effective then, and it is still effective now.
Step 1 – Start the story.
This usually involves setting the scene and context of the story. For stories regarding the organisations values you would explain a situation and set the scene that you are going to explain how the organisation’s values can be used in real situations.
Step 2 – Explain the middle section of the story
This usually involves the details about what happened and who did what. It is where the rationale behind how the values were used would be explained.
Step 3 – Finish the story
This section provide the “So what!” part of the story. What was the result? In this case, what was the impact of using the organisation’s values to guide decision making and actions.
These three steps effectively catalyse Conversations That Matter®.
An example
Start
When I was on the executive team of a medium sized business some legislation was passed that affected $14million of our revenue. In 12 months time it would be gone. This revenue directly paid the salaries of over 200 people.
Middle
Having already performed some scenario planning on this outcome, the executive team met to confirm what would be done for the staff to ensure that the values of integrity, teamwork, service and community were upheld throughout a difficult period. A decision was made to use the organisation’s training and development budget to up skill the staff in resume writing, interview skills and outplacement programs to ensure that as many staff as possible could find new jobs.
End
All staff who wished to access the support were provided with the training and outplacement support that they required. While it was a difficult period for everyone involved staff consistently reported that while they wished that the situation had not occurred, they were delighted with the support that the organisation had provided them throughout their transition. The vast majority of staff found new jobs and opportunities that fitted with their career aspirations.
A significant benefit of storytelling is that it helps people to makes sense of situations. After you have told a story it is worth asking people if the story has triggered any similar examples that also might show the organisation’s values in use. When listening to their stories listen for the start, middle and end. Not everyone tells stories correctly so they might miss out some important parts of the story. If you are listening you can help them out. For example, if someone shares a story but leaves out the end, ask, “What happened? What difference did your actions make?”. You’ll be amazed at the difference asking such questions can make to the quality of your team members storytelling.
Using this technique can create highly engaged and flowing workplace conversations. Without even knowing it your team members will start to deepen their understanding of what your organisation’s values really mean in action. So, set aside 15 minutes once a month in your team meetings and see if you can bring your organisation’s values alive through storytelling. Follow the simple start, middle and end structure and you’ll be surprised just how effective it can be. Please leave a comment or let me know how you go using the three steps for organisational storytelling.
Preparing powerful questions can be one of the most important practices that a leader can include in their repertoire of leadership skills. Powerful questions have the following four characteristics:
– They are genuine, meaning that we are open to whatever answers are provided
– They are thought provoking
– They invite another’s contribution
– They act as a call to create
It is relatively easy to identify whether or not a powerful question has been used because the five outcomes from powerful questions include:
– New thinking
– New solutions
– New partnerships
– New products and services
– Action that would not have otherwise occurred
On the surface creating powerful questions may seem easy. My experience has taught me otherwise. Just like any skill, the ability to develop powerful questions takes time and effort. In programs where we teach people about the importance of developing their questioning skills, the participants often experience difficulty in generating questions. People often say, “I’m really good at answering questions, I’m just not very good at creating them!”
We encourage people to adopt a practice whereby any meeting that you are about to attend, you spend some time thinking about the types of questions that you could consider asking. When adopting this practice there are at least two levels of questions that should be considered. These are the ‘Big Picture’ or strategic questions, and the second level is the action or event level questions. Most people have a tendency toward the action questions which often create a cycle of problems, questions and actions that may not be connected with the strategic possibilities that may exist.
Developing your questioning skills will enable your to develop the capability to catalyse and conduct more Conversations That Matter®.
For example I recently conducted a program where a team of participants were helping another participant (Dan) to prepare a list of powerful questions for a meeting that he was about to conduct with a team member Judith, the following week. Dan was an experienced manager and had authorised leave for Judith who had been with the organisation for about four months and had just completed a training program for her role. Judith had proven herself to be highly competent in her short time with the organisation. Two other staff were to share Judith’s duties while she was on leave. Dan had asked Judith if she was happy to train the two people to do her work and she had agreed to do so.
Dan was happy that he’d been able to allow Judith to go on leave and was pleased that two other staff had been trained to do her work. However, on the first day that Judith was on leave he discovered that while the two staff had been ‘shown’ what to do, neither of them had actually been given the opportunity to ‘do’ the work in their ‘training’ and therefore had little idea about how to do Judith’s work.
As a participant in our program Dan was preparing his list of questions with the help of the rest of the participants in his group. Initially, the questions that the group generated included:
o Did you know that the two staff didn’t really know what to do when you were on leave?
o What did you expect would happen on the first day of your leave?
o Why didn’t you train them properly?
To me, these questions were very much at the action/event level because they are focused on the detail that is ‘right in front of our eyes’. In this example it was clear that the staff had not been trained properly because their performance was lower than expected. Action-event level questions are like zooming in on an issue with a video camera. The problem with starting at action-event level questions is that if you are looking at the wrong picture you will zoom in on the wrong details!
Such responses are quite normal from our program participants because, once again, most of us are used to answering questions rather than designing them. When I asked the group how they would have responded to the questions themselves if they had been Judith, the group (including Dan) reported that they would probably feel like they were being attacked. I then asked Dan if Judith was a specialist in the field of training. He said “No.”
Dan had a sudden ‘a-ha’ moment and then said, “…yet I expected Judith to know exactly how to train someone in her job. Just because she could do her job doesn’t mean that she’d be able or competent to train someone else to do it. I have assumed for years that people could train others to do their job. Some people probably can, but not everybody.”
I then asked, “What performance outcome does your organisation desire when staff are ‘back-filled’ while on leave?” This was a strategic question, a ‘Big Picture’ question. “The same level of performance.” was Dan’s answer. “What system has the organisation created to ensure that the performance outcome that you desire will occur?” I continued.
“Well, other than staff training other staff to back-fill them, there really isn’t one. And come to think of it, we regularly have performance issues when staff go on leave, which then leads us to be reluctant to approve leave in the first place.”
Strategic questions enable us to zoom out, to take in the whole picture and to see how the system is contributing to the issue, not just a single individual.
We then focused back on the questions that Dan was preparing for his meeting with Judith. When generating the questions a member of the group then said, “Maybe it isn’t a meeting between Dan and Judith that we should be preparing these questions for. Maybe it is a meeting with between Dan and the rest of the organisation’s leadership team?”.
Dan had another ‘a-ha’ moment. “You’re right! That’s exactly who we should be preparing this list of questions for. My focus was in the wrong spot. It was very easy to blame Judith, but actually those of us leading the organisation need to take responsibility for this issue. Under-performance when people have gone on leave has been a problem for years.”
For the first time Dan’s thinking on this issue had shifted. Nothing more than a shift in focus from creating answers to creating questions and a couple of strategic questions had enabled Dan to think differently.
Finally after generating a list of questions for the Leadership Team (including both Strategic and action-event level questions), Dan was asked by another group member what his intentions regarding meeting with Judith would be. He answered, “I’ll ask her about her holiday and fill her in about what’s been going on while she was away. I’m not going to focus on the training, not yet, anyway. I was blaming her but it wasn’t her fault. It was ‘our’ fault, including mine. When the time is right I’ll seek her input to the new system that we clearly need to create.”
In conclusion I asked Dan and his group how they would feel if they were Judith when she had the ‘new’ conversation that Dan now had planned to have with her. “Great! I’d feel like Dan actually cared about me and was interested in my holiday.”
Think about the different outcomes that the two potential conversations with Judith would most likely create. Which outcome do you think is more likely to enhance Judith’s engagement with the organisation, and which one do you think is more likely to reduce her engagement? Clearly the new conversation that Dan was planning to have with Judith is more likely to enhance Judith’s engagement with the organisation.
Preparing questions before meetings is a very powerful practice to include in your repertoire of leadership behaviours. Remember to prepare some strategic questions, and as soon as possible to introduce them to your conversation. A simple, yet effective action-event level question to be asked after discussing your strategic questions is, “What will we do next?”.
If you are trying this practice for the first time, please let us know how you go. In addition, please share the questions that you used that seemed to be effective in helping the people with whom you are working to shift their focus to a more strategic level.
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.
Questions are powerful. First they enable the possible to be imagined, and then they enable the imagined to be created.
To illustrate I refer to the amazing Flash Dance Mob that occurred at Oprah’s 24th year season opening party in Michigan Avenue, Chicago. As part of the celebration the Black Eyed Peas performed their hit “I Got a Feeling” to the 21,000 strong crowd. Unbeknown to Oprah who was on stage with the Black Eyed Peas, several hundred dancers were strategically placed throughout the crowd. The crowd had been informed that if they wanted to join in the dance then they should simply follow the moves of the people around them. The result was that the majority of the crowd joined in the dance, started by a single dancer strategically placed in front of the stage. If you haven’t seen the clip, turn up your volume and watch it now.
It was an amazing spectacle! The beauty of the crowd dancing together was that it embodies action. There is no denying it, the whole crowd took action, danced together and created an amazing spectacle and surprise for Oprah.
So how does something like this dance get created? Quite simply, someone (probably the producer Australian Michael Gracey) asked a question, something like, “What if we could get the whole crowd to dance together?”. This question would have sparked the imagination of those people who were involved in the conversation, more questions would have followed and eventually a plan would have been created. At the start of the dance no-one, including Michael Gracey would have known that the dance would actually work. Yet it did work. And it all started with a question.
‘”What if” questions are often powerful because they allow people to imagine what might be possible. What if questions often lead to innovation. Unfortunately I can’t remember the source, but I once learned that innovation comes from getting something and putting it with something different. In this case, dancers were put together with a crowd and voila, innovation occurred. Questions played a central role in enabling the innovation to be realised.
When was the last time that you asked a powerful question? What happened, what did you create and what something did you put with something different to create something new?
Strategic conversations are conversations that include anywhere from 12 to over 1,000 people. These conversations are designed to enable large groups of people to quickly ‘get on the same page’. This can include gaining clarity regarding a desired future, understanding the current situation in the context of the desired future, to then agreeing on the steps to be taken to move forward. New technology including twitter has suddenly and exponentially increased the power and possibilities for strategic conversations.
Recently Dr Andrew O’Brien from Organisations That Matter facilitated a strategic conversation that was hosted by the CEO of Telecom New Zealand as part of their Customer Summit process. Twitter was used to include people from ‘outside the room’ and proved to be an outstanding success. Our understanding is that this was a world first for this type of conversation.
If you are interested in finding out more about that specific conversation, check out this blog that was posted by a participant.
As a facilitator of strategic conversations is it exciting to see the possibilities that new technology is bringing to ‘face to face’ communication. The question for you to consider is, ‘when do you plan to host a strategic conversation?’.
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“We have Happy Feet starting this week.”, said my seven year old daughter as we sat down for dinner.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s a program at school where we see how many laps of the track around the school that we can complete. It goes for two weeks.”
“What part of the school day will you get to participate in this program?” I asked.
“It starts this Thursday and we’ll do it at morning playtime.”
“So you don’t have to do it?”
“No, I want to and I’m going to do it every day. I want to run like you. It’s good for my health and fitness.”
This conversation took place the night after I had completed the Melbourne Marathon. I can’t explain how happy I felt to hear my daughter spontaneously start this conversation. In all honesty, a spontaneous conversation like this one makes me feel even happier than when I complete a marathon (and believe me, I usually feel pretty happy when I get to the finish line!).
My life is so busy and hectic that if I didn’t have goals like completing a minimum of two marathons per year, it is quite likely that I might not do any exercise at all. One of my life’s purposes, however, is to set a good example to my four children about health and fitness. Completing two marathons per year is a concrete goal that I set myself that enable me to live that purpose. A conversation like the one described above provides clear evidence to me that my purpose is working. Over time, examples like this provide more and more motivation for me to continue to ‘live my purpose’.
In the Integrated Personal Planning programs that we provide many participants are very good at identifying goals for themselves. However many people are not clear about the higher purpose to which their goals relate. For example, many people may have a health and fitness goal to lose a certain number of kilograms. For this example, let’s say five kilograms. Unless they relate this goal to a higher purpose these people are at considerable risk of achieving their goal, but then slipping back into the bad habits that caused them to be overweight in the first place. The result; within a very short timeframe they put the five kilograms (and often more) back on. This is a familiar story for many, many people.
Clarity about your purpose may mean that more than one goal is created to help you to ‘live’ your purpose. If your goal is to lose five kilograms, maybe your purpose might be to live a healthy and more balanced lifestyle so that you can physically do want you want to do. For example, you may have one goal to lose five kilograms, and another goal to maintain your weight for five years after you have achieved your first goal, and another again to complete one holiday per year that involves some hiking. All these goals would work together to assist you to ‘live’ your purpose.
Linking goals to your purpose reduces the risk of oscillating between success and failure as it relates to your goals. Another function of having a clear purpose is that it enables you to continue to set new goals as you near the achievement of your current ones. For example, I always ensure that I know the next marathon that I will be doing after I complete the current one that I am booked in to run. This ensures that when I finish my current marathon (and achieve a goal) that I don’t fall into the trap of saying to myself, “Oh, I’ll get back into training when I work out what marathon I’ll do next.” Six, twelve, 24 months etc. could easily ‘fly by’ and before I knew it I would have stopped living my purpose and become unhealthy. Maintaining tension with ongoing goals as they relate to your purpose can be very, very powerful!
It is important that I note that I am not advocating that you all go out and start running marathons. That’s just what works for me. In fact health and fitness goals are relative to your current situation, so it may in fact be a bigger achievement for many of you to run/walk five kilometres than it is for me to run 42kms. Maybe swimming is your thing, or maybe it is averaging a certain number of exercise to music classes per week over a 6 month period. Having goals is what is important, and relating them to a higher level reason for doing them (i.e. your purpose) is even more powerful.
Many people also get stuck with regard to working out their purpose as it relates to their goals. Purpose is not unique. Is my purpose to set a good example of being healthy and fit to my four children (as well as being healthy and fit to be able to do whatever it is I physically want to be able to do in my life) particularly unique? No, it isn’t. Is my goal to run a minimum of two marathons per year also unique? No it isn’t. What IS unique is how I bring those goals into reality. The way I train and the marathons in which I choose to compete are unique to me. What is also unique is how living my purpose and achieving my goals contributes to me creating the future that I desire (see The Power of Personal Vision by Andrew O’Brien for more information).
My challenge to you is to identify the goals that you are currently striving to achieve and then articulating to yourself what higher purpose those goals are serving. The following three questions can be helpful in helping you to work out your purpose:
1) Why is this goal important to me?
2) What are the benefits of achieving this goal?
3) How does achieving this goal relate to the future that I want to create for myself?
Please feel free to share your thoughts with our learning community because the more examples that we have that highlight the relationship between purpose and goals, the more other members of our community will be able to work out the relationship between their goals and their purpose for themselves.
Truth to Power is the capacity to be honest, forthright and candid with those poeple who hold more real or perceived power than yourself. Gary uses a real life conversation from an elite sport team where dialogue skills were used to challenge a shared mental model about leadership. Gary then relates this conversation to the businessworld and highlights the power of using dialogue to support truth to power in an organisational context.
“Before I was announced Captain of the club”, shared John, “Whenever an issue came up, I would always first look at the Captain for his response. I even did this when someone said something that was funny – I’d check the Captain’s response before I said anything. It was as if I didn’t even have my own mind. When I look back now I realise that I had a view that because the Captain was the Captain, he’d automatically know the answer to whatever issues were raised. You know, somehow he’d been dipped into the font of all wisdom.”
John continued, “Then I became Captain and one of the first things I noticed was people looking at me and waiting for my reaction and I realised that they were now doing to me what I had been doing to the previous Captain. And it wasn’t just a few of the players, it was everyone! But I know that I’m not the font of all wisdom because I’m learning too. If I already knew everything about being Captain then how could I improve over the next three to four years? I can’t imagine that I won’t improve which therefore means that I’m not as good now as I will be in the future. This also means that right now I won’t know the best way to handle every issue that comes up. I’ll know a few because I’ve been around a while now, but I won’t know everything. The pressure you feel to have an answer, “the answer” is incredible!”
After a period of time John added, ” When I wasn’t the Captain I recall a few times when I actually did have a different opinion about what we should do, but I never raised them because I thought to myself, “Oh well. The Captain knows best so we should do what he thinks. Otherwise he wouldn’t be Captain.” Guys, please don’t do that, if you have a different view to me I need to hear it. My view might be wrong. More importantly when we put our different views together maybe we’ll all see something better that none of us could see on our own.”
What an insightful series of comments. John (not his real name) is the Captain of an elite sports team with whom I have worked in Australia. These comments were made in relation to an explicit conversation that I was facilitating with John and the rest of the Leadership Team with whom he was working. The purpose of the conversation was to raise their individual and collective awareness of their mental models regarding leadership. The other members of his Leadership Team remarked that they too had shared the “font of all wisdom” mental model regarding the person holding the title of Captain. They also all agreed how ridiculous such a mental model was and how debilitating it probably was to their performance and their capacity to present a different view to those in positions of power. Yet they also agreed, and I observed in practice, just how difficult such a mental model is to stop from a behavioural perspective.
This brief conversation provides a detailed insight into the collective mental models about leadership that are both flawed and limiting in the context of Truth to Power. Truth to Power is the capacity for people who have less real or perceived power to be honest and direct with people who hold more power. In the example provided by John and his team-mates above it is little wonder people find it difficult to hold alternate views with those in power. Similarly it is little wonder that those in power often behave in a defensive way when people present a different view to the one they hold. Quite literally the issue of ‘saving face’ becomes real.
Elite sportspeople are often described as “jocks who can’t think for themselves”. My experience could not be further from that description. The elite sportspeople with whom I have worked closely have been, to a person people who have been intelligent and willing to learn. Very rarely, including in the corporate world, where we work extensively have I experienced such an open and honest conversation as the one described above. John’s willingness to be vulnerable to his team-mates by suspending (please see the blog on the Seven Skills of Dialogue) his mental models about his role and how they had changed as a result of becoming the Captain was a privilege to experience. John’s intention for sharing this information was to open the door as far he possibly could to enable his fellow Leadership Team members to be honest with him and to not default their views to him simply because he was the Captain.
While we never used the term ‘Dialogue’ the Leadership Team were actually holding a dialogue about their individual and collective mental models about leadership. John was concerned that if he wasn’t explicit about his experience of transitioning not being the Captain to becoming the Captain, then it would not be until the next Captain was in his shoes that he would understand this perplexing situation. While the leadership team still has some considerable distance to travel in their development the fact that this conversation had taken place meant that John could refer to it whenever he sensed that the rest of the Leadership Team were not being completely honest with him about their views on any given issue.
While this example is provided from an elite sport context, the same phenomenon occurs throughout the government and corporate sectors. One of the only ways to release the choke hold on people that the mental models described above can have on people’s behaviour is to develop the capacity to dialogue. My view and experience is that if the capacity to dialogue can be developed within the elite sport arena, then it can also be developed in any other sector. ‘Not enough time’ is often used an excuse for not developing the capacity to dialogue. I can’t think of an industry where time is less available and the pressure as high as in the elite sport arena. The point of leverage for change will come from both those in positions of power and those with less power to trust the learning environment created through dialogue to collectively release the stranglehold of these debilitating mental models.
What are your experiences with holding conversations regarding your individual and collective mental models regarding leadership? Have you ever had them? How do you think they would unfold?
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One of the most important roles that a leader has is the development of the people that the leaders serve. Often this means letting those people take the lead even though their level of performance may not be at the same level as the leaders.
Recently a client (let’s call him John) shared a story where he had battled to resist his own internal urge to ‘takeover’ from one of his team members (let’s call her Amy) when it became apparent that Amy was uncomfortable performing the task she had agreed to perform.
Amy had agreed to be the host and welcome a High Court Judge to their team, and then thank and provide a summary of the judge’s speech to conclude the evening. After struggling through her initial welcome John had become quite concerned that Amy’s performance was not up to his standards, despite this being Amy’s first time at performing such a role. As his discomfort rose, so too did his desire to ‘save’ Amy by taking over from her. John knew that he could have done a better job and was concerned about how Amy’s introduction would reflect on the organsiation if it wasn’t rectified for the concluding sections of the event.
Taking this type of action in this instance would have by many people’s standards reflected great leadership. After all, who wants top run the risk of their organsiation looking poor because of someone’s poor performance? Something inside John, possibly his social intelligence, told him to ‘hold his nerve’ and to do nothing. That is right, John consciously decided to do ‘nothing’ (which, if we wanted to get technical, is in fact a conscious choice to do something that in this example was to not intervene). In leadership the choice to do nothing is often far more difficult than the choice to do something!
John’s intuition was justified as Amy recovered her poor welcome address by completing an outstanding thank you and summary of the the judge’s speech. The judge even commented on the quality of Amy’s listening and was appreciative of the fact that at least one person had clearly listened to him! Amy was delighted and received a significant confidence boost from having worked through her challenge.
When reflecting on the evening John had mentioned to me that no-one other than himself had been aware of the leadership challenge that he had faced that evening. Leadership is very much like that. A great deal of the work by great leaders goes unnoticed, especially when the leader is holding themself back for the sake of the development of a team member.
John also noted how delighted he felt when Amy had ‘delivered’ at the end of the judge’s speech. His delight came from multiple sources. The first was that he was delighted for Amy because he knew that she would have been disappointed with her welcome and introduction (which she later confirmed) and that she would have been stressing about the summary and concluding remarks (which she also confirmed). To overcome those stresses and to perform so well was exciting because it showed Amy that she could recover from a poor start and it would also give her confidence moving forward into her next development activities. The second source for John’s delight was that he had been his own master in this little episode. On previous occasions he had stepped in and ‘saved the day’, or so he had thought. After this experience his thoughts about the previous ones were, “What if, instead of saving the day, I had actually reduced the development of those people so that I could look good?” It is an interesting question, isn’t it!
Leadership is not always about being the person out the front making all the noise. Often, true leadership comes from having the personal mastery to let others lead. In this way, doing ‘nothing’ can be just as effective as doing ‘something’.
