“Oh behave!”
The bottom line: Leadership begins with your behavior.
A leader who who tells you the right thing to do is not exercising the same strength of the leader who who shows others how to live and work by example. The leader who shows instead of tells are is exponentially more powerful and impactful.
It turns out that people gravitate toward the standard a leader sets, not the standard a leader requests.
If your organization, leaders, managers, teams, and individuals are not effecting the change, growth, or forward movement you hope for, there is bad news and good news.
The bad news is that you likely play a significant factor in that unwanted equation.
The good news is that changing the directional current of your organizations effectiveness starts with your own behaviors. You do have choice and influence so show the away!
Space Architecture
Physical space has impact. This is a core tenant of traditional architecture. Research indicates that the spaces we occupy account for 30% of our overall human experience regardless of the type of space, such as an office, home, or commercial space.
How a space is specifically shaped, organized, or utilized, will communicate a set of values.
A given space can generate an opportunity or it can fail to create one.
An intentionally defined space becomes a container, holding and delivering an intended experience and function.
Spaces are capable of resonating with people in both positive and negative ways.
A space can engender comfort, order, clarity, and simplicity but it is also capable of hosting a chaotic experience of eclectic complexity like Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, whatever the architect of the space is looking to create.
Intention and care should be applied to space and the structures you put into it as they determines flow, interactions, and experiences, both internal and external to that space.
Keep in mind that space is more than the sole dimension of the physical world. Space impacts all five senses and those senses are primary influencers shaping the social, emotional, and psychological experience.
Architecting spaces where there is human interaction and experience involves a recognition that it’s an entire ecosystem that needs to be designed with these things in mind.
Points Theatre
Employees in many organizations experience organizational systems that are fundamentally designed to “get more points” for creating what you could call “productivity artifacts”.
We are all familiar with them. Artifacts such as emails, meeting with their agendas and action items, and PowerPoint slides typically full of way too many words and overstuffed data charts instead of effective visuals.
There can be an institutional addiction to collecting the most “points” for starting initiatives but not really ever finishing them.
To be fair, this is how we often incentivize our people, painting a certain picture of what achievement should look like. A key challenge comes in the way this fosters a form of productivity theatre. It may hold some value but is often not the greater, as in better, value.
Designing, creating and curating healthy performant environments need to turn this points game towards thinking deeply, questioning the status quo (not status quo building) and adaptive behaviors needed for creating change.
Moving payload, A.K.A. the work, is most often a productivity and efficiency game of volume. More is better. Bigger is better. You know the mantras.
I’d suggest that designing the system around people, mission, and organizational purpose is another issue, entirely. It requires an alternative people architecture that, among many things, will increase the clarity about what an organization is trying actually accomplish and how to do it with increased speed, quality, and value.
Leading Success
Success as a leader is not…
A thing you do
Something you find
An outcome from an equation or recipe
Success is the space where you arrive in concert with others.
Success is an orchestration.
Don’t mistake being “first chair” with being the entire orchestra.
Being first chair is simply holding the flag for others to follow, learn, grow and become greater.
In this way, leading is the act of facilitating community.
Curiosity
Curiosity is like a summer experience of your youth. Growing up experiencing summer is often infused with the freedom of riding a bike and a breeze in your face, or stopping in at the corner store and browsing a choice selection of candy to spend a kid’s summer budget on.
Summertime is also notable as a time of transition for pushing boundaries, experimenting, and developing skills and strength through challenges, some won and some lost. Newfound personal agency, exploration, and curiosity serve as a flywheel that fuels the summer season.
Then we grow up, falling into our “adult” patterns that focus us on following a fixed script. Our responsibilities increase and our ability to be curious tends to be pushed down below the surface.
Remembering that being curious offers many benefits, it is possible to reach down and pull it back up into play. Personal and professional growth, as well as meaningful connection to others, can ignite curiosity. Be intentional about exercising curiosity as an adult and it will generate the same opportunity and energy. Where do you once again need to become curious?
Half Baked
Typically, when someone refers to someone or something as “half baked”, it’s not a particularly positive comment. It usually implies something essential is incomplete or missing. In contrast, Seth Godin posted a contrary suggestion on his blog advocating for the idea that the value of creating the conditions for doing great work involves considering just that.
When you leverage the creative tension inherent in putting work out there while it’s still in process, you just might create something spectacular or genius.
Whatever you may be engaged in creating, consider this concept. Exercise both your courage and your freedom. It will be fine! Put down those censoring constraints that have nothing to offer you tomorrow as they are only invested in protecting yesterday.
“Half-baked work, shared in a trusting environment, is the fuel for the system that created the works of genius.” - Seth Godin
Importance of Doubt
Stanley Tucci, a popular actor, director, and writer, commented about his memoir. An interviewer asked him what it was like to write.
Tucci said, “It goes through those phases where you go, Why am I writing this? I have nothing to say, this is the most boring book anyone will ever read. And then suddenly you read it and go, Oh, that’s not bad. The same thing happens with screenplays, or when you’re directing or acting. The doubt is really important.”
His comment merits some attention, “The doubt is really important.”
Conventional thinking insists that we work to extinguish doubt wherever it lurks. We are told to stoke the fires of confidence, psych ourselves up, visualize success, and push those sabotaging voices that whisper defeat out of our minds. In this context, the anatomy of our doubt is fear. It can distract us putting our focus on perceived uncertainty and gaps when we compare ourselves to any other given point of reference.
In contrast to conventional thinking, I’d suggest that doubt is incredibly NORMAL. None of us are alone when it comes to doubting. It’s incredibly human. Often, the most accomplished among us have the greatest struggle with doubt, precisely because we are trying to do even more. The bigger the attempt at doing something new and challenging, the larger the doubt.
There is good news if you experience doubt creating drag on your forward movement, energy level or general ability to have a positive outlook.
Doubt is an important piece to setting ourselves up for success. Your doubt is a key factor in your growth and can drive you in a positive direction.
Doubt can motivate, improve, encourage, change, generate, and experiment.
Where can doubt be working for you instead of against you?
Doubt can help us become better at what we are doing.
Embrace doubt and do not let it intimidate you into less and use it to fuel your movement forward.
Finally, be patient and realistic with yourself. Personal growth often comes from connecting your experiences with your beliefs.
Doubt is less a problem to shake off and more of a muscle that needs to be stretched, used, and exercised to work to our advantage. When you engage and work with your own doubt, you have an opportunity to become stronger and more capable of doing the great things that are yours to do.
Leadership Takes All of Us
I recently came across a fantastic comment from Jacob Morgan who is an author and speaker on leadership and the future of work. He stated, “All leaders must be coaches and mentors. But it goes beyond spending 10 minutes with someone and teaching them something to be slightly more successful. The goal of every leader is to make people more successful THAN YOU. True leaders aren’t afraid of supporting employees who become more successful than them. They want their people to outshine them and become strong leaders for the future.”
As important as this concept is in today’s changing leadership landscape, it often goes unrecognized or is diminished in organizations, leaving professionals standing alone and isolated as they try to navigate the counter-currents of opposing leadership cultures and mindsets.
Two challenges come to mind that create key disconnects, impacting the effectiveness and sustainability of leaders in any company where they exist.
Organizational incentives are misaligned to a people-first definition of leadership.
Leadership is defined with different ideas and approaches.
As you sort through your own leadership definition challenges, here are a couple of thoughts to keep in mind.
You are not alone! There are others out there that see and experience the same thing that you do. Your experience is valid! Believe it or not, the larger organizational and industrialized systems around us sometimes have it wrong. Work and leadership advocates are increasingly drawing these themes into open discussions.
Create a North Star definition of leadership. Establishing a true direction with a common definition for leadership is essential for effective and healthy organizations. When you advocate for a unified definition it will serve to anchor you, those you lead, and those you work with.
Start a conversation that seeks to define and create support for a common definition of leadership. It will give your organization an opportunity to consciously evaluate their own varied leadership definitions, and then provide insights that are necessary to help the organization establish a definition of leadership that will enable growth. The goal is to have a leadership definition that is adaptive and keeps people focused in a common direction that’s sustainable. It's possible to reimagine leadership in a way that multiplies the value already residing within an organization with a network effect.