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The Truth About Leadership - Part 6

You Can’t Do it Alone

This statement is half true. First there is an understanding that leadership requires others to be lead. The definition of leadership says nothing about this. While it may be implied, who leads you when you choose to push harder or not push harder to achieve certain goals? It’s you. You are your own leader. Therefore, no one else is required to lead you. However, when we look at goals beyond the personal goals, then this statement is true. Without the 100’s of 1000’s of dedicated men and women who worked on the Lunar Moon Project with NASA, we would not have achieved that goal.

On page 62, the claim is made about leadership, “How do you know someone is a leader? […] The simplest way to know is just to look to see whether that person has followers. If you think you’re a leader and you turn around and no one is following you, then you’re simply out for a walk”. This is very disparaging for personal leaders to read; since it discounts the personal growth work they are doing to improve not only themselves but also the life of others around them, who may not even be aware of it.

There are silent leaders: people who work tirelessly behind the scenes without any thanks or congratulations or even knowing how their actions will affect other people, but hope that it will have a positive effect. These leaders are just as important and powerful as the visible leaders. Buddhist monks discovered this type of leadership 1000’s of years ago and call it, “Taking action without action!” Simply by virtue of being who they are, and doing what they do, regardless of whether or not others follow them, they demonstrate how a better future could look. If someone happens to notice, they may become curious and ask how they do it, and study under them. But at no time does the Buddhist Monk become attached to their presence, how good or bad they are at mirroring their behavior, or whether or not they have achieved the goal of “Taking action without action!” They are content in knowing that the human condition for another small part of the world has been improved every so slightly.

So much of this chapter is about the human condition:

Making a human connection

Hearing what people are saying

Uniting people to solve a shared problem

Making others feel strong, capable, and empowered

Bringing it out of others

On this last point, please refer to “Total Quality or Else” (1991) by Lloyd Dobyns and Clare Crawford-Mason, ISBN 0-395-57439-0, who discuss the history and lessons learned when Dr. Demming, the creator of Total Quality Management worked with the Japanese to improve their systems. Dr. Demming realized that every worker was seeing a part of the process and knew ways that their process could be improved. He utilized this information by aggregating it into larger Quality Initiatives to build better products, stronger companies, and product improvements.

So, what “Bringing it out of others” is referring to, is that you have to listen to the men and women on the front line who are making the parts, assembling the parts, polishing the parts, and using the parts for their ideas on how their part of the process could be improved. If you ignore this information, no one will care about your product or service. And, I do mean, “NO ONE!” How many people still use a typewriter today vs a word processor, today?