Adapted from Steven’s new book “Leadership Just Got Personal”
Things are not always what they seem. Man, if only I had a buck for every time that rang true in my life! That’s one of the big challenges we face when “leading in a world of service,” isn’t it? Things are not always what they seem, and worse, none of the traditional behaviors of leadership seem to hold any water. In service you can’t “make” someone do something; you certainly can’t pull rank and say, “I’m the boss, that’s why!” And one’s willingness to “tow the line” so they can “keep their job” doesn’t even enter the picture, does it? That’s because none of those techniques are “leadership.” And more importantly, leadership is only partially how we influence and inspire others to act, the other part of leadership is how we inspire and empower ourselves to act. Put more simply, leadership just got personal!
I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland on the majestic Chesapeake Bay and from the moment I could move all I wanted to do was go fast. So when my dad bought his first boat, I was thrilled. It was a cool blue open-bow tri-hull runabout that went so fast I thought my hair was going to blow off my head. As a six-year old speed-demon I loved the way that boat would lean into turns, and how the bow would pop into the air when my dad thrust the throttle to full speed just before he trimmed the motor. Bam! The boat jumped over wakes and waves and, if there were none to be found, Dad would make a sharp banking turn so he could cross our own wake. That was just too cool for words.
But things are not always what they seem. Right in the middle of my drooling over something going faster than us, a pristine white sail would float mysteriously past us with a quiet confidence, pointing purposefully into the rich blue skies of a Maryland summer. I’d swear those sailboats winked as they glided by, playfully taunting me. When the speedboats were long gone, it was the sailboats that left me mesmerized. It was their majesty and mystery, not their speed that enthralled me. Why?!
“How do they do that?” I asked. “I mean, I get it that the wind can blow them away, but how do sailboats get home again?” It would be twenty years before I got the answer to my question, and I began to see more clearly that leadership is personal and things aren’t always what they seem.
In New York during my late-twenties, I got the chance to sail on a friend’s 27-foot sloop, where on our first short trip I learned about the principle of lift. Just as an airplane is lifted off the ground by its wings, a boat is pulled through the water by its sails. The trick, I learned, is to get the right shape in the sail in order to capture the power of the wind.
“So I had it all wrong,” I thought. “A boat isn’t pushed and blown away at all, it’s pulled.” I didn’t see that coming.
To most non-sailors, as I was, this comes as a big surprise. Rarely does the wind push a sailing vessel, and then, only when it blows directly from behind. Most of the time the boat is propelled through the water, the principle of lift acting upon the sails, pulling it forward through the waves.
Furthermore, when a sailboat is being pushed by the wind, it’s called Running with the Wind and it’s one of the quietest points of sail. The wind, the boat and the waves are all moving in the same direction and it can feel eerily calm to experience the wind and the boat moving so peacefully as one. Your chips don’t blow off your plate and your hat stays comfortably on your head.
Unfortunately, when leaders push, it is seldom the same. Instead of pushing with their employees, blowing in the same direction, leaders often tend to push against them, because they experience resistance or opposition to their vision or direction. That’s when leaders flaunt the dreaded “I’m the boss, that’s why!” excuse and begin demanding rather than leading.
Can you do that as a captain on a sailboat, i.e. forget the sails, fire up the motor and force your way forward against the waves and wind? Sure, but that’s not sailing and, quite frankly, that’s not leading either. That’s not taking advantage of the power and talent of your team. When you push the crew in opposition to their natural tendencies, they simply become a group of passengers along for the ride, with no vested interest, commitment or loyalty. And as any seasoned captain will tell you, Loyalty beats Obedience hands down. Loyalty will weather the storms and step up beyond the call of duty, while Obedience jumps ship at the first safe port following a conflict.
True captains, like great leaders, rarely “push,” and when they do, it’s not in opposition to the flow and direction of their people. Instead, they push with them, moving in the same direction. And with a well-led crew, a vessel can absolutely sail against the wind or challenge, opposition, conflict and struggle and make fantastic progress. And by doing so, a boat need not be at the mercy of the forces of nature; it can simply harness the wind, engage the forces of Lift and quite literally convert opposition into power. The same is true in leadership. What looks like opposition is more like power and energy and the more effectively a leader Lifts his team up by making the connection personal, the more efficiently they will reach their destination together.
Real leaders don’t insist on compliance. Rather, they are committed to connection. Like filling the sails with wind and power, they connect the goals, visions, dreams and intentions of their people to the goals, visions, dreams and intentions of the organization, so they move together as one; using the power of Lift to give their people shape, purpose and energy. And when the winds of change blow across their surface, real leaders sit up and notice, puff out their chest with pride and connection and, quite simply, become a better version of themselves, and in the process help others to do the same.
This connection to what people really want and how they can achieve this goal through you and your organization is the real art of leadership, but once again, things are not always what they seem because sometimes what people say and what people mean are two different things.
For example, Chuck was introduced to me through a mutual friend, and arrives with the vision of starting a whitewater rafting company. It’s a dream Chuck has had since he was sixteen years old. Everyone around him is opposed to the idea and no one is afraid to tell him so. After all, he has a fantastic job, making great money. He has outstanding flexibility to come and go as he pleases. The problem is that no one else seems to understand the importance and value of his dream. So try as he may, Chuck is unable to garner the desired support to embark on his project and he feels discouraged. He asks quite simply, “Can you help me fulfill my dream?”
His story takes about fifteen or twenty minutes and it sounds exciting. When I then ask what the problem is, he says that he just doesn’t know how to get there.
“I’ve got too many forces against me and I can’t seem to find the strength and courage to make this happen. How do I make this happen?” (So the question, like on a sailboat, is how to convert those forces of opposition into energy, right?)
So we spent some time delving into the vision, exploring the obstacles and getting a clear image of what he was really battling. Over the weeks we kept coming back to his vision because, as I posed in the next set of questions, I perceived that he lacked only the clarity of detail. It seems that he wasn’t exactly sure what he really wanted or why. The high level romantic version was solid: self-employment, the great outdoors, doing what he loves, teaching people to overcome fear, living on the river…the list was long and it sounded great. We needed only to bring it out of the clouds and work on the practicalities.
“How many hours a day are you working? How many employees do you have? What is your wife’s role? What about your kids? (Keep in mind; he formed this dream at sixteen, long before being married with children.) What will you do in the winter? Tell me about cash flow and retirement and growth in the business. How does your role grow and change?”
I asked these questions because the scope of his vision was limited, much of it based on an experience with the rafting company he worked for as a teen.
“Tell me about your dreams,” I then said one day.
“What do you mean,” he replied. “This is my dream.”
“No,” I said, “What about the other dreams? Surely your life isn’t 100% about a rafting company. Tell me about your kids and fatherhood, your relationship with your wife and how that relationship grows over the years. What other dreams do you have? In other words, take me deeper into the whole picture of your life and what you value and what’s important to you.”
And over time he did. Chuck was thirty-two years old when he came to me. He had held his dream for literally half his life. He knew what he wanted; he’d just never had enough specific details to move forward. However, together, we got there. And a whole vision showed up in Technicolor detail, and the more specific he got, the more clearly focused his vision became. The more detailed his clarity, the more answers showed up. There was less and less wondering about how and where the courage would be coming from, because he now knew. And every time the vision led him down the slippery slope of judgment and all the reason why it wouldn’t work, we came back up for a deeper level of clarity and solved the problem. Decisions were getting easier, all the way to the moment when a major epiphany occurred and it came time for him to move into action.
The clearer Chuck got, the more he could see what it would look like when he arrived. As his longstanding vision merged with the other dreams in his life, Chuck no longer wanted to run a whitewater rafting company. When he really looked at the details, the impact on his life and life-style, his relationships with his children and his wife, the danger factor of whitewater rafting every day, and so much more, he began to realize that the vision he had wasn’t the vision he wanted.
What happens to so many leaders, is that they make a statement about what they want or plan to achieve – on either the personal or professional level –and as the details pan out, they realize it isn’t exactly what they want. But they continue to force it anyway. I suspect that has a lot to do with our society. (God forbid I ever get nominated to the Supreme Court because, horror of horrors, I have actually changed my mind about many things over the course of my lifetime. If you took a good look at my past you might find a contradiction or two.) Unfortunately, our society doesn’t afford our leaders the luxury of growth and evolution, so it becomes incumbent upon leaders to take charge, grow and evolve on their own.
And that’s exactly what happened with Chuck. After years of claiming that one day he would start a whitewater rafting business, he began to evolve. It turns out that everyone else had been right, if not for exactly the right reasons, and you can imagine how difficult that was for him to realize? He instantly became worried about the “I told you so’s,” and now he needed the courage to change his mind in the face of all the perceived judgments.
In short order Chuck found that courage and he made some big and bold decisions about his dreams. In the end he gave up none of them, he simply got more clarity about what it would be like when he arrived. As long as he was concerned about how he was going to reach his vision, there was little room left for its evolution. It wasn’t until we asked the question, “How will you recognize your dream as arrived?” that he was able to really see it from a new perspective and gain the clarity he needed to step into his perfect life.
The irony is that outwardly Chuck changed very little about his work. He simply found a new way to bring in what he wanted from rafting: extended time outdoors with his family, exhilaration, and freedom. Instead of walking away from a thriving three-generation family business, he started catering to a new clientele, organizing outdoor trips, and inviting those around him to participate in his new vision in exciting ways.
Things are not always what they seem, sailboats aren’t pushed by the wind, they are lifted up by the wind; what Chuck thought he wanted and what he really wanted were so close and yet so different. As leaders in a service world we have a bold and challenging objective; to meet people where they are, instead of where we wish they were; to lift people up and to see their resistance and challenges as the very wind that empowers our vessel; and to get clear with the ourselves and the people we lead so we can weave the tapestry of our dreams and visions in such a way that that we all get to become the us we know inside we are capable of becoming, and in doing so, we all become a better version of ourselves. Leadership IS personal. What is the story of your leadership going to say about you, your life, your vision, your organization and your team?
