How - Dov Seidman [143]
That is leadership: not simply having the vision of landing on the moon, but doing everything it takes for the roughly one million people who came together around this effort to speak the same language, to have a common consciousness, and to pursue a mission that is greater than any individual. Would America have landed on the moon if most people had said, “I’m interested in going to the moon, but it depends. I would go to the moon if I could sit in the spacecraft, in the front row, on the right side. Where I sit matters more than landing on the moon.” If everyone wanted to jam into the spacecraft but no one wanted to work at Cape Canaveral and do a different job, we would not have reached New Jersey, let alone the moon. So a million people had to come together in a mutually reinforcing system to convert that vision into reality.
An organization, as we have said, is simply that: a group of people who come together in a mutually reinforcing system to accomplish something greater than any individual. So leadership is not just for people who have “president” in their title. Leadership is an attitude, a disposition, and a way of approaching the challenges you face every day. It is not a title on your business card. Though many people are formally empowered to lead others, many more of us—and in our increasingly horizontal world that number grows every day—work in teams without formal hierarchical structures. And this trend is bound to continue, with more and more of our achievements the result of our ability to be effective in groups of relative equals. Self-governance is also a leadership orientation; it begins by leading yourself. To become more self-governing and to participate in and foment more self-governing cultures around yourself, you must accept the challenge to become your own legislature, to look inside for answers and be guided by your alignment to the values you find there. This framework can help you develop the orientation to do this well.
As we go through the elements of the framework in the pages that follow and hear from many people who lead, remember that great leaders became leaders precisely because they either consciously or by their very nature embodied those behaviors that make Waves, that move those around them to do great things, and that work powerfully with others for change. That is the essence of leadership, and it begins with leading yourself.
We began this book with a story about a person I think is one of the greatest leaders ever, Krazy George Henderson, the man who invented the Wave. To thrive in the internetworked world of twenty-first-century business, you don’t need one big Wave; you need to make Waves every day, and like that stadium cheer, anyone can make one at any time. It could be a question in a town hall meeting that would make it a better meeting, or an e-mail that inspires others to take up the cause at hand. Leadership is getting your HOWs right, and you can look at anything through the prism of leadership. You can brush your teeth because it is something your parents made you do as a child, or you can brush your teeth because you have a vision of dental health and a winning smile. Leadership is about starting and making Waves contagious in everything you do.
The Leadership Framework is not a set of rules or edicts you must memorize or comply with, cans and can’ts that live outside of you; the Leadership Framework lives in the world of shoulds. It begins with core values and then gives you ways of approaching each decision or action to bring those values to bear on others. It provides a foundation from which to make decisions every day and brings values to life in behaviors. These behaviors, consistently done, reinforce each other to