How - Dov Seidman [146]
In every e-mail, instant message, phone call, teleconference, or face-to-face encounter you can communicate to enlist and share, or you can do something else. Ask yourself, when you write an e-mail, do you have a vision to make it effective? A vision for the response? Leaders reach out to others with a quality of communication that allows people to share, to be enlisted, and to make your vision theirs. Taking this additional moment before you hit the send button is not an extra something, a burden or tax for you to contend with. Instead, it makes everything you do more effective. If others embrace your communication and make its goals their own, more gets done. Think of it this way: You go on a diet to lose five pounds. Dieting is not an added burden; it takes no more time to eat one way than another way. Dieting is a series of choices to eat one thing and not another, and a good diet regimen provides you with guidance—based on a set of beliefs about health, exercise, and nutrition—to help you make those choices and achieve your goal. When you reach out to others, you can choose to enlist them, or you can choose to respond in way that has little effect but to clear your in-box for the time being. One starts a Wave; the other kills one.
If you don’t share your vision with others, you are acting as a maverick . Your vision will remain yours alone. There is nothing wrong with being a maverick (in fact, we admire many of them), just as there is nothing wrong with many of the behaviors that occupy the outer circle of the Leadership Framework. From time to time, they may even be the most useful or appropriate behaviors to practice. However, they are not self-governing, leadership behaviors, behaviors that can start TRIPs or make things happen in a hyperconnected world. Since the conditions of the world have changed in such specific and remarkable ways so as to place new, higher value on connection and interrelation, it is those behaviors that best capitalize on the conditions that we are concerned with here. These are the behaviors codified in the Leadership Framework.
Seize Authority and Take Responsibility
Self-governing leaders step forward. They raise their hands at meetings. They say, “I have an idea,” “I’d like to run this task force,” “I’d like to complete that assignment,” or “I think we should land on Mars and not Venus.” Leaders stand up for what they envision, and are not afraid to occasionally take center stage. They offer themselves up. They seize the authority and take the responsibility that comes with leadership. Carpe diem is the watchword of their faith. If you never step up, you consign yourself to a career of always following.
Having a leadership orientation does not necessarily mean you must lead in every instance; you can maintain a leadership disposition and still follow the leadership of others. Within any team or work group, certain people will take the overall lead, but within that effort opportunities arise for everyone to lead. You could envision yourself disseminating project metrics in a way that enlists others in the team goals or step forward to provide them with essential data to make better decisions. Though you work within a group or have natural or appointed superiors, a leadership disposition opens you up to a greater level of contribution and achievement. A self-governing leadership culture allows everyone to take these opportunities to lead, and when you step up and seize the moment, the moment seizes you.
Plan and Implement
Walt Disney was a visionary. He imagined an anthropomorphic mouse and he put that mouse into action, changing the face of animation, film-making, merchandising, amusement parks, and family entertainment. But he didn’t create one of the largest entertainment companies in the world solely by his dreams. “The way to get started,” he famously said, “is to quit talking and begin doing.”4 Leadership is ideas put into action.
If you have a vision and you share and enlist others in it, the next step requires that you plan and implement its achievement. The gutters