How - Dov Seidman [148]
Ask yourself a practical question: Do you want to be promoted from your current position? Now put yourself in your superior’s shoes for a moment. Can he or she promote you if you are the only person who can do what you do? If the job won’t get done unless you stay there and continue to be the hero, it makes no sense for the business to ever promote you. If heroism is what’s getting the job done, you will stay right where you are to keep getting the job done. If, however, you build a self-sustaining approach to your job, a clock that can tell time without you, it is far more likely that you can get promoted—in fact, more likely that you will. Not only will you have excelled at the discharge of your responsibilities, but also you will have built something larger than yourself and made a contribution to the whole organization.
For example, many large and medium-sized businesses require sales and services teams to use a web-based customer relationship management (CRM) application like Salesforce.com. Essentially a centralized database platform, these tools provide each company rep a way of recording and storing detailed information about sales contacts, leads, and ongoing negotiations in which they are involved. Too often, I think, a tool like this is perceived as busywork, an administrative tax on the hardworking reps who, after a long week on planes, trains, automobiles, cell phones, and BlackBerrys, must then spend additional hours plugging all their notes into the system. Seen through the lens of HOW, however, this is a leadership opportunity, a chance to build continuity, to inform and enlist the team. Should you catch the flu a day before a closing pitch, the continuity you’ve built into the CRM application enables someone else on the team to easily step up, grab the ball, and bring home the business.
If you build a system that can be run by others, train others so that they may step up and take more responsibility, or enlist those around you in a team-based approach that is more efficient and profitable, a superior can then say, “The business doesn’t seem to need you as much to accomplish that goal; we could use you better in this new position.” The key ingredient to progress, to getting ahead, is to leave a foundation behind.
CIRCLES IN CIRCLES (A THOUGHT)
These five behaviors—envision, communicate and enlist, seize authority and take responsibility, plan and implement, and build succession and continuity—form the foundation of a self-governing disposition. The rest of the Leadership Framework amplifies, refines, and reinforces these basic concepts, creating a circle of leadership attributes.
A thought here about circles: Waves, we know, go around. Studies show us they start much more easily in closed-loop stadiums where everyone can see one another, and much less easily in, for instance, motor speedways, where the audience lines one side of the stadium. Leadership, in some way, mirrors this geometry. The Leadership Framework creates a self-perpetuating circle of energy, like a Wave in a stadium. When two kids hold hands, lean back (trusting one another not to let go), and spin around, they can achieve great speed with little effort, and the energy between them continues to grow as long as they hold on. When they let go, all that energy disburses. The Leadership Framework mirrors that idea. As we talk through the Leadership Framework, you will notice that for everything a leader is, there is something he or she is not. When your actions take you out of the framework, you sacrifice its self-propelling energy and, like those dizzy kids, crumple in a heap on the grass.
The other remarkable thing about the framework is that it allows us to be really aggressive and fiercely competitive in pursuit of our goals.