Leadership is a
deliberate balance
of
conviction WITH humility.
Great leaders are hard to find,
because managing the balance between those two is difficult.
You have the confident ones among us who have great conviction and confidence. And, too often, they are too eager to drive, to control, to decide, to own… and occasionally great conviction comes with a healthy side of ego.
And, you have the humble ones who have great concern and respect for others. And, too often, they are willing to take the back seat, consider too thoughtfully or broadly the ideas or feelings of others, to stay quiet, to cede the space… and occasionally great humility comes without enough confidence.
How do you strike the balance?
How do you do the dance, in a way that flows, and creates an energy that others want to follow?
Here’s how I see it…
The conviction must be on values and vision.
As leaders…
We must have conviction…
VALUES
We must know what we stand for, and what our organizations stand for… and most importantly, we must have the courage and clarity to speak to them explicitly and consistently. We must have very little tolerance for values that dilute or confuse our own. We must know the difference, and help our colleagues and teammates to understand the difference as well.
I often see leaders that have strong conviction for values, but may not be able to summarize them in words and thus cannot express them and share them.
VISION
We must know where we are headed… where we want the team or organization to go… WHY going there is important… WHY we should be compelled to get there. Again, you must be able to speak to it with specificity and be vigilant when others are trying to hijack the company knowingly, or otherwise, in a different direction.
AND…
We must be humble…
APPROACH
We must know that people have an inherent desire to contribute, and we must give people the space to do so. We must know that the collective intellect is greater than our own. We must leverage the collective intellect and give those around us the ability to design and create their own approach for leveraging the values we’ve established to get to the vision that we have verbalized. People contributing begets people engaging and great things happen when that is the case.
VOICE
Along the same lines, we must know that we are leaders and thus servants of the collective organization, group or team. We must be willing to take a distant second chair to the organization. Each person must have a voice, because only then can we assess the state, the concern, and the buy in of our vision. Only by taking a second seat and ceding our voice can we hear, can we learn…
But, we cannot cede our voice too long where we see values being violated… nor when we see our vision being ignored…
As leaders, our conviction and clarity in our vision drives the QUESTIONS that must be answered in order to progress toward it. We should have clarity and conviction to the questions that must be answered, and with those give the room to our teams to provide and own the answers. Then we must always ensure the answers embrace and celebrate our values as best as possible.
CONVICTION about the QUESTIONS that lead us to our VISION.
HUMILITY to let others provide the ANSWERS that move us toward our vision.
For those of you who understand the concept of harmony in the moment… Our values are the deepest core of our IS, they are our foundation. They must be set. Our Vision is the core of our want… our long term want. The organization, and thus the people in it are the rest of our truth, the rest of our “IS”, and it is the people that are the engine and the vehicle and the reason for our want…
Our values and our vision, must be resounding with the majority of our organization… must be energizing to our organizations… otherwise we are not serving them.
And, our job, is to LEAD the alignment of the collective of our teams on those values toward that vision by highlighting the situations (moreso than the individuals) where we are straying.
When done right, leadership is inspiring and engaging and energizing.
When done wrong, leadership is distracting, demotivating, and dangerous.
The balance takes practice… and, I believe, it is never perfected or mastered. It is achieved in moments… or not achieved.
I am often amazed how single moments of failed leadership define people for long durations, and single moments of conviction and humility in the right balance create lasting trust and followership.
Great leadership like great harmony… is achieved only in the moment… and then across many moments people don’t need to judge us because we are where we are…
Either we are closer to our VISION, to our WANT, with the respect of those we serve…
Or we are further from it… and standing alone wondering what ever happened to the people around us…
Lead and Serve…
Conviction and humility…
Find it deliberately in each moment…
In harmony,
Nestor
P.S. And, as is always the case… it applies to all types of leadership, including being a parent… possibly the hardest place to be humble… or to cede… because the vision, in parenting, doesn’t ultimately belong to just us.