Where's my Yoda?

I need somebody to guide me in the ways of leadership. I need a master who will help me gather the insights and experiences that will enable me to extract the best from the people I work with. But there is nobody in my organization whose leadership skills I admire and seek to emulate. At least I don't know of anybody who has the skills that I would like to have. 

I'm skipping ahead. Why do I need a leadership mentor? The only way to develop leadership skills is to lead. Leadership requires influencing other people. There is no way to do that other than to actually go out and influence other people. The more I lead, the better leader I'll become. The real trick is figuring out how to select leadership roles that will allow me to push my skills without going beyond my capabilities. I think a mentor could help with that. There's also looking back over a particular experience and figuring out what I did well and what I can do better. The only way this will happen is to talk over my experiences with an experienced leader.

Where should I find my mentor? I need somebody in my company. I've been told that I should start building my network in the organization. This mentor thing sounds like a good way to do that. There are formal programs for finding a mentor, but they're passive and overly bureaucratic. I'm going to go about it the old fashioned way. (I'm going to ask somebody. There's an opportunity to practice my influencing skills.) As the best mentors are probably in a different site, I'll need to consult with somebody who has some insight into who works up there to help me find a mentor. I have a meeting with somebody to discuss some training that I took a couple of weeks ago. She knows people up there. That could be my chance to start the search...

Defining leadership

I heard an interview with Seth Godin where he said that education should be about two things: leadership and decision making. I am in the active pursuit of a degree that has classes designed to address those two issues. Management is all about leading and making decisions. Too bad my classes don't really touch either of those topics. That's not a failure of Marist. I'm sure every other MBA program fails at effectively teaching those skills as well. Business classes are great at describing what businesses do, but no class can teach you how to lead or how to make a decision.

Leading requires action. You can't learn how to lead by reading a book. You have to see an opportunity and act on that opportunity. There is no room for passivity or sitting back to see how things shake out when you're the one responsible for getting things done. Acts of leadership emerge from a deep sense of who you are and what you want to accomplish. Leaders know what they're trying to accomplish. At the bottom of it, leadership is really just rallying people around your cause. To rally people around a cause, you must first share that cause. You can't share that cause until you have identified that cause.

You're never going to find that one thing that stirs your soul sitting in a classroom. All you learn in a classroom is what the teacher thinks about something. Discovery requires action. Doing. School is just an illusion of doing. School informs experience. It does not create experience.

Making decisions is easy when you have a mission. Your objectives are clear. The principles are well-defined. Stating and sharing a vision requires that you take a stand. That stand clarifies choices. Making decisions is easy when you've decided what you're trying to accomplish. Of course most people and most organizations have no sense of purpose. Rules and procedures replace a stirring vision. Control dominates while inspiration withers.

Practice what you preach

When I'm not sitting in front of my computer, I'm pretty fluent in generating ideas for blog posts. I can come to my computer with a good idea laid out only to see it wither away as soon as the blank post page loads up. Those sentences that sounded so good in my head lose their allure. Insights that held some heft lose their punch. Is this rapid evacuation of meaning the consequence of shining the harsh light of external consideration onto internal thoughts or is it just a way for me to spare myself judgement?

All too often I close my computer before I've written anything. The posts that make it our of the draft stage are those that come easily. I get going and the ideas flow. The two posts that I wrote around the election were like that. I sat down, wrote, and published. A few others came about just to get something out there. Just produce something. Rather than consume, consume, consume, produce something. Maybe its a touch banal or trite, but getting something out there is a choice. It's taking action rather than sitting back and letting events and circumstance make my decision for me.

Fill the bucket

Mastery is not skill acquisition. Mastery is knowing certain skills, but it's also about knowing how to build on and refine those skills. It's not seeing which existing option fits best, but being able to see a novel solution to an original problem. 

Mastery allows you to see every dimension of your art. What's strong, what's weak, and what to do about those weak points. It's seeing something that nobody else has ever seen before. That body of skills, knowledge, and experience shifts from something external that you seek to comprehend to something internal that you apply effortlessly. Your mind, body, every bit of you is transformed by your mastery. 

There is no way to hack mastery. You have to fill the bucket, drop by drop.

Drip, drip, drip...