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...

"This is a test"

A difficult conversation may not seem like a big thing, but a challenging conversation is challenging because there is something about it that makes us uncomfortable. It's easy to gear up for that Big Event on your calendar, but handling that thing that just pops up requires a different kind of preparation. It's not the presentation to the potential client or acing the interview that separates leads to success.We'll be judged by that new client or our new boss by how we handle those little things that nobody likes to do. We're the baboon out there chasing away the lion while the other baboons are hiding in a tree.

Getting better at doing the things that we don't want to do is the difference between settling for what we've always been and growing into what we want to become. The trick is recognizing when we're faced with an opportunity to challenge our limits. We're so accustomed to having the big moments presented to us in a formal and predictable manner in our organizations that we forget to practice how to handle the big moments of life. Big moments usually looks small. Their bigness only emerges as time reveals their impact. You can't study for every test, but you need to ace them all.

What people see

Two events, which has the greater potential to significantly impact my career?

The first has been months in the making. I've been working with another scientist to develop a model that we can use to quickly assess the amount of drug in a new product. We finally got the model to work this week. There was no guarantee that our approach would work when we started the project. There were periods where I thought we were going to fail, but I had a sense that it had to work so we kept trying different tricks until we found one that worked.

The second event spontaneously emerged during a meeting to discuss our impressions of a candidate for an open position. Near the end of the meeting, I noticed that people were working hard to convince themselves that this guy was right for the job. He was probably going to get offered the position until it was my turn to give my rating. I decided to condense my thinking down to a single sentence. "We're working hard to rationalize that this guy is a good fit." The tone of the room shifted dramatically. Everybody felt the truth of what I had said. We liked him, but something about him just wasn't right.

I want figuring out how to get the model to work to be the event that defines me to the organization, but I sense that my comment will have more of a long term impact. My internal dialogue usually downplays the social/political aspect of my work life in favor of technical accomplishments. That's the wrong way to look at these things. The technical accomplishments merely offer evidence that you're competent. The social stuff determines how high you will rise. People see the social. They only hear about the technical.

Stepping Out

I'm not fighting my Dark Triad any more. Forget making myself smaller so other people can look bigger. That's for chumps. I'm going to fill up as much space, and garner as much attention, as I can get. No more selling myself short. If I'm the one whose made a project go, I'm going to accept the credit. No deflecting, no humble self-deprecating. I'm owning my ability. Why bother down playing my successes? Who gives a shit if I violate organizational norms or ruffle a few feathers by standing up and saying that I'm the magic piece that made this project go? What do I gain by down playing my role? Nothing. 

Being humble is just another way to be passive. 

Keep the outside out

So you have more willpower if you view it as an endless resource rather than thinking of it as something that gets used up. Interesting observation, but it's really just a question of whether you let your external world define your state of mind. Do you seek validation from people "liking" your posts or giving you helpful votes on your Amazon reviews? The more you seek those forms of validation, the more you surrender what you're really about. Pursuing likes or votes means that you've handed power over to the outside. You've sacrificed what you stand for, who your are, to get somebody else's approval. External validation leaves your state of mind, your well-being, to the whim and fancy of everybody else.

Patagonia ran an ad telling people not to buy one of their jackets on Black Friday a few years ago. The ad resulted in a big bump in sales. Why? The ad let everybody know what Patagonia stands for, what they're about. They told the world what they were and let people who shared that mission come to them. There was no grovelling or surrender. Patagonia was the alpha. People love an alpha. Alphas make people feel safe. 

Alphas don't let other people tell them what to think or how to feel. Likes and votes and every other form of approval come from an authentic assertion of who you are and what you stand for. The more you become what you think everybody else wants, the more those people will go away.