The average life span of an individual is about 4,000 weeks. And if you work from the age of 21 years old to 65 years old, then the career of most people is on average about 2,288 weeks. Recognizing that you may not be a leader on your first day at work and that most, but not all, people enter into the world of leadership in their late 20s or early 30s, this means that on average your time in the world of leadership is somewhere between 1,500 - 1,768 weeks in length.
With these numbers in mind, I have one question for you today: What are you going to do as a leader that makes a difference at work and in the lives of the people you work with?
One answer is to build and maintain pockets of excellence. While we can not change the whole world or, at times, the whole company, we can nevertheless create change that results in pockets of excellence. Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao in their book, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting To More Without Settling For Less (Crown Business, 2014) write “… scaling requires leaders to find and develop pockets of excellence, connect people and teams, and ensure that excellence continues to flow through those ties.”
Many people in leadership positions want good teamwork to happen and then expand to other areas. In particular, they want a “successful team” to role model the “right way” to other teams in the company. Often, to make this happen, they try to deploy the successful team’s leader to help the other dysfunctional teams. While this is common, it rarely makes a difference.
When excellence is built, maintained and then expanded in a successful manner, I have noticed three things. First, the team leader makes an emotional connection with people who are creating pockets of excellence more than just the intellectual connection. One part of this is that they help others in making connections both inside and outside the team.
Second, the team leader understands the difference between technical problems and adaptive challenges. They make sure the team is not trying to find technical solutions to adaptive challenges. They understand that adaptive challenges can only be addressed through changes in people’s priorities, beliefs, habits and loyalties. This requires all involved to explore new ways of thinking, and leaders, who maintain their teams over time, are very clear about that new way of thinking.
Finally, these same leaders role model and empower healthy behaviors. They understand that most employees expect history to repeat itself. For these individuals, bad behaviors and bad experiences in the past often is a prologue to future choices, actions and outcomes. Thus, most employees resist going through a repeat of negative experiences. They do not have the time or the energy. But exceptional leaders get this and thus focus on understanding why people are showing resistance. They do not suppress dialogue, but instead actually encourage. They recognize that if one wants to build and maintain a pocket of excellence, then one must first build a safe working environment for dialogue. This is where trust begins. And trust is the foundation of excellence.
If you seek to not waste the short period of time that you are a leader, then create and maintain pockets of excellence. It will be transformative for you and all involved, and it will make a positive difference in the lives of so many. And this is one of the major purposes of the 4,000 weeks we get to live on this beautiful planet.
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