“The most important thing I learned is that soldiers watch what their leaders do.  You can give them classes and lecture them forever, but it is your personal example they will follow.”
~General Colin Powell

When the team is together, everyone talks teamwork.  When it’s public, we’re all aware that people are watching.  But when in pairs, or by themselves, when they think no one is around, it’s sometimes different.  They’re not leaders, I’m not even sure they’re managers, but I know they are toxic.

There’s a reason the military has “This side toward enemy” printed on the front of Claymore mines.  They know that sometimes people are in a hurry, not paying attention, or just don’t understand the ramifications of which way it needs to go.  I’m sure in the early days there were cases of those devices being planted in the wrong direction.  But in the business world, a backfire is a glitch.  People aren’t killed.  Harmed maybe, but not killed.

The difference is you, and your leadership.  When you’re complaining about your boss, or another leader, when you’re rolling your eyes at their comments, or when you try to create an alliance to ensure you win, you’re planting a leadership Claymore in the wrong direction.

“There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. Their controls would freeze up, their planes would buffet wildly, and they would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, seven hundred and fifty miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man could ever pass. They called it the sound barrier.”
~(opening to the movie “The Right Stuff”)

When you approach the sound barrier there is a sudden increase in aerodynamic drag and the plane buffets around.  For Chuck Yeager, and the others, it must have been some experience.  It was a change they wanted, but I’ll bet there were some too frightened to push through.  Change can feel dangerous.  Some of the test pilots of the 50s thought you couldn’t send someone into space and back without being “spam in a can.”

We’re feeling the bumps, jinks, and aerodynamic drag of seismic changes in media, driven by an even bigger change in generations.  It’s uncomfortable, disruptive and even frightening.  The world, as we baby boomers knew it, is evolving but that’s no worse than what the Greatest Generation, who fought in World War II, had to adapt to with us.  Funny, they thought Boomers would be the end of America, but here we are.  Things will change, but at the same time the world will go on.

We all have our areas where change seems impossible, there’s nothing wrong or unusual with that, unless it freezes us into inaction.  Change is happening all around us every day.  The key is the response to change – how we humans handle the change.  There are basically three responses: we fool ourselves and ignore or refuse change, we can adapt to change, or we can be one of those rare people who get ahead of and lead change.

The question we should be answering is not about change, it should be how we’ll adapt to change, or maybe even lead change.

“Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.”
~Robert Louis Stevenson

I’ve been reading Boundaries For Leaders by Henry Cloud, great book about growing a culture of leadership.  In it, he talks about a leader he was talking to who was complaining about the culture around him.  Cloud kept asking questions about why these things were happening, which led the leader to realize the culture was up to him!  Finally, the leader was in charge… ridiculously in charge.

Leaders and managers spend a lot of time complaining about how their workplace operates without ever realizing that they are the ones who can fix it.  I won’t give you all the details of the book, but two of the principles that will allow you to be ridiculously in charge are what you create and what you allow.

What you create is based on what you aspire to see, the culture you create (intentional or not), the goals you set, the strategy you employ and the leadership you demonstrate.  These are usually the things we want.

What you allow are the things you don’t want to happen, but seem to anyway.  It’s the things that happen because you don’t work against them.  If you never say anything to people about coming to work late, they will come to work late.  If you allow people to snipe at each other, sniping will grow as a tactic.

Of the two, what gets the least attention is what you allow.  All those irritating things that happen – that you actually allow to happen – that you can’t understand.  The things you don’t really want to deal with, because it’ll be too tough or complicated.  Also, the things that you do yourself that only become irritating when it happens back to you.

This is one of the easiest to understand books about leadership that I’ve ever seen.  Don’t expect to breeze through it, some parts are more difficult than others.  You’ll also want to go slow enough give yourself time to absorb it.

One reason I love it is because it challenged me, but then gave me simple, doable answers.  We can all improve our leadership skills, even if we’re only leading ourselves.  This could be one of the biggest answers to a challenge you’ll find this year.