Tag: leadership lessons

Vacation Vocation

Humor me for a small exercise in meditational zen. As you find your center and begin deep, controlled breaths, your office surrounding dissolve away. You’re transported to a rocky Andorran precipice where a sharp breeze bites at your exposed neck. Surveying the rugged landscape, you glimpse a wild horse commuting between France and Spain across the liberated terrain. As you watch the horse lightly gallop across the horizon, you can almost feel the hypnotic rumbling in the ground as hoof contacts firm ground. The rumbling swells into a vibration that seems to spring from your core. Glancing down to your pocket you discover your implacable cell phone hissing at you like a clammy kitten. Work is calling and they need your help.

This situation may be mildly hyperbolic but unfortunately it strikes too close to home for many leaders. A vacation is for a leader what a tub of ice cream is for a South Beach Diet devotee. Vacations are agonizingly tempting escapes from the intensity of advancing an agenda, but they’re escapes that can potentially weigh down an agenda. Particularly in organizational environments constrained by uncertainty, your campaign is unlikely to take a siesta while you’re lying on a beach on Ibiza. Without your steady guidance, your coalition will crumble like last week’s coffee cake and you’ll find yourself in an uncomfortably sandy position.

So how do you combine relaxed disengagement with manic dedication to your leadership cause? I discovered one solution in the backseat of my Chevy Cobalt last month as I toured the country for a month-long road trip. With four drivers splitting driving shifts from New York to San Francisco (via Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Colorado Springs, Denver, Boulder, Wasatch Mountains, and Lake Tahoe) I found myself often twiddling my digits in a compressed corner of the car. Unfortunately, though, invading my day dreams was the realization that I had to submit 25 hours a week of research and editing to this blog’s namesake Professor Bacharach.

My epiphany arrived as I whacked my laptop keyboard somewhere between Salt Lake City and Reno on I-80 W: Vacations are inspiring. Tourists absorb constant stimuli as they travel through mountains, deserts, strip malls, and Taco Bells by train, plane, car, or Segway. While you may want to throw your Blackberry into the Grand Canyon, consider instead how you can use your Grand Canyon trip to motivate your coalition and mobilize your agenda. Ultimately, your trip to the Pacific Ocean may prove much valuable to your agenda than your trip to the water cooler.

My road trip ultimately produced pages of leadership fodder and potentially some slight carpal tunnel syndrome. It was extraordinarily productive relaxation.

Tags leadership, leadership lessons, leadership skills, Samuel Bacharach

BLG Leadership Insights Features Managerial Competence Proactive Leaders Proactive Stories

Trucking Along

Sometimes leadership lessons sneak up in unexpected locations. On Tuesday at 1am, that location was Highway 55 between Chicago and St Louis. In preparation for my future career as a nomadic carnival worker, I have decided to take the requisite post-undergraduate road trip out West. My buggy, a 2005 Chevy Cobalt, hobbles down expressways with the weight of four passengers, a spunky cat, two clown dolls, and fountains of energy drinks. On Tuesday, as my friends slumbered and the cat serenaded the car with rhythmic purrs from her nook or cranny, I began studying the lumbering giants sharing the road with me. As I coaxed my Chevy between trucks like a caffeinated ant dodging elephants, I contemplated the life of a truck driver.

Truck drivers, whether transporting water beds or Mexican jumping beans, must mobilize a hefty load toward a defined goal. By virtue of their independence and responsibility, they become highway leaders—executives in the mysterious asphalt jungle that links distance locations. Each driver is an Odysseus who struggles through a hero’s journey while conquering various obstacles along the way. While amateurs like me muddle past in clown cars, truckers maintain a consistent pace that allows them to complete their voyage. They recruit sympathetic coalition partners like dispatchers, service center clerks, meteorologists, and fellow drivers, to assist them as they drive their agenda forward. Through shrewd political capability, they establish their credibility and ensure that these partners will come to the rescue when something blocks their course. Finally, they check their egos at the toll booth; there’s no room in their cab for hefty hubris and vanity doesn’t increase gas mileage.

Truckers also share something intimate and often taboo to discuss with fellow leaders: loneliness. Talk radio and garage funk music offer poor company on a graveyard shift through rural Missouri. Like an executive left alone with a massive merger agenda, truck drivers must carry abundant loads of poise and patience. Leaders struggle with the solitude of decision-making and the pressures of authority while avoiding narcissistic obsession. Ultimately, when your agenda succeeds or fails, coalition partners disappear and you alone receive the accolades or blame. The leader’s journey is inevitably an isolating pursuit and aspiring executives must grapple with this reality. At least, when the going gets tough, you can commiserate with the Highway 55 truckers and wish you were travelling with a cat and clown dolls.

Tags coalition strategy, leadership, leadership lessons, leadership skills, proactive leadership

BLG Leadership Insights Proactive Stories Social Media

Sofa Snorkeling

Picture Credit: wnstn

Two weeks ago I met a stranger on the internet and last weekend I slept over at his place. My parents are aware of the situation and seem comfortable. I’ve done it several times before in countries ranging from Canada to Andorra and it’s always been a rewarding experience.

Ok before sullying the good names of Sam Bacharach and Cornell University let me explain how this was in fact a benign and platonic experience that informs leadership theory. Of course, if I do get in trouble I’ll just blame it on my ghostwriter.

CouchSurfing.com is a social networking site designed to connect travelers around the universe (although surfers in outer space are encouraged to pack Velcro in order to stay fixed to their futons). The site is funded through karma and donations and fueled by the surprising willingness of people to host and introduce nomads to their cities. The self-policing service maintains safety and integrity through a rigorous system of user-provided references. If someone even suggests your couch was uncomfortable or your personality was unappealing, you’ll likely receive few requests. If someone calls you a smelly mooch, you’ll have a difficult task securing a host. It’s an impressively successful network.

While I’m still waiting for my first hosting attempt, my CouchSurfing hosts have included a Brazilian IT professional, a Disney Channel actor, and an NPR producer. Each has introduced me to a new city and a network of their friends. Even with limited time to form a couch groove in these host’s living rooms, I now find myself in coalition with diverse and talented partners around the globe. We’re each independently engaged in mobilizing a collective agenda, albeit a slightly romantic one.

Just like any organization, we actively support and host each other when necessary and passively support with positive references when that suffices. We expand our networks by identifying engaging and enthusiastic coalition partners. We sustain momentum by organizing community CouchSurfing meet-ups that preserve community and participation. We shove our egos into the dark crevices of our couches and reject hubris and narcissism. It’s an organization that embraces uncertainty and functions with perpetual fluidity.

I’m not suggesting that you infuse a little pragmatic fun into your organization and start surfing on your colleagues’ couches. That probably crosses the line. Just remember, if a generation of couch potatoes can mobilize a proactive global coalition, imagine what you can do in your organization.

Tags employee engagement, funny leadership, leadership lessons, social media, social networking

BLG Leadership Insights Features Managerial Competence Political Competence Proactive Leaders Social Media

Crusty Public Relations

I cringed when Rupert Murdoch was pied in the face in Britain’s Parliament at the peak of his News of the World scandal. As frosting projectiled toward the media tycoon’s face, jaws dropped in both offended horror and journalistic hunger for a rich news story. The gears of a media landscape Murdoch helped construct began turning against him as reporters baked the event into a delicious tabloid commentary on the mogul’s precipitous fall from grace.

I cringed because I saw a leader’s struggles compounded by the judgmental gaze of media. Leaders often incorporate media training into their management arsenal. Politically savvy executives understand that the internet generation affixes a steady lens on people in positions of power. You may try to establish a contained audience of coalition partners and interested parties, but you must realize your statements and actions reach an alarmingly diverse audience.

Everyone receives the same HR orientation that warns you to seize your internet identity and protect your external image. However, leaders invariably find this lesson conflicting with the impulse to promote accomplishments and campaign your agenda to the past. A leader is a public personality so how does one hide from flying pastries when fortunes go south?

There is no clever maxim that frees the proactive leader from the 24 hour news cycle. Human resources logic suggests that a leader adopts a cautious paranoia that shields them from an antagonistic external world. This caution may work for Willy Wonka but leaders from Richard Nixon to Julian Assange have discovered the perils of mobilizing a paranoid agenda.

The truly proactive leader co-opts the media into its coalition as an active participant in mobilizing an agenda. Like all coalition partners, the media is not always your ally. Journalists and public observers can range from active supporters to weak supporters to committed antagonists. While factions of the public may applaud your agenda, others may actively disparage your efforts. Don’t view the media as a monolithic organism but rather as a diffuse network of critical observers.

You will inevitably confront your pie-in-the-sky moment and there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to duck out of the frosty public spotlight. Just pack some napkins and a sense of humor and you’ll receive your just deserts.

Tags employee engagement, leadership, leadership lessons, Media outreach, Public relations, social media

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