How (44 page)

You see that it is organized into three concentric spaces. At the center of the lens, at its point of sharpest focus, lies a set of Core Values. In the illustration, I have used the values that we embrace at LRN as central to our mission. You can easily substitute your own, but they must be the deep sorts of values like justice, honesty, integrity, community, and honor that truly inspire the highest in human conduct and interrelations. You’ll find the list of possible choices is not long. The most important things about whatever values lie at the center of the circle are that they express the highest aspirations and fundamental beliefs of the group to which you belong; that they are truly the core; and that everyone can agree, embrace, and align themselves with them. They are the guiding principles that unite you in common endeavor.

Surrounding the central core are Leadership Attributes, the behaviors, attitudes, and orientation of a self-governing individual. It is these attributes we will primarily focus on and explore in the pages that follow. Surrounding these is a set of Nonleadership Attributes, behaviors that often result when you abdicate your pursuit of HOW.

Let us begin at the beginning of the framework and see where it leads. (I know, a circle has no beginning—that is part of its unique character—so I have numbered a starting place at about nine o’clock on the circle to get us on track.) Feel free to refer back to the illustration frequently to better follow the narrative.

Vision

The Leadership Framework begins with five essential attributes, five keystones of behavior upon which the entire structure rests. The first is
vision
. A self-governing person spends some time in another realm, the future. Having a leadership disposition means mentally envisioning a better future for yourself, the tasks at hand, and those with whom you labor. Leadership starts with vision, and leaders envision every moment. You could have big visions or little ones, envision a

FIGURE 12.1
The Leadership Framework

better meeting or envision inspiring thousands of workers around the world to make better decisions. You could envision a feature in a technological platform, or envision a whole new product, or simply envision a way to make someone else’s day a little bit better. You can create a new vision or embrace someone else’s and make it your own.

Envisioning represents a proactive stance toward achievement; it is an activity, a behavior, and a disposition toward pursuing your goals. If you don’t have a vision, then you fall outside the lens of HOW and are a short-term manager: task-oriented, obedient, and obsessed with and limited to what you can see right under your nose. Short-term managers tend to be reactive by nature and find themselves putting out fires more often than they light the beacons that show the way. It is a defensive posture and worries more about appeasing others than about engaging them. To get your HOWs right you must be focused on others, and vision is the crucial first disposition toward achieving that goal.

Communicate and Enlist

Most visions that are worth pursuing are greater than any one of us, so if you have a vision and you feel it truly has content that could make for a better future, then you should
share
it with somebody else. The question then becomes: HOW do you share it? What is the quality of your effort? If you browbeat somebody, if you talk
at
them, you are not sharing. Sharing, at its heart, attempts to make your vision into everyone’s vision, to make a Wave. Uniting a group of people behind a single goal or set of goals presents the greatest challenge to any leader; achieving that alignment results in the greatest success.

To reach this goal you must
enlist
those around you and help them see what you see. To truly enlist you must be open and forthcoming about your motives, be transparent in your communication, and reach out to others in a way that they feel you’ve truly shared.

Consider the last 50 e-mails you received. Which ones enlist? Which, when you read them, make you think, “Yes, I get it. This makes sense. I want to help.” Which ones, by contrast, make you think, “What is this all about? This is not what we agreed to. Why did you cc: my boss? What are you up to?” The ones that enlist create connections. They build strong synapses between the sender and you. They make you want to participate, belong, or assist in the effort.

In every e-mail, instant message, phone call, teleconference, or face-to-face encounter you can communicate to enlist and share, or you can do something else. Ask yourself, when you write an e-mail, do you have a vision to make it effective? A vision for the response? Leaders reach out to others with a quality of communication that allows people to share, to be enlisted, and to make your vision theirs. Taking this additional moment before you hit the send button is not an extra something, a burden or tax for you to contend with. Instead, it makes everything you do more effective. If others embrace your communication and make its goals their own, more gets done. Think of it this way: You go on a diet to lose five pounds. Dieting is not an added burden; it takes no more time to eat one way than another way. Dieting is a series of choices to eat one thing and not another, and a good diet regimen provides you with guidance—based on a set of beliefs about health, exercise, and nutrition—to help you make those choices and achieve your goal. When you reach out to others, you can choose to enlist them, or you can choose to respond in way that has little effect but to clear your in-box for the time being. One starts a Wave; the other kills one.

If you don’t share your vision with others, you are acting as a
maverick
. Your vision will remain yours alone. There is nothing wrong with being a maverick (in fact, we admire many of them), just as there is nothing wrong with many of the behaviors that occupy the outer circle of the Leadership Framework. From time to time, they may even be the most useful or appropriate behaviors to practice. However, they are not self-governing,
leadership
behaviors, behaviors that can start TRIPs or make things happen in a hyperconnected world. Since the conditions of the world have changed in such specific and remarkable ways so as to place new, higher value on connection and interrelation, it is those behaviors that best capitalize on the conditions that we are concerned with here. These are the behaviors codified in the Leadership Framework.

Seize Authority and Take Responsibility

Self-governing leaders step forward. They raise their hands at meetings. They say, “I have an idea,” “I’d like to run this task force,” “I’d like to complete that assignment,” or “I think we should land on Mars and not Venus.” Leaders stand up for what they envision, and are not afraid to occasionally take center stage. They offer themselves up. They seize the authority and take the responsibility that comes with leadership.
Carpe diem
is the watchword of their faith. If you never step up, you consign yourself to a career of always following.

Having a leadership orientation does not necessarily mean you must lead in every instance; you can maintain a leadership disposition and still follow the leadership of others. Within any team or work group, certain people will take the overall lead, but within that effort opportunities arise for everyone to lead. You could envision yourself disseminating project metrics in a way that enlists others in the team goals or step forward to provide them with essential data to make better decisions. Though you work within a group or have natural or appointed superiors, a leadership disposition opens you up to a greater level of contribution and achievement. A self-governing leadership culture allows everyone to take these opportunities to lead, and when you step up and seize the moment, the moment seizes you.

Plan and Implement

Walt Disney was a visionary. He imagined an anthropomorphic mouse and he put that mouse into action, changing the face of animation, film-making, merchandising, amusement parks, and family entertainment. But he didn’t create one of the largest entertainment companies in the world solely by his dreams. “The way to get started,” he famously said, “is to quit talking and begin doing.”
⁴
Leadership is ideas put into action.

If you have a vision and you share and enlist others in it, the next step requires that you plan and implement its achievement. The gutters of business are littered with the great ideas of those who envision but cannot implement. They are the dreamers of the world. They talk a good game, but when push comes to shove, they don’t have what it takes to get things done. Many people have imagined a business they wanted to start, a project that would make lives easier, or simply a better way to reach a goal; many have imagined landing on the moon in one way or another. You meet many people with dreams, but you also meet those who work with others as a team to make their vision real. In a world of HOW, these are the winners. A small vision achieved is worth ten grand notions unimplemented.

Self-governing people step up, seize the moment, and find ways to get things done. Though this may seem at first a recipe for doubling your workload, in fact the opposite is often true. This basic eagerness to plan and implement their visions or the visions of others serves as a powerful example to those around them. When others see these sorts of HOWs in action, they feel similarly inspired and join in. More gets done with less effort because the whole team pulls together. In football, when a running back is crashing the line with extra effort, his tackles block extra hard, his quarterback makes better handoffs, and everyone on the team steps up with the extra effort needed to help him score a touchdown.

Build Succession and Continuity

I collect mechanical wristwatches. It’s a hobby. I find them very beautiful, a profound expression of our desire to order the world around us, and objects that embody the deep tradition of man striving for perfection, to make many small and intricate parts operate as a constant whole. If you ask me the time, however, I usually reach into my pocket and pull out my cell phone. It is in continual contact with an atomic timeserver and is the most accurate information I can put my hands on. I’m the CEO of my company, the ultimate leader there, if you will. If I show up late to a meeting, can the people waiting for me there find out the time? Of course they can.

Metaphorically, leaders don’t show up and tell you perfect time; as James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras told us so brilliantly in
Built to Last
, leaders build clocks that keep telling the time whether they are there or not.
⁵
If landing on the moon depended on JFK, what would have happened when he was tragically assassinated? Leaders are not superheroes; they build succession and continuity into everything that they do. They don’t build anything that depends on a single person to show up and tell perfect time.

This idea is one of the most central and powerful ideas in the Leadership Framework, and the one most often underestimated. I think it is because saying the world doesn’t need heroes contradicts most of our experience. Business often calls on us to be heroic, to go the extra mile, burn the midnight oil, or pull the extra shift in order to meet our goals. And I agree. The world certainly needs heroes. You can’t get the train out of the station without some hard pushing, without heroism sometimes. The paradox is that though we need heroism from time to time, to truly thrive we must build self-sustaining approaches at the same time. Understanding the need for systems that generate energy as they achieve, rather than depleting resources to do so, leads you to a disposition that does not depend on heroics. You cannot build a great, enduring, significant company on the backs of superheroes. No matter how strong they are, eventually they will collapse under the weight. To build a skyscraper of an idea, hundreds of floors stacked on one another, you need a foundation of continuity that can grow as you do.