Leadership - Not a "Do It Yourself" Activity

by Don Harkey

Since I was little, I have been interested in leadership. My favorite game growing up was setting up a club of my friends, coming up with our secret handshake, setting up the organizational structure... yeah... I have always been a little sick.

One of the challenges I can remember is getting my friends as excited about the club as I was. I would be really into something we would be doing and I would have a terrible time getting my friends to follow along. I didn't understand... all they had to do was follow my clear directions!

As I got a little older, I got into Scouting. With my sick love of organizations, I soon became a patrol leader. Members of my patrol were very excited that I was to be their leader as I had great visions of what we could do. I envisioned working together on campouts to cook and set up our tents together. I talked about field trips and games. I even developed a patrol newsletter (called the "Bear Facts"... we were the "Bear" Patrol).

Then as we started having meetings, I laid out all of my great plans with my patrol. Within minutes they were distracted and doing other things. I was very frustrated. Why couldn't they just listen to me?

As I grew older and took on more leadership roles in high school, college, and then in business, I learned a lot more about leadership. Leadership is about providing your group with a clear vision. However, a key component to motivation is autonomy. This means that an effective leader should communicate a clear vision, and then leave their people to choose how to move forward.

This can be very challenging for the holder of the vision, especially if the leader holds a lot of passion for the vision. There is a natural fear that others will "mess it up". How many times have you heard a leader in an organization say, "sometimes its just easier to do it myself". That may be true, but that's not leadership.

If the vision is communicated well, a team of people working toward the vision will do much better than just a single person would. They can apply more knowledge, more creativity, and more brute force to an idea than any one person. Furthermore, they will become inspired by the work of the team. The word "synergy" is a popular buzz word, but that is exactly what these teams do... they create energy out of nothing.

If you are a visionary thinker, remember when it comes to leadership, your role is to let others in on your vision and then give them autonomy for how to get to that vision. Believe me... I have a whole pile of disbanded clubs and chaotic patrol meetings to prove this point!