A Different Way of Looking at the Leadership Environment
Plumbing Change, Keeping the Old and Adding New Components
Article 7 in a Series
By Two Guys From Stillwater, Minnesota
John Buettner and Bob Molenda
Plumbing Change, Keeping the Old and Adding New Components
So, maybe we have a Leadership problem because we have some “Less-than-Stellar” Leaders? It could be, that the Mission is not worthwhile or there is none, you might observe. To be fair, the Followers could have some bad days, too. Then there is this thing about changes that have made victims of all of us during the last twenty-five years. Doesn’t this make you wonder why anyone can get anything done, with all of this distraction taking place? Now we are thinking that the plumbing and wiring needs to change, even though the old pipes and wires still seem to work well. “Nuts!”
What if the changes that we now know about, provide an opportunity to simplify the overall design? Maybe we can integrate the new with the old criteria and make everything work better for Leadership, Followership and Missions. Besides all that, we can all get more familiar with change and how to accept it, because it just does not go away like a bad haircut. You can be sure that by the time we do this, there will be other changes. What if we understood things better? Maybe we can find a “Loophole”?
This is where we are.
What we have so far is a list of Leadership Characteristics that are more than 2500 years old. These characteristics are still accepted by today’s leadership trainers and they have not changed much in all that time. This means that the basic wiring and plumbing is still good. (The combined list is summarized in Article 4 of this series.) Remember dropping these into the two buckets?
We also know that there are other External Changes that have taken place recently that have affected the leadership and team environment. Good Leaders exhibit some of the accepted characteristics but might not be aware of the more recent external changes that have affected how everyone works together to accomplish any mission. Your advice is to “Be nice and cut leaders some slack!” This is probably where the new version might have a lot of merit. (This list is summarized in Article 5 of this series). We also put this list of changes and leadership tasks into the same two buckets.
This is where we are headed.
So here we are, with our pipe wrenches, screwdrivers and cutters, pulling apart the infrastructure of the past and trying to install a newer version. We’re doing this because of the changes that have taken place and the rampant examples of leaks and failures in leadership and teams that we are experiencing. Hopefully, the newer version will be simple, relatively quantifiable and provide steady power to the enterprise in the future. How do we know we aren’t screwing things up? It is because we are keeping the old and adding the new, while trying to better understand all the connections.
The model keeps the Leadership Characteristics that we know and adds others that address the changes that have happened to everyone in the last twenty-five years. In addition, this version also directs Leadership towards the “Mission” that everyone is working on. That’s new, you’re thinking! At the same time, we want to simplify the wiring, make it understandable and get a feel for how important these Two Leadership ‘Buckets’ really are to everyone involved.
“Interesting approach here, boiling everything down to the two things that matter”, you say. Just take all of the Characteristics, Habits, Virtues and External Changes of Leaders and connect them as logically as we can into these two categories that are important to the Enterprise. Let’s see, one of these categories is A. Leadership Personal Characteristics and the other category is B. Mission-Oriented Characteristics. Why would anyone want to do this? Maybe it might help us to better understand the role of Leadership in a Mission setting and how the characteristics of the Leader come into play. The care and maintenance of Followers/Stakeholders is different than the care and maintenance of the mission. Everything is still there as before, more has been added and we are fitting everything into the two buckets that we already talked about. Give it a shot!
By fitting everything into these two categories, it might enable us to determine which category is most important for Leadership focus and tailoring. Is there overlap of characteristics between the categories? Yes, but this is where we start, and with more input, it will help us to improve Leadership. Did you wonder about which of the two categories is most important? Better yet, can we figure out how much more important one of them is compared to the other? Remember these two questions. We will come back to them down the road.
We know that you’re thinking, “What did you use to separate all these characteristics into the two categories?” You probably noticed the (QERD) Device in the middle of the above diagram and wondered what it was.
Well, one of our authors, as you know is a scientist and inventor. He is familiar with a Quantum Entropy Reversal Device(QERD) that is emplaced at the exit of a large funnel containing all of the known Leadership Characteristics. This magical machine then separates all the Leadership and Mission Characteristics into the two categories (buckets).
It was used in past work found under his name. “There is some overlap, but it works pretty well for the basic question at hand”, said he. “There is a quantum operator that functions as a rachet so that these filters can be adjusted to change the output separation,” he indicated, “so that it can be customized when needed.” You might have noticed, that we have used the QERD twice thus far, in this project! But we digress.
That is one big, imaginary, theoretical explanation that could be used to create order and simplicity out of Chaos, but it is False, a jest. It makes the diagram above look better, it helps understanding, but the QERD device itself, is Fake!
Everyone here knows that each of these characteristics was carefully hand-placed into one of the two categories by your authors. There is no machine that can do this, no way to avoid the hard work involved, but we all need to dream about being able to simplify complicated systems. We call it QERD.
Now, who took the screwdriver and where are the wire cutters?
Next Time: Article 8
What does the New Wiring/Plumbing Look Like?
Previous Articles: A Different Way of Looking at Leadership
Links:
Article 1: Picking Fresh, Ripe Leaders
Article 2: Looking for the Leadership Button
Article 3: Anybody Here Want to be a Follower?
Article 4: Do We Know What We Know after 2,574 Years of Leadership Studies?
