Where I Stand
If you’ve been reading my articles for quite a while — and I’m so thankful for your pair of eyes, and for your time and attention — you might have noted some sways in the way I write. I like to play with the intensity of depths, I like to switch perspectives, and I even make some of my articles provocative on purpose.
And, it’s about time I provide some explanation as to why I write the way I write. Sways or no sways, there’s something I firmly believe in: in the end, our work — and that implies work space and people we work with — is meant to help us reveal and showcase our personal talents and unique skills, whatever they may be. In fact, I consider it the biggest talent and personal skill when someone — they usually call such people “leaders”, “coaches”, “mentors” , or “facilitators”— sees in people more than they see in themselves and uses whichever means they have available to help the others access and reveal the untapped depths of their personal potential. There’s even more to this. It’s still the world where people are supposed to generate profit from businesses, and if a seer-of-hidden-talents happens to be capable of also seeing how those talents and skills might be leveraged to the good of their organization, as well as for a greater good, wouldn’t that be a million-star-rated skill, too?
On to the part with the explanation. In one of my earlier articles I wrote about the false notes in the buzz. The modern media is swarming with the words and word combinations that have been misused and misrepresented. For example, many of my articles are tagged “leadership” — and I have to go with a tag, one way or the other — but I’m well aware that for many of us the word “leader” evokes connotations not of a someone who is wise and who leads, but of someone who speaks of lofty things and skips on walking the talk. On the other hand, the word “manager” — whose original unretarded meaning is that of an “efficient organizer” — has been mixed with mud, for many, because of certain legacy imbalances in the organizational cultures of earlier times in general. Later on, as the balance shifted and as people got tired of dysfunctional managers, they bumped into the mishaps of flat organizations, and since then the public sentiment seems to have levelled the balance back to reinstating the good reputation of the word “manager”, that is, a manager has to be a good manager.
Those were the false notes in the buzz that I spoke of previously, in my writings. And, I’m starting to get a certain tinge of falseness from the overabundance of “leaders”, “coaches”, “mentors”, and “facilitators” in the media churn. I’m not speaking of anyone personally here. The point is, from the way the info-sphere makes us feel, everyone is supposed to be mentored, coached and facilitated to become someone, like, a leader. And, a certain coachee or a mentee is thinking of themselves as a subject, not as the one who has just as much power as a coach, or a mentor, or a facilitator in a coaching relationship. Besides — and I wrote of this as of Fear #1 in my recent “Your Q-Blog Needs You” post — there’s so much “content” around, there’s so much to read, and to check, and then they want you to become a leader, and it seems like you have to be coached, and trained, and to read more… until your poor head has no space at all to stop and to reflect and to see if…maybe you’ve already got everything that it takes to be a leader, or a manager, or whoever you think yourself not yet ready to be? And, maybe what you need to nurture and to develop those qualities that you’ve got inherent in your personality — based on your background, or based on the things that you’ve experienced in your life — is anything but stuffing your head with newer and newer doses of truisms which you’ve already read about through and through? And, if you’ve happened to be skimming through the reads with the words “real leaders do this or that” in the header, hadn’t this make you feel like a poor kitty who is scared because some big cat is a cool guy in the house, and you are not, because the “content” on the screen does not seem to empower you as the one who already has the buds of leadership qualities in you? Only, those buds don’t need to be dumped with more and more “content”, and they are just pleading to be nurtured and watered?
… and that’s exactly why I write my Becoming a Leader series and some of my other articles the way I do. I want to provoke, to make you ask yourself the questions that help you realize who you are, based on what you feel and know about yourself, not on what “leaders-coaches-mentors” who barely know you — or who don’t know you personally at all! — are making of you. What, some sort of a Pinocchio? I don’t want to be the one who pumps and dumps your heads with more and more chunks of “content” and with “how to’s” (and I highly recommend that you check the reads referenced for further reading below). Though, I have to admit, some of my articles are written in line with the modern ethos of online writing, which succumbs to certain outworn “false notes”, ubiquitous in this age when much of what they write on the web is written for algorithms, not for humans. The prevailing assumption holds that the algorithm knows better what’s good for people, but we have the colossus with feet of clay on our hands here, and.. maybe there will even come a time when algorithm-less reads curated by caring humans for other humans will regain their value.
Since I’ve started on the false notes, two more have popped in my mind. They speak a lot about “passion” and being passionate about what you do, and about some sort of a “drive”. It looks like several species of “passion” and “drive” exist in the world of organizations and corporations, not just one (without going into much detail). So, probably, I could say that I’m passionate about helping people get the best out of themselves based on their authenticity, but I prefer to use a more solid phrase here — because the word “passion” appears to have been tainted with a certain falseness, too.
I’ll just say: “This is where I stand”, as in:
There are no victories, there are only battles, and the best you can hope for is to find some place where you can make your stand. If you are lucky, you will find someone to stand with you. This is my spot. This is where I stand. — Captain Roy Montgomery
Related:
(tech) Leaders, Managers, and Tennis Umpires
Why Self-Organization Is a Luxury
Further reading:
Too Much Crystallized Thinking Lowers Fluid Intelligence
Leadership, Leader, Be a Leader, and other buzzwords of the 21st Century
