Читать книгу Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People - Joseph O’Connor - Страница 6

Why do you want to develop as a leader? What do you want to achieve? A leader is going somewhere. Why move if you are happy with what you have?

We move for only two reasons: either we are unhappy where we are and want to be somewhere else, or we sense something better and are drawn towards it. However good our life, we get used to it and then we want more; our imagination always soars beyond our present state. The energy to start comes from our conviction within, coupled with a push from the outside. This call to adventure and the urge to play with the unknown has given us our art, music, science and commerce.

Leadership comes from our natural striving to constantly reinvent ourselves. You do not need external permission to be a leader. Nor do you need any qualifications or position of authority. Leadership does not depend on what you do already. Many people in positions of authority are not leaders; they may have the title but not the substance. Others have the substance, but no title. Leadership comes from the reality of what you do and how you think, not from your title or nominal responsibilities. Leadership blooms when the soil and climate is right, but the seed comes from within. So the only permission you need to begin is your own. The moment you say to yourself, ‘I can be a leader,’ you have already rolled up the map, put on your boots, got up from your easy chair and taken the first step on the journey.

Irish folklore tells the story of a group of tourists enjoying a walk in the countryside. They had a map, but even so, by early afternoon, they found themselves lost. The sky clouded over, the wind whipped the leaves around their feet and the first spots of warm rain began to fall on their faces. They decided to make for Roundmarsh, which, according to the map, was the nearest town. After an hour, unable to see through the curtain of rain, they decided to ask for directions. Walking on for half a mile, the rain eased off and they met a local man walking his dog in the opposite direction.

‘Excuse me,’ said the tourist leader, ‘we are a little lost. Can you tell us how to get to Roundmarsh?’

The man stared into the distance at nothing in particular and considered the question very seriously.

‘Roundmarsh?’ he muttered. ‘Roundmarsh? Hmm. That’s a problem. If I wanted to get to Roundmarsh, I wouldn’t start from here.’

It is always easier to get to where you are going when you know where you are. In the words of Max de Pree, the retired CEO of Herman Miller, ‘A leader’s task is to define reality.’ The leader puts a stake in the ground and says, ‘Here we are, what is possible?’ Two thousand years ago, a Chinese proverb gave much the same soundbite: ‘Gain power by accepting reality.’ The ancients steal all our best ideas. But accepting reality by knowing where you are is the first step of every journey.

We need to ask three basic questions:

Where are we going?

Why are we going there at all?

How do we want to get there?

Then, as this is a leadership journey, we need to ask more questions:

What resources do we have to help us?

What are our limits and our strengths?

What traps do we need to avoid?

What do we know about leaders?

Who are they and what do they do?

What kind of models do we have for leadership?

Do we have a good map?

Why start the journey anyway? What prompts you? What draws you to being a leader? Unusual circumstances? A personal crisis? Perhaps a person has come into your life and changed your thinking. We all have defining moments in our lives and often a person will act as a leader for you. Sometimes we recognize it at the time, but not always.

I remember a seminar I attended a few years ago with Eloise Ristad, a marvellous teacher who was Professor of Piano at Colorado University. She gave workshops on music and performance anxiety, a big problem for many classical musicians. They are expected to give a flawless performance, ‘speaking’ with their instrument, which needs constant practice to master. The pressure can reduce solo instrumentalists to glassy-eyed paralysis, like a rabbit caught in the glare of a car’s headlights. Musicians are taught to play their instrument at college, but they are given little guidance on how to perform it. Eloise had written a book called A Soprano on her Head¹ which I admired very much. She had a unorthodox approach to teaching music, in which she used all sorts of ways to interrupt performers’ stuck patterns. The title of the book came from the way she cured a singer of stage fright. She asked this singer (who was tongue tied in her presence and could hardly croak a note) to stand on her head and then sing. Ridiculous! And yet it worked. You might say it gave her a whole new perspective on singing. It was certainly the beginning of the resumption of her interrupted singing career.

I remember coming back from that workshop thinking, ‘I can write a book too.’ The fact that I had not written anything beyond school essays at that time didn’t seem to matter. A year later the manuscript was finished and it started me on a journey as a writer. The call is when you suddenly recognize you want to change.

One of my friends told me his turning point. He was with a textile firm, in name a manager but in reality a glorified clerk. His boss seemed to know less and work less than he did, and he referred to his in-tray as ‘Hell’ because it seemed to be a bottomless pit of torture and was always full. His out-tray was ‘the ocean’ because it was impossible to empty. Quite appropriately, the depth of Hell was how the boss decided what sort of worker you were. One Wednesday morning, after a longer than usual drive to work through the rush-hour traffic, a client blamed my friend loudly and publicly for something he knew nothing about. ‘That’s it!’ he shouted as he slammed the telephone down. ‘I’m leaving!’ And he did, after tipping the contents of his in-tray on his manager’s desk. He started his own business, where he earns less than he did before, but he is immeasurably happier, joining the ranks of the self-employed who have a tolerant and sometimes indulgent employer. He refers to that Wednesday as ‘the day that all Hell broke loose’.

It can be a chance remark from a friend can set you searching, or a new project at work, a manager who becomes a mentor, moving house, starting a romantic relationship, becoming a parent. In the popular rendition of chaos theory, a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing can conceivably cause a hurricane in Texas, such is the complexity, interconnectedness and unpredictability of the world’s weather system. (If it worked the other way round, that would be the real miracle.) Our social relationships are at least as complex as the weather, so I have no trouble believing that a few words from someone in the right place at the right time can totally change your life.

You are called – to what? Let us look at this enigmatic quality ‘leadership’ more closely. The word deceives us in its simplicity. It does not mean the same for everyone. Ideas about leadership and what constitutes a good leader have changed throughout history. They also differ from culture to culture. For example, the American individualistic and challenging style of leadership is very different from the Japanese style of leadership. A good leader in Japan seeks consensus; they call it nema washi, meaning ‘digging around the roots’. The phrase comes from the practice of cutting around a tree a few weeks before you want to move it. The cut roots start sprouting new growth, so when they move the tree, new growth takes hold straight away. The cutting also prepares the tree more gradually for the move than uprooting it in one go. But if they find too many roots, that is, a host of objections, Japanese leaders tend to withdraw and continue discussions. They will not usually bring an issue to a vote until they feel that most people will agree. The debate is over before the meeting.

Whatever their style, something that all leaders share is influence. We may see influential people on television, in films, in politics or at work, meet them socially or read about them in the press. We may admire them and want to copy them because they get things done, they stand for something important, something we want to be part of. We bestow ‘leadership’ on them. So leadership does not exist as an independent quality; it only exists between people. It describes a relationship. ‘Followers’ are the other half of leaders. They go together.

Leadership has long been associated with authority – we tend to concentrate on the leader, to think of them as innately superior in some way, and take the followers for granted. But formal authority is only one possible part of leadership. Many leaders do not have it. In some cases, perhaps ‘companionship’ better describes the relationship between leader and followers.

As leadership connects people in this way, I do not think it can be fully modelled from the outside by giving lists of how leaders act, culled from the study of other leaders. It can only be modelled from the inside, by each of us developing the values, beliefs and qualities we need to realize and achieve our purpose in life, to bring out our vision of what is possible. Then others will join us. We will be leaders first to ourselves and then to our companions.