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strategy

Jan 14
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Courageous Leadership:  A Delicate Balance

By Inspirations, Managing Change, NonProfits, Strategic Thinking No Comments

I’m going to start with the moral of the story:

“Warriors” are what you get when you treat action-minded “worriers” with respect and don’t just try to work around them.

Visionaries are what you get when you treat dreamers with respect and don’t just try point out the potential pitfalls in their ideas.

It is nearly impossible to be both a warrior and a visionary at the same time.

Navigating any worthy initiative needs both types of courage, and they both frustrate the other.

Yesterday, I posted this observation (and the header image here) on Facebook:  “Our clients come in all shapes and sizes, but the one thing they have in common is courage. Remarkable passion fuels these small business, higher ed and nonprofit organization leaders as they fling themselves into the gap between where they are and where they want to be: it’s an honor to support them as they blaze new paths, create better practices, make difficult decisions, have the tough conversations, and generally find ways to defy fear, embrace change, and inspire their teams to do better tomorrow than yesterday.”

As a response to that post, a long-time friend, client and one of my favorite provocateurs reached out to me by email to continue the conversation. For the sake of this discussion, we’ll call him “TJ”.  He was the one who crafted the “moral of the story” (above) and I have asked for his permission to post his thoughts here (orange italics) for the sake of furthering an important discussion:

“Courage is an appropriate word for those leading organizations or teams or families or just themselves.  Not everyone is courageous, but not everyone who is brave is the same.  I would suggest there are two types of courage.  The bold innovators, the true game changers have what I call the Bobby Kennedy style of courage, “I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”  This group is blessed with the ability to see beyond the apparent hurdles to the magnificent horizon.

I would argue many more of us muster a different brand of courage, the courage born from the fear of messing up, the fear of embarrassment, the fear of failure.  Despite all the obstacles they can see and imagine, this group gets out of bed each day and takes the responsibility to keep the ship in the channel, heading to the destination.

My experiences tell me that both types of courage are needed for an entity to succeed, but that very few people have both types.  In fact, I’m not sure it is possible for one person to be both visionary while at the same time sweating the details.  That seems intuitive to me.  But what happens when someone is perceived as fearful because his/her courage is different?

In the best organizations, this difference is recognized, embraced and respected.  In many more organizations, this difference leads to resentment.  I would argue that dreamers need to be challenged to better appreciate those in their organizations that give them the time, space and freedom to dream.  Worriers (for lack of a better term at this point) should be challenged to better recognize the value of those who create the vision and destinations that give organizations meaning, purpose and a future.”

My response:

I would call the latter category — the brave ship steerers you refer to — Warriors instead of Worriers. They muster a different brand of courage, waking up every day, conquering their fears to head back to the project/company/work battlefield despite all the minefields that they know exist (and a whole lot more that are just imagined.)

What too few people understand, and you rightly point out, is that organizations desperately need both the visionary’s courage and the warrior’s courage to successfully find the open blue waters to navigate.

It’s a delicate balance – one represented by a different photo.

Too much or too little of either side’s courage, and the whole operation collapses.

As leadership teams, we must understand that each side doesn’t just benefit from, but RELIES ON the other side to bring their best strengths to the table.

Believing that either brand of courage alone could lead the ship safely is a false confidence that will surely run the ship aground on one path or another: into waters too rocky or shallow to survive or so deep and stormy that the ship will be submerged.

Just acknowledging that there ARE two types of courage (and probably more!) is a huge step towards embracing the balance, and the momentum that can come when that balance is in harmony.

If you are a visionary leader, resist the urge to view the warriors on your team as “worriers.”

If you are a warrior leader, resist the urge to dismiss the “dreamer” side of your visionary colleagues.

We can all navigate more wisely, when we can see how to use all the talents available on the team to their best use.

 

Apr 26
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Scorched Earth: Can You Survive?

By Community Management, Event Design, Managing Change, Strategic Thinking 3 Comments

A few years ago, my husband and I became fascinated with the TV show The Colony. It created a mostly-realistic (it’s TV, people, let’s suspend a little disbelief) post-apocalyptic disaster environment, put real people with a variety of skills in and told them to figure out how to survive as a group over a series of weeks. Each person had to look inside themselves and ask, “what skills did I have in my old life that are relevant here to our group’s mission of survival?” As the season unfolded, the group gathered food, built shelters, started fires, filtered water, created small engines, protected themselves from marauders, and generally figured out how to survive. It’s a modern day interpretation on surviving the military ‘scorched Earth’ philosophy.

One of the major challenges I see facing nonprofit organizations today is that many are surviving almost entirely on momentum and history. They’re doing things that have always been done (electing the new committee, producing the annual report, running the tradeshow at X venue) because inertia and momentum keeps things moving. Multi-year contracts exist. Some volunteers feel entitled, others go unengaged.  Staff resources are stretched thin. The infrastructure is complicated and relies on many people playing their individual parts, not unlike an assembly line. Staff and volunteers generally are not incented to ask “what should we be doing differently?” In the meantime, the for-profit world has stepped boldly into direct competition for community, eyeballs, subscribers, participation, sponsor/ad revenue. The competitors are leaner, hungrier, and have cultivated better skills for the fight ahead. (With some slight nuance, this is true for both charitable nonprofits and trade association nonprofits.)

Honestly, I doubt that most traditional nonprofit organizations could survive a ‘scorched Earth’ scenario. Most have cultivated neither the creativity nor the competitive spirit to survive. Joe Rominiecki observed in a blog posting this week that Associations by nature have “a workforce that discovers, likes, and comes to depend on the comfort of the status quo. And it goes without saying that comfort breeds complacency.” 

Your team’s creative skills, sense of competitiveness, and risk tolerance might be sharpened with a little ‘scorched Earth’ exercise. Ask yourself: if literally every dollar of revenue (and expense obligation) that your organization has coming in was gone tomorrow, what would you do?  Where, precisely, would you start rebuilding?  (I’m betting it wouldn’t be a 2 hour staff meeting with highly paid executives debating whether or not your annual report should be printed magazine-style or delivered in an interactive video series.)

In a scorched Earth scenario, you’d ask:

  • What provides the most revenue? Currently? Potentially? (What giant potential revenue source have you not explored because “resources are too tight”?)
  • What do we do that’s most unique in the marketplace today? (If you “used to be” unique and everyone’s copying you now – go forth and figure out how to be different again.)
  • Who do we really need on the team? (Similarly but more painfully, whose skills aren’t useful to us anymore?)
  • Where are the empty places on the map? What will it take to get there? (reference with a hat tip to David Brooks’ New York Times article on the Creative Monopoly)
  • What’s your competitive advantage?  Is it healthy or damaged? (If it’s your members, do you treat them like they are a critical part of your mission or an annoying afterthought?)

When you can answer these questions with some tangibles, list them and prioritize where and how you would start to rebuild your community.

If there were such a thing, the "Doomsday Clock" for old-school nonprofits has ticked notably closer to midnight in recent years.

With the competitive landscape for most organizations out there today, is this really such a far-fetched scenario? Sure, it might not evaporate overnight, but with very few exceptions, the revenue is drying up (let’s stop kidding ourselves that it’s just economic constriction, a lot of it is shifting to other outlets.) If there were such a thing, the Doomsday Clock for old-line nonprofit associations has moved notably closer to midnight in recent years.

If these answers to the ‘scorched Earth’ exercise don’t align with your current organizational structure and division of resources, you have just found the opportunities to make some difficult and likely very painful changes. But the roadmap you have just created is an alternative to near-certain death. You can’t go back to the ‘good old days’ but you can find different ways to thrive that WILL turn back the hands on that Doomsday Clock. A three-or-five year plan isn’t going to cut it. Revenue victories are going daily to the nimble. Are you among them?

Just as the post-apocalyptic scenarios may be a little farfetched (for all but the least optimistic among us,) I do still feel a little comfort knowing I have multiple gallons of freshwater and a generator in the basement. With some courageous leadership, virtually ANY organization can create a team that will not only survive, but thrive in a ‘scorched Earth’ scenario – but you’ll have to burn some old ways of doing things & be ready to eat some of your sacred cows for nourishment along the way.

(Stay tuned for Part II – How to Start a Bonfire & Grind Up the Cow)

Cover photo credit:  George Schick