Their leadership is the best feedback loop for your leadership.
Brent Filson
Through feedback, life on our planet grows and thrives. If life forms don't create feedback loops and get good information about how well they are interacting with their world, the world will eventually destroy them.
This is true for those in charge. Leaders need to know how they are doing, or they won't last long as leaders.
Results are one type of feedback. After all, there's nothing more important for a leader to do than get things done. You should know what kind of results you're getting, if they're the right ones, and if you're doing things the right way to get them.
There is another kind of measurement that is just as important as results, and sometimes even more important. Most leaders don't pay attention to this measurement. This measurement is not just about you, but also about the people you lead.
To explain what that measurement is, I'll first talk about a basic idea about how to lead people to get things done.
There's a big difference between doing a task and being in charge of it. This makes a huge difference in how well the task gets done.
For example, if you're a floor sweeper, don't you do your job best not just by sweeping floors, but by taking charge of sweeping floors?
This kind of leadership could include:
— stepping up to order and take care of supplies,
— judging the job's results and trying to make them better and better,
— making it part of the general cleaning policy to sweep the floors,
— finding, training, and making more floor cleaners,
— creating a "floor-sweeping spirit" that can be shown through training, special uniforms and insignia, behaviour, etc.
— making plans and goals for sweeping the floor.
If not, one just pushes a broom when in a "doing" mode.
You may say, "Brent, listen up: a job is a job is a job. This thing about being a leader makes too much out of not much."
Possible. But what I want to say is that putting leadership into a task changes what is expected of it. Even the task itself changes. Think about it: I think our world changes when we are asked to lead instead of just doing.
When you need to get people to do something, you should challenge them not to do the task, but to lead it.
This brings us back to the most important way to measure your leadership. Your leadership should be judged not by how well you lead, but by how well the people you lead lead.
Now that they are in charge, they can't just do what they want. They have to agree with you on what steps they will take as leaders. You can stop them from doing anything they want to do. But don't use the veto very often. Build up your own confidence and theirs in your leadership.
When you look at the feedback loop connected to your leadership to figure out how good it is, you are looking at your world as it should be. This will lead to great results.
All rights are reserved by The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. for the year 2006.
