NAVIGATING THE SEAS OF GREYNESS
When you are child you learn how to deal with your parents. Once you become an adult or a parent you tend to forget that you were once young. You forget all the things adults did that you did not appreciate. You end up becoming what you did not appreciate.
When you were a follower you learnt how to deal with your leader. Once you became a leader you soon forgot how it was like to be a follower. You end doing all the things you promised yourself you would never do. When you were a follower you criticized everything in sight. You spoke of how different you would be if you ever got the chance. Your talk was big. Your talk could have even sounded right. However, when the time came for you to lead everything changed. It was not as cut and dried as you thought it would be. Leadership is never as cut and dried as followers think it is.
Followers more often than not suffer from what I call The Shower Deception. Have you ever sung whilst in the shower? You sound like the next big thing. You start thinking to yourself you are definitely in the wrong business. Whilst in the shower you sound like you deserve a recording contract. As long as you remain in the shower then your singing sounds perfect; stay in there long enough and you will start to believe your singing is indeed perfect! But take a step out of the shower and try recording yourself whilst singing and your thoughts on your singing ability may be very different. What you heard in the shower sounded right but it was not right.
It is this self-same deception that many people have when it comes to leadership. They have their shower-like environment that makes everything they think and say sound so right. This environment causes them to believe that they could easily lead if they really wanted to. They believe leading is easy. Sailing a boat through smooth sails often is. You get see the nice blue sea, all the colourful fish and even the lovely sun. But as the adage goes smooth sails do not make a great sailor. As the first sign of a storm all of a sudden things are not as colourful as you thought they were. There is thunder, crashing waves and everything is grey now! The beautiful colours you saw in the beginning no longer exist. The greatest sailors have learnt how to differentiate things irrespective of their colour. Great sailors have mastered navigating through the grey areas.
It is the ability to navigate through these areas and storms that differentiate a leader from a follower. The view is very different from the front. Being ahead of the pack means you are the first to see things that those behind you are yet to see. But by the time they see what you are seeing you must have the answer to the question they will ask next “so what now?” Followers ask this question because they begin to see that things from the front are not all sunshine and rainbows. There are times when everything is grey, when the right answer is not easy to find. The skill to navigate through these grey areas is the true mark of a great leader.
I am learning more and more than the true sign of a leader has very little to do with having all the right answers, because more often than not there is no clear-cut right answer. The true sign of a leader is not the ability to deliver eloquent messages that simply leave your followers all fired up. It has very little to do with how good you look or your ‘power walk’. Leadership for the most part is about managing conflict. It is about creating solutions that are so unorthodox that some definitely will revile against. Being a leader is about dabbling in those problems that followers often overlook and disregard. Being a leader is not about saying you can do better, it is about being better.
Leadership of any form is complex. The leadership books I read made it sound so glamorous and easy. But the moment I took my nose out a book and actually went to see for myself what it is like at the forefront of things the image I saw was not the one painted in the books. The true leaders always dabbled on two main words: Challenge and Opportunity. Where everybody sees chaos and defeat, leaders see challenge and opportunity. I believe that is the great thing about grey areas, there is no real right or wrong, you get to call it whatever you want. Great leaders understand that as opposed to seeing defeat, see opportunity. This changes your entire thought process. Where others see the end, you see the beginning.
Grey areas are beautiful. Followers steer clear of such areas, but great leaders understand that once you are in a storm the only way out is through! Great leaders have actually gotten out of their showers and entered the seas where they are tested on a regular basis. The seas will forever test your skill as a sailor. Great leaders have mastered the art of navigating through the great areas.