For my
challenge I decided to concentrate on the idea of leader as teacher.
The reason for this is because it’s the face of leadership that
appeals to me the most and I enjoy working within. I would like to
think of myself as a visionary, creative leader but what I find is
that I’m not so good at having ideas. What I am good at is
imagining the possibilities of an idea, what it could leverage off
and where it could go. I figured that the easiest way to reach out
to people who have had the idea is to be a teacher who helps them to
make the idea all that it could be. The approach to this took many
paths, the main on being to put myself out there as an advisor for
start up companies with ideas. I approached the organisers of the
Cable Car Challenge, a Wellington business plan competition, and
advertised my services on their web site. After what seems like an
eternity I finally had a reply! We had a meeting and we chatted to
this about his idea and I gave what I thought was some pretty useful
advice and some ideas to take the project forward. I got an email
from him later saying that he had taken the advice and the project
was on the heat. I found leadership and I think he did to. Job
done!
Searching for a path to leadership
I hate
leadership and I try to avoid it at all costs. I don’t mind
sticking my head out in public and having a rant and rave on my
soapbox but the thought of actually creating a movement and having
followers feels like a responsibility that I can’t abide.
So what
the hell am I doing putting myself out to a world of strangers as an
expert on business matters? Am I insane? During some points of the
challenge I was beginning to think so. So, without any further ado I
will tell the story of how it all happened.
At lecture
one I was sitting there writing the passage about finding leadership
into my journal and thinking about what it is that gets me pissed off
enough to want to do something about it. I thought of my heroes who
are all punk rock poets and decide I wanted to become one of them.
The plan went something like this: form a band, put together a
political message and get going with a hard core punk song. It
sounds daft now but it’s not actually that hard. I already
know some musicians in Wellington who are pretty good and I’m
not bad at writing lyrics. The trick was to figure out how to get
the song out there and then I realised I could volunteer at the
Victoria University radio station and sneak my song into their
playlist while I DJ on the graveyard shift. It’s also quite
easy and not very expensive to get your music into iTunes and the
potential sales bonanza that is the internet. Add your tune to a
crazy home video and it can be a YouTube hit in days. The
possibilities are endless! Unfortunately this enthusiasm was short
lived because at the end of the day I’m quite a homebody and I
just didn’t have the gumption to get out of my comfort zone and
do this thing.
The next
idea was to piggy back off someone else’s political movement
and being a computer geek the One Laptop Per Child program seemed
like it was the ideal way to use my skills and do something in the
volunteer space. I found that there were already some projects on
the boil in New Zealand so I contacted the people involved and found
that the projects were not really on the boil at all and that most
people seem to be too busy to really contribute a lot of time to a
volunteer program of this kind. It’s not the type of volunteer
program were anyone can just rock up and hand out bread or anything,
this is hardcore computer programming. It also struck me that the
people involved in this process were mainly concerned about promoting
their own companies which I didn’t think was the point of the
exercise at all.
Finally, I
thought of something that ended up being the answer, although I
didn’t know it at the time and strictly speaking it wasn’t
my idea at all. I was bitching about the challenge in class and
asking Sophie if there were any things I could do at VicLink that
might help out some businesses that they had on the go. She
indicated the VicLink has a bit too much Intellectual Property for
volunteers to be moseying about in but she suggested that I put
myself out there with the Cable Car Challenge people as a free
business advisor. She had thought of doing this herself but as a
judge on the challenge it was a conflict of interest so she didn’t
think this was appropriate. I got the contact name of the Cable Car
Challenge organisers and contacted them the very next day to see how
I could go about being a business advisor.
Taking the path to leadership
Initially
the organisers were very receptive although a little concerned. At
first they suggested that I might get inundated with replies as there
are over two hundred entrants in the competition. I know how these
things work on the web and I wouldn’t expect that any more than
10 percent of the people who read the newsletter would even bother to
contact me. Carol, the organiser of the Challenge offered to put my
details into an email that would be sent out to the challenge
entrants to get the ball rolling. I took the initiative and built a
web site in Google Pages that was advertising my services and then
sent to link to Carol to add to the email notice. Job done! Or so I
thought…
While I
was awaiting the plethora of emails from people seeking my help, I
got on a roll with sharing knowledge! Leader as Teacher! I started
a blogger site for all my MBA musings, published all my assignments
on Google Docs, added Google Analytics so I could keep track of the
site activity and thought this is it! I’m sharing my knowledge
with the world! Come feast on the wealth of my experience. It was
satisfying and gratifying to know that I was putting back into the
world at large. Meanwhile, I was waiting for the emails to roll in…
And time
passed. No emails. What the f^&k? I thought? The MBA is so
useless that I can’t even give away the skills I have learned?
Does not one respect me? Is it all about me? I gave Carol a ring.
No we haven’t sent out the newsletter. What? We thought that
there were professional liability issues with associating ourselves
with a free consultant. Hmmmm, what about if I post something in the
blog on the Cable Car Challenge website? Oh yes no problem! So off
I went again. I added an entry to their blog and awaited Carol to
moderate it so that it would actually be visible to the world at
large. And waited…and waited….checked the
site…nothing. The due date of the challenge is rolling up
fast. Cue state of depression, desperation and self doubt then give
up.
Now what
do I do? Can I rely on no one in this world to deliver what they
promise? All sorts of thoughts filled my head. Do I abandon this
and crack on with something else? In desperation I thought I would
create a social/politics interest group in Face Book. Surely with an
election coming up that would work! Even if I only get 5 members
then it’s better that failing this task!
Then one
day I checked out the statistics on my website and found that I had
received some new hits. I checked the referring page and found that
they were from the Cable Car Challenge website. Finally some action!
Only four hits in the first day but it’s better than nothing.
Then an email turned up from a young chap looking for some help.
This chap had actually failed to make it to the final of the
challenge but he was not prepared to give up and wanted to pursue his
idea anyway. That’s the kind of spirit I can respect so I got
in touch and we agreed to meet up on campus so I could get some
information on his background, idea and see what we could come up
with. We met up and chatted for an hour about his idea. I
understood his idea straight away and thought it’s not bad at
all. I mentioned some other possibilities that he hadn’t
thought of and his face lit up when he realised how much potential
this thing has. Finally, I advised him on some things he could do to
move this project forward. I made two points…
Leadership:
get people on board who get your teachable point of view, if they
understand it you have found the right person and they will follow
you
Emotion:
Emotional commitment is key, be emotionally committed to your idea,
get your followers to be emotionally committed to it, get your
customers emotionally committed
I agreed
to draft up a bit of the stuff we had talked about in the
mind/cognitive map of some kind and send it on to him. He emailed me
a couple of days ago to let me know he had gone out and found some
followers who had come on bard and were going to work on the project
with him. Good on him!
Reflections on the journey
It felt
pretty good to know that I had learned something useful in my MBA
after all. It also felt good that I had been able to share it and
someone had not only listened but had acted on it.
I was in a
state of despondency with the MBA process. I was unhappy with my
career which was why I did the MBA in the first place. As the
process drew to a close I began to look about for new things to do
and thought that being a business advisor was something I would be
good at. After the initial failure I became very frustrated and
started to fall back onto my old habits and to look for jobs that
were really no different that what I had done before. I became quite
depressed about the idea that I had spent all this time and effort on
learning all this stuff, only to be back in the same dead end I was
in before.
After
completing this journey and getting through to the other side I can
now rationalise that depression and angst as just part of the
process. It’s not very pleasant being in the middle of it and
I imagine that as life goes on there will always be periods like
this. Reflecting on the cycle of change and stepping up to
leadership this is part of the process, the test as it were. You
take the step out of your comfort zone, you slide down that slope
where you don’t know what’s going to happen and the
uncertainty almost kills you. Then you see something catch alight
and the idea begins to burn. If you keep at it you start back up the
slope, different, changed but alive and knowing it was worth the
effort of going there. No matter what the size of your movement, if
you change one life you have changed the life of everyone that person
knows, all the people they know and on into infinity.
Were too now?
I still
don’t like the test bit of the process, it can be pretty
shitty. That being said this is just part of making or leading
change. I think the world doesn’t really like change, it
resists it. Whether it is people not doing what they promise, the
little voices in your head giving you shit about it, the temptation
of the easy path, the relentless battle between internalising and
externalising blame, in short the world just doesn’t like
things that are different. If you want to make a difference then you
have to understand that the process is painful, the rewards are
uncertain and but the opportunities to change are infinite. Some
opportunities will not work out. Some will work out beyond your
wildest imaginings. Nothing is written and only a fool would believe
that they had planed everything from the beginning when things do
work out. Change and leadership are processes that you manage the
best you can. Win or lose you need to accept that change is tough
and that you need to keep changing, keep fighting the world in order
to make a difference. It’s not a conspiracy against you as a
person, although I often feel it is! The world is like a comfortable
child in front of a television and you have to push it outside once
in a while. It will resist but eventually it will thank you for it.
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