This week I had an opportunity to pause and reflect on the past few weeks.
Truly, it’s amazing how quickly the time goes by.
In the past few weeks, I’ve become far more sensitive towards others, towards their feelings about life, teams, and projects, and how to better encourage them. I’ve also felt a tremendous release from having to be a certain kind of leader. There are countless models of leadership, and no one model is right; additionally, one person might have to flex between several models based on team need and context.
I think I’ve been getting more flexible.
I’ve been reading a lot about sensing, too.
This blog post from Innovative Excellence, for example, explores how powerful (and at times deceitful) our senses can be. The author mentions our brains “filling in the gaps” based on previous experiences to expedite processing time, and the power of one sense disagreeing with the others (it looks and smells and tastes like an apple, but the texture is way off).
He applies the idea to innovation, and says that using these affordances (the idea that certain forms or materials afford a certain kind of motion or involvement: a knob for turning, a handle for pulling, etc.) or the dissonance created by senses in disagreement provide opportunities for leverage in innovation. If it’s going to disagree, make it seem like it was on purpose, and use the opportunity to make your statement louder. As we like to say at work “never let them see you bleed.” That is to say, if something is off, don’t bring it up. In fact, if you can, use it to your advantage.
Great Leadership explored the idea of listening. However, author Marcia Reynolds doesn’t really explore the concept of listening as the “sense of hearing.” Instead, she speaks to listening to your peers, to your leaders, to your followers, and being humble enough to admit when you don’t know the right answer, but you are willing to talk about it.
She briefly explores the concept as a biological concept: that leaders– especially those who have already climbed the corporate ladder, would become less and less comfortable with ambiguity. Personally, I don’t blame those with greater responsibilities for wanting to make safer decisions. Their mistakes have far greater consequences than those who have less to lose.
Which is a concept that Seth Godin explores in one of his blogs: when a business is new, that is the time to make sure what you’re offering is fresh. That is the time to take chances. As he says, “Too often, we look at the serious nature of starting a business (and worse, our imagined serious implications of failing when we do so) and we forget about useful, fresh or interesting. We forget to do that thing that might not work, to expose ourselves to things that are generous and new and fun.”
So while young business have an opportunity for newness and risk, the older and larger a company (or idea, or leader, or group) gets, the fewer chances they’ll want to take.
1) The larger you are, the more appealing old, tested, proven methods appear.
2) The larger you are, the more you have to lose.
3) The larger you are, the more people you have to convince
4) The larger you are, the more resources you have to move
But I think that’s where sensing can be reintroduced: large companies, leaders, and teams need to be in tune with themselves, with each other, and with what’s going on around them. They need to be able to not only look, but to see, not only hear, but to listen.
And only once they can sense what’s around them, with them, and within them can they know where they need newness.