There are two reasons people do things: because they can; and because they have to. As Dr. Lee Thayer points out in “The Competent Organization” no one has ever done anything that cannot be done – and what makes things necessary to people is always a matter of intrinsic drive – much as Daniel Pink writes about in his book “Drive.” But the other side of that coin – is no one has ever done something believed to have been impossible – without first making it necessary.
So the two questions are: How do I make this possible? And, how do I make this necessary? It may seem simple enough, so how doe this inform our habits of leadership?
Leadership is not what we do – it is who we are. Leadership is formed in the habits that drive what we do. Asking questions is simple. But doing so effectively is not easy. You must apply these questions to every person ( including yourself), every situation and all the time. And it’s not a recipe for leadership, meaning, simply “asking:” the questions will not produce any meaningful results. You must first become someone who can turn these simple questions into powerful tools. It’s a pure matter of competence. Competence is not about skill, or talent, or even knowing what to do with a tool. It is about what you accomplish with that tool. A tool is only as good as the person whose hands it is in.
Handling tools masterfully comes down to habits. We begin to think about outcomes rather than process. Tools become extensions of ourselves. As our competence increases it is less about the tools and more about who we are that directs what we can perform. And when that level of fluency is reached and we are the master of our tools – we find or fashion exactly what we need – based on what we can learn from environment in which we are working.
To use any questions as powerful tools, we must understand that they serve to help us create and manage meaning; both what we understand and what we impart to others. We must first become credible and competent with these core questions – and understand where and how to use them.
Anyone is a leadership role should understand that you must be resourceful in order to guide an organization’s performance. We direct the purpose of the enterprise, the activities and accomplishments of it’s people and the allocation of the assets and other resources. It’s easy to see how this is a matter of how we can make things possible. Many of our decisions address “how” things happen. It is simply a matter of “managing” the business. In and of isteslf it doesn’t really take much leadership skill to manage the hows. But effectively providing the “why” is entirely about leadership.
Simon Sinek pointed out in”Leaders Eat Last” that authority is not what gets people to do things. We can bully and intimidate – threaten to fire people – or demonstrate our ability to do so just to keep people in line – but we know that power doesn’t fuel performance. When we force extrinsic pressure on people – they tend to offer minimally what they have to, at best. And often simply fail to perform at all. So, how do we make it possible to make things necessary?
Competent leaders get people to do things for their own reasons – and great leaders align those reasons with the great, worthy purpose of the organization. President Dwight D. Eisenhower once noted that “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” Leaders make and manage meaning to make it necessary for people to perform. They create the why as well as the how.
The habit of learning is at the core of these questions. When our questions are rooted in genuine curiosity – we are in the learning mode. Often we ask rhetorical questions aimed at demonstrating the authority of our knowledge and when we are certain of what we know – we are no longer open to learning.
It’s a good idea to know what someone else is thinking – before attempting to tell them what to think. Asking is a good start – but listening to the answers is often the more difficult task. Learning what you are working with is critical to effectively and efficiently getting anything accomplished. Especially if what you aim for is to get others to make necessary what you endeavor to make possible.
For any business, one of the most frustrating and debilitating conditions is when things are clearly possible – but there is no sense of urgency or necessity around them. It is often labeled as a problem of inefficiency ( time, talent and money being wasted). But that is the consequence – the real problem is often leadership. The problem is how do we make it necessary for whatever needs to be accomplished to get done.
Just as often we find ourselves looking at something clearly necessary (for example when we are at the brink of disaster or listening to an opportunity screaming towards our door) – and find ourselves struggling to make it possible to do what must be done. We look at our resources: financial, talent, human bandwidth, technology and so-forth, and evaluate “how can we do this?” (And in moments of doubt, the even more critical question: “why must we do this?) At that moment we find it necessary to make something possible. At issue is the habits that make up who we are. The old saw, “hope is not a method” comes to mind.
It boils down to how prepared and how competent we are as leaders and and as an organization. But it is still driven by the same two questions. Great organizations find ways to do what others think impossible. They find a way, using whatever resources they can muster, improvise or invent from whatever is at hand or reachable – and don’t make a habit of making or accepting excuses. Leadership is what informs these habits.
The myriad complexities and competencies of any effective leader rests on how well you address these two fundamental issues. They are simple questions, but the danger in asking questions is when we believe that we already know the answers. Wisdom in leadership speaks to the constant need for curiosity, exploration and an insatiable desire for personal growth. Mark Twain borrowed and and made famous the idea that “it is seldom what I don’t know that gets me in trouble, more often it is what I do, that turns out not to be so.”
