On Leading with Greatness

Dysfunctional organizations always out themselves. Despite their attempts to compensate for their incompetence with apologies and small gestures, they can never get the fundamentals right. It’s like a boat with a chronically leaky hull. You can bail all you want with as many buckets as you can find, but that boat is going down.

What would it be like to be the last person on Earth?

He then responded with a bit of cornpone that was new to me, drawling, “Well, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I chuckled at the pleasantry and went right on fixing what was not broke. After all, “ain't broke” doesn't mean “couldn't be better.”

Leadership is practically in my blood. From a young age, I have been thrust into leadership positions, and I had to rely on my wits to succeed. Nonetheless, I always was a pretty good gut leader.

Leadership is a skill, and like any other skill you can be born into it, but it must also be learned. The thing with learning new skills, though, is that while someone can guide you through the process, they cannot teach you the actual skill. That only comes through application and practice.

How often have you heard that confidence and getting things done are definitional leadership qualities?

The difference between bossing and leading is massive. Yes, of course, most leaders are bosses on some level, but very few bosses are leaders. Boss is a position. Leader is an attitude of greatness, whatever the position, which is why untitled (and unentitled) employees can be great leaders without being bosses.

Last week I delved into the corporate culture of crisis, shedding light on its high costs and offering some strategies to break free from the grip of this mindset. If you missed that, you can catch up with the article here.

Now let’s dig a little more deeply into crisis culture, starting with the word itself.

Picture this series of disasters! The phone rings, an email arrives, a report request lands on your desk, someone demands answers, dammit, answers! Welcome to the woeful world of the corporate addiction to urgency. It is as if urgency itself is an emergency—the crisis of urgency. But as I always say,

If everything is a crisis, nothing is a crisis.

In other words, once everything becomes equally urgent, there can be no priorities, and chaos ensues.

Rope is an incredibly simple but amazing tool. Imagine a world without it—no sails raised to harness the wind, no stones transported miles to construct the pyramids, the highest mountain peaks unscaled. For millennia, rope has hoisted laden pails from wells, secured the beams of modest dwellings, and flown our proud banners. Even laundry once relied on rope to dry in the heat of the sun.

Like any versatile tool, however, rope has its dark uses. Rope can truss limbs—securing animals for the slaughterhouse and humans for bondage. Yes, rope can guard us from danger and maintain order even in the largest crowd, but it also restricts our free movement, marking forbidden perimeters and enforcing confinement. And in the darkest chapters of human stories, rope can be used to take life.

Surprising as it may be, I wielded a lot of rope as a professor and as a boss.

Have you ever tried to transform the very soul of an organization—its culture? Quite the task, right? To thoroughly transform a culture for the better, you need to look to and master the Rule of Thirds Strategy.