When No One is Looking Take the Lead Essay #2
What do you know about Leadership?
Read Leadership Essay #1: Are You Ready?
A quarterback orchestrates a drive down field with less than two minutes to go in the fourth quarter, to set up the game-winning field goal. A chief of staff coordinates her medical team during a school shooting, as multiple victims flood the emergency room. A teenage boy stops a bullying incident at school, then starts a campaign to change conduct across the country.
These are examples of real people, in real situations demonstrating real leadership. Their situations are all different. So what makes them leaders in their moments? Qualities, traits, characteristics and skills called attributes.
There are specific attributes essential to leadership. Some are innate and part of the core components of what distinctively makes an individual the “individual” they are. Others are acquired, having been taught, learned, drilled and developed from competent mentors and real-life experiences that yield insight and discovered abilities. Consider the following examples:
· Anyone can learn to play tennis, but only one person played it like Serena Williams. Her exceptional abilities and talents, her level of competitiveness, determination and unrelenting passion to win were inherent to her being — innate. Attributes that are innate are hallmarks. They are the qualities, traits and characteristics that distinguish and define an inherent distinction. With hallmarks, a person already is.
· Firefighters are carefully instructed and thoroughly trained, with repetitious rigor, to override their fears and instincts for self-preservation, in order to run into burning buildings and rescue people trapped inside — acquired. Attributes that are acquired are competencies. They are the learned interrelated skills, habits and aptitudes that enable ability. With competencies, a person eventually becomes.
One word might be standing out as a striking omission. It’s often thought to be essential for leadership, and necessary for the credibility and selection of a leader:
Experience: the knowledge gained from observing, encountering or doing.
Time is required to gain knowledge. Everyone who has ever sat in classrooms, endured basic training, sweated through scrimmages or practiced hours to capably play an instrument knows this. Practically speaking, the more you do anything, the more proficient you become at doing it. This is a generalization and like most generalizations it must yield to the variables of character, conduct, chances and circumstances.
I consider experience as two types. While both are significant to leadership, one is more fundamental than the other.
Job experience is what we generally think of, as a criteria for leadership. We are inclined to believe that individuals with more time vested in a job are more qualified to lead others. Their career of applied training, situational recognition and task familiarity makes them better suited to head an agency, department, organization, company or team. This defines one type, over-time experience, the day-in-day-out, year after year accumulation of know-how, problem solving and operational execution.
I’ve seen many examples, in virtually every profession, sector, industry and arena of life that over-time experience IS NOT an indispensable prerequisite for leadership. Otherwise:
- First-time candidates and people with no political background would never unseat an incumbent, in an election.
- Rookie athletes, entering a locker room of veteran players, would never immediately be assigned or expected to spearhead their teams.
- Film school neophytes would never direct doyens of the industry, to critically acclaimed performances.
- Young adults, barely out of high school, would never command squads and troops through the life and death circumstances of actual combat.
What enables them to do this? Three things:
1. Preparation: the actions, methods and training done to become ready and able to perform a task, react to an event or resolve a challenge. Without the development of skills, the simulation of situations, and the evaluation outcomes for improvement moments for leadership will often result in examples of incompetence.
2. Maturation: the growth rate for characteristics to progress to a more evolved, desired or ultimate state. Physical growth to adulthood is relatively the same for humans the world over. But mental, psychological and emotional changes can vary as widely and uniquely as fingerprints, because growth can be accelerated by conditions and accentuated by capacity. The eldest child left to rear younger siblings after the loss of both parents can suddenly take on responsibilities and concerns well beyond their years. Within months at combat, a young field medic can gain an expertise in triaging and treating traumas that a seasoned ER doctor in a rural community will never obtain.
3. Activation: the cause that makes something start. Hallmark leadership attributes are much like genes. Some are operating while others lie dormant in the psyche, waiting for the one, spontaneous thing that will cause them to express and become active. Thomas Burnett, Jr., Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, Jeremy Glick and Sandy Bradshaw never planned or prepared to encounter hijackers aboard Flight 93, on September 11, 2001. With the possibility of an attack on the White House or a nuclear plant, they thwarted hijackers, in a self-sacrificing heroic moment of leadership and spared hundreds, if not thousands of lives. The circumstances for leadership will often determine what we have in ourselves, in the moment.
