Lead the Change, Keep the Team
Lead the Change, Keep the Team
There’s an old African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
I reminded a coachee of this recently. He was preparing to launch a new initiative and anticipating resistance. He felt strongly about the importance of this project to the organization’s success, yet knew the magnitude of the change would unsettle some of his direct reports; leaders who had been with the organization for years and were deeply invested in the past, not the future.
He could “go fast” and arrive alone at a solution that might look elegant on paper but prove unworkable in practice. Or he could learn to “go together” and build the kind of ownership that makes real progress possible. (more…)
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I live in the metro Detroit area, and for anyone who has a heartbeat here, we know that the Detroit Pistons are in the National Basketball Association playoffs. After last year’s poor 14-68 season, they’ve rebounded to 44-38 with a new coach and a physical style of play reminiscent of the 1989 and 1990 “Bad Boys” era when they won back-to-back championships.
Many years ago, when I was newly appointed as the leader of a large team, I met with them to introduce myself and to learn more about them. And I shared an analogy that continues to ring true in my mind today; that we’re an orchestra and I was their conductor.
Several weeks ago, I completed my first half marathon. Making the decision to do it, disciplining myself to train for it, standing in the middle of the street in downtown Detroit at 6:30 a.m. on a chilly morning with anxious excitement waiting for the starting signal, and later working through the physical aches were all new experiences. But my biggest learning wasn’t physical, it was mental.
It’s no secret that many companies are struggling to find the right balance between remote and hybrid work policies for their knowledge workers. After over two years of forced remote work, announcements and retractions of return-to-office dates, remote local hires who have never stepped foot on site, and remote countrywide hires who will never be expected to work on site, many hope there is light at the end of the tunnel. They just don’t know if it’s sunlight or a train headlight. 
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article about a young man named Liam McCoy.1 Liam was born with albinism, a diagnosis characterized by lack of the pigment melanin in his hair, eyes, and skin. His eyes were overly sensitive to bright light, they moved involuntarily to the point that he was unable to make them look at any specific object, and he was extremely nearsighted. He could only see something in a field three inches from his nose and had a visual acuity of 20/2000. Though he had sight, his visual perception was extremely poor, and he learned to experience and understand his environment using cues that were different from those born with normal vision. 
“Belief in what someone can do is more powerful than knowledge of what they can do.”