Leadership might require some reflection.
More reflection than the books write about.
And sometimes, leadership requires making a U-turn. Even if you’re embarrassed or frustrated to take that step.
I wrote yesterday about some life lessons I picked up while trapped in one heck of a squall that turned a two and a half hour car trip into a five hour car trip and shaved a few years off my life.
The part of the trip was the absolute hardest for me was making a U-turn. I was already almost four hours into the trip. My phone was alarming with tornado warnings and the sky looked an alien green with finger clouds dropping down immediately to my left. Just as I was debating what to do and how I would protect my four year old if one of those funnels hit the ground, a median in the highway opened up to my left and instinctively I took it. I drove a mile back to the south and turned off at a small country store in hopes of finding a safe place or at least avoiding the treacherous conditions ahead.
It did the trick. We waited out the most dangerous of conditions for 20 minutes and then headed back to the north.
It was a hard decision to make. We’d so slowly gained the ground that would bring us closer to home that turning back was disheartening.
That is often the case with leading. You and your team have worked so hard to move an initiative or project or mission forward, that stopping, much less pulling back and regrouping, seems tantamount to defeat.
I’ve been there. Why, after all of the hours of work and consensus building, would you do anything other than press forward?
But sometimes the territory ahead is more dangerous that the territory you’ve already traversed.
My grandfather used to say, “Keep driving in the rainstorm. You’ll drive out of it.” This doesn’t apply to tornadoes.
Part of the trick to effectively leading is knowing which conditions are rainstorms you can drive through and which are tornadoes that require you to turn back or, at least, wait out.
You learn a lot in the waiting. You have time to sit and gauge the weather trend. You can plot alternative routes. You can develop the most effective timing and execution for a safe arrival.
If we’re always pushing forward, with no time for reflection, we lose the ability to identify changing conditions around us. {====> Click to Tweet} Players in the game change. The environment for the plan changes. Politics, economics, public opinion, corporate culture, and any number of other variables are in constant flux. If you don’t build in time to evaluate the changes, you won’t know when a course correction is necessary.
Don’t be scared of reflection. Don’t let emotion stop you from pulling back when conditions dictate. Sometimes leaders need a time out too.
Leave a Reply