Happy after Thanksgiving

The day after Thanksgiving offers promise. So the holidays are fully upon us, ready or not. I should be able to get a lot of work done today, but don't really feel like it. In some ways I feel spent in my career. I'm relatively young so that's not a good sign. But sometimes I am jazzed. Leading an organization toward something, anything, beyond where it currently is, takes so much energy. The momentum is away from you and it takes concerted perseverance to create minor currents that start to facilitate change. You orchestrate and hope to not manipulate. You have dead weight in some staff that torques you and have to develop emotional discipline. Blood can be smelled by your staff and so there tends to be accumulations of poor behavior that can crescendo. Ironically, you're the only one who feels it because you're the lightening rod that caused it. If you don't keep your list of offenses and frustrations short, you will blow. Your message will be curtailed to everyone to, "This organization is terrible, everywhere I look is brokenness..." In most cases you're not saying a word, but it's spoken loudly.

It's not all bad. Actually, it is very, very good. I think the problem is that the fruit is so esoteric and can take years to see. Perhaps good leadership requires counter-intuitive measures because it is in the negative issues and consequences that the extent of required change becomes visible. It is often the negative issues, the outcroppings of rock in the water, that hurt the most. These outcropping are often under the water and responsible for the odd current patterns you were trying to figure out. I suspect two things happen over time with this outcropping phenomena for a good leader. First, they start to pick up where the outcroppings are by being attentive to the currents and thereby mitigate some pain in change by making wiser choices. They also realize that as the current is renegotiated these outcroppings become much more vulnerable to erosion. It can be possible to outlive even the strongest and hardest detractor if the momentum shifts and their place remains the same.