Step out of the cockpit of your leadership for a moment and take a look at how the trip is going.
Turbulence, storms, navigational changes, difficult crewmates / passengers, and the need for acceleration or deceleration are the facts of life.
Yet, if you’re a leader, then you’re at the helm, whether or not you’ve got a firm grip on the rudder and stick—or have been on autopilot while hanging out in the passenger cabin feeling annoyed or victimized.
Nothing reveals this passenger versus pilot mindset more so than a crisis like the one in the American automobile industry. The additional multi-billion dollar bailout requests from GM and Chrysler show that when leaders believe themselves to be passengers, the only solution tends to be a desperate cry to “rescue me.” However, at Ford, an organization that has NOT asked for a bailout, we see leaders behaving like pilots: “we’re at the helm, this is quite the storm, we’ve had some mechanical problems, yet we’ll get there one way or another.”
Your mindset isn’t just a psychological curiosity . . . it’s in charge. What you want, what you believe about the
best way to get there, and how actively—or passively—engaged you are as the pilot, are the three key factors responsible for your current position and heading. Yet too often leaders are unaware of the causal relationship between their internal “story” and bottom line results.
So it’s a responsibility of leadership to look in the mirror from time to time and ask four questions:
- What do I MOST want to achieve or accomplish right now, and immediately ahead?
- What do my current actions reveal of my beliefs about the best way to get there?
- How actively fired up and engaged am I in these things?
- What do all of the above mean for my current position, speed, and heading, and necessary adjustments to these?
Particularly when things are tough, too often leaders, not accustomed to turbulence, wrongly blame outside factors—other than their own beliefs and behavior—as key to the results they are getting. They make their people, economic / competitive / market conditions, their clients or customers, their board, investors, and so on, the perpetrators of less-than-desired results. Such thinking lets a leader put themselves in the role of passenger.
To avoid this, you must check in with yourself, and notice any bias to place responsibility for your trajectory and progress somewhere else.
Your results always reflect the answers to these questions, which makes a deliberate awareness and approach critical to all you hope to achieve. As leader, you always have choices, particularly when you know your beliefs control your actions (and inactions), which then lead directly to the results, wanted or unwanted, you are getting. Expose and change your beliefs in these areas and you can always change your organization’s outcome for the better.
David Peck