Last week talked about leading without authority.  In order to do lead without authority you have to have courage.  This week’s entry will focus on courage, culture, and leadership and is inspired by comments shared by Bill Fanelli and Chris Saunders.

I’m playing cards and I have three 9s and two 10s.  Is it a good hand?  It depends.  How good my hand is depends on what game we are playing and what rules we are following.  I bring this up, because the games we play and their rules only exist because we agree to play by those rules.  This means that we can decide to play by different rules and change the game we are playing.  Think about our work.  Each day we decide what game we are going to play and what rules we are going to play by.  Think of this as the work we do and how we do the work (culture).

The leadership challenge is, “What rules are you playing by and are you intentionally choosing how you play?”  When I think about work there are some traditional “games” that come to mind where I am rewarded for beating you.  The rules state that if I win, you must lose.  This makes us compete against each other.  We don’t have to play that way though.  Quite frankly, I don’t want to play that way.  Instead, we can choose to play where we fight for something and not against each other, a game where we can both win.  This changes our strategy from hoarding secrets to collaborating in order to accomplish something.

None of this is easy and this is a true test of courage.  One thing I have learned over the past few years is that not everyone wants to play the same game.  Maybe they don’t know how to play a newer game.  Maybe they don’t have the skills to play this game.  Maybe they are good at the old game and don’t want to change games, or maybe they are just scared.  It’s really easy to look around and decide just to go along with the crowd and play the game their way.  However, if I’ve learned anything from watching great leaders it is that they are the ones with enough courage to play an entirely different game with its own rules.  They take these risks because they believe in the game even when others don’t.  They believe in the game and do the right thing even when they aren’t recognized for it, and this is the kind of leader I want to be.

 What game are you playing?  What rules are you using?  Here’s to playing a different game.

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry