I listened to a podcast once and the interviewer asked, “What lessons does life keep putting in front of you?”  This series is inspired by the lessons that continued to show up in front of me this year.  This week is an analogy about baking and how leadership matters.

I have many skills, but baking is not one of them.  If you give me eggs, salt, butter, flour, milk, a pan, and an oven I will give you a disaster. If you give those exact same things to my wife, she will make you an amazing dessert.  It’s the same challenge.  It’s the same ingredients.  However, it is totally different outcomes, based on the knowledge and skills of the people involved.

What does this have to do with leadership?  In the above example, it’s not about the ingredients, it’s about the baker and their knowledge and skills that lead to different outcomes.  In a similar way, it’s not the ingredients, it’s the leader.  Think about when times have been tough and you’ve had a good leader vs a not so good leader.  Under good leadership my vibe is, “Bring the challenges.  I’ll just run through those walls or jump over them.”  My vibe under not so great leaders is, “Dude, why am I always running uphill with hundreds of pounds on my back while people throw rocks at me?”  Any of those vibes feel familiar to you?

Right now, the world is giving us a lot of ingredients, and they aren’t all easy ones to deal with.  There is chaos, burnout, turmoil, stress, competitive pressure, AI (totally a fad by the way, just like the internet 😉), shifting priorities, lack of stability, and more.  This is why leadership matters now more than ever.  While people are handed the same ingredients, there are VERY DIFFERENT outcomes.  Good leaders are finding ways to take these ingredients and turn them into opportunities and paths forward.  Other leaders are overwhelmed by these ingredients, creating lost teams filled with doubt, uncertainty, and low engagement.

The challenge: How can you continue to grow as a leader to be ready to bake with any ingredients sent your way?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry