INsight/ Leaving the Harbor
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Photo by Geran de Klerk on Unsplash.
Manila, 19 January 2022 — Which challenge are you taking as a leader?
Story
It happened in 2021. In the Grow3Leaders Challenge, we celebrated the achievements of small teams of 1+3 leaders who made positive changes happen in their workplaces in just six to eight weeks, in countries around the world. Preparations are now underway to kick off again with a next round to open soon for enrollment. Meanwhile, more people are deciding to join the Grow3Leaders mailing list to receive updates on the challenge. There is something special about what the leaders taking the challenge have done in 2021 and in the two years before that, and it can be easy for outsiders to overlook it.
So what makes the leaders who completed the Grow3Leaders Challenge so special? It is that, to reach the finish, they actually put in real work to learn and practice new skills and behaviors. Today, on the other hand, we see that talking about leadership and influencing change has become popular as more and more people want to discover a purpose to make their work and life more meaningful. For many, leadership and leading have become a part of ‘the lingo.’ What we found, however, is that there is a big difference between the lingo, the talk, and putting in the work. If you only learn the lingo, you might end up just like the people in a famous story by Alan Watts.
In the story, Watts, a philosopher, described the people who, like him, owned a boat in the harbor of Sausalito off San Francisco. Unlike him, however, most of them never left the harbor, and just held parties on their boats during the evenings and weekends to look good and have fun. Why was that? Because they had not invested in learning the skills to take their boat out to sea, which is more challenging than it looks. So they took the easy way out, just partying instead. The story reminds me of some discussions we see on social media, which can be all talk and no action because of a lack of skills to lead in a challenge.
Challenge
Of course, as a committed leader, you don’t want to get stuck ‘in the harbor’ and end up partying and just looking good. You want to do the actual work and get real results. And that’s what leadership development is about. What is so rewarding is that there are many things that you only discover by working on a challenge as you master the skills you need.
In the Grow3Leaders Challenge, this breaks down into three roles to choose from:
Collab Member – you join 3 colleagues to influence a change together.
Collab Leader – you invite 3 colleagues and lead them in the challenge.
Collab Mentor – you mentor one or more Collabs through the challenge.
Each role lets you learn specific skills and practice leadership behaviors over and over until you develop a level of mastery. It’s in that continuous practice that you discover what leadership really is, and how powerful it is to help you and others grow and drive positive change together. While I can write about it here, it’s actually quite impossible to capture its real value in words. What you want to get, therefore, is the actual experience. Just like reading a restaurant menu doesn’t live up to the joy of eating a good meal, and reading about navigation skills doesn’t come close to the pleasure of taking your boat out to sea, it’s putting your skills into action that makes all the difference in what you get out of it.
Question
Taking the story forward, the question for you this week is about the kind of leadership you are going to pursue. Are you stuck in the harbor, like the owners of the boats in Alan Watts’ story, as you keep reading more insights about leadership without actually learning the skills yourself? Or will you challenge yourself to learn the skills and bring your boat out to sea? The experience offered by the Grow3Leaders Challenge is special. Joining is free of charge — not free of commitment. You will need your commitment to reach the finish. To find out more, sign up for updates on Grow3Leaders, so you will know when enrollment opens for the next round of the challenge.
If, on the other hand, you prefer an individual leadership challenge, you can explore taking the Leader in Transition Program, where you will gain valuable leadership skills to navigate the leadership transition you find yourself in. It’s a one-to-one program for executives, managers, and senior professionals who want to level up in their leadership or get through a challenging transition. In this program, your boat definitely leaves the harbor too. If you are committed to investing in your individual leadership, book a Free Strategy Call.
Many people, however, are quite happy to stay where they are, in their comfort zone. They do their best to keep learning and they keep up with new lingo, yet they don’t invest in making real change happen, which invariably comes with learning the skills and taking on a challenge. The trap, as I see it, is to keep talking while not moving, to be like the owners of those boats that never left the harbor in Sausalito. If that applies to you, you’re missing out on the best that life has to offer you as a leader. So what’s keeping you there?