Developing the Leadership to Find the Right Mix
Colleagues sometimes ask me what it’s like to write a weekly blog post, typically wondering how I constantly find topics to write about.
I normally note that I only write once a week, and I get ideas much more often, so it becomes more about sifting and sorting than dreaming up subjects.
Quite often, like this week, an idea hits me between the eyes and I cannot put it down, and then the tough work begins as I try to figure out how best to share it with readers.
I’ve gotta say, this one could go any number of directions, because it’s so foundational to my work.
Thinking Out Loud, In Writing
Selfishly, I write in order to force myself to clarify my thinking, and would do so even if I didn’t make my writing public.
It’s my version of “thinking out loud”, which I’m known to do, but I do it in writing. It’s kind of my personal journal, open for viewing.
So what was it that “hit me” this time, that I’m about to share?
I’m taking a series of online courses through Coursera, and there was a video in which a presenter uttered a sentence that made me immediately hit pause and rewind.
I’ll spare you the details of the courses, but note that they’re in the area of Positive Psychology, a recent interest of mine.
I don’t have the verbatim quote, but got the five key words.
“…the right mixture of governance, culture, and leadership…”
Whoa, some of these words are right up my alley, but I’ve never heard them put that way before.
He’s Speaking My Language
Regular readers know how often I write about governance, despite the fact that that word has less than positive connotations for many people.
I also write about leadership often enough, or maybe not often enough, since it’s so important in so many places, especially in enterprising families.
Culture isn’t a word I use much, but it’s also key, and never far from the subject either, even if I don’t use that word.
So while those three words caught my ear, it was the ones right before them, “the right mixture” that got me thinking.
As I considered the idea, I couldn’t help coming to the conclusion that governance and culture fit together nicely as different ways that people work together, formal and informal, but leadership seemed to stick out a bit.
Mixing Governance and Culture
Governance is mostly about the formal structures, procedures, and mechanisms that are put in place to make sure that things run well, and that there are actual written ways that remind us all how we have agreed we will act together.
Culture is more about the informal “that’s how we do things around here” that are almost never written anywhere, yet they’re typically even more powerful in guiding actions than the written rules are.
Finding the right mixture of those two elements, the formal and the informal, is where a lot of the magic happens, and I use the word magic because it’s something that we usually can’t explain and perhaps don’t even try to comprehend.
The Right Mixture Needs to Be Found
But that “right mixture” does need to be found, and it will often happen with trial and error.
It will also vary from one family to another, as well as from one decade or generation to another within the same family, depending on where they are in their evolution of working together, and who the key players are.
But it’s not as if there’s a dial that we move to the left or right to adjust to the right setting, it just sort of evolves.
How and Where Does Leadership Fit?
Maybe that’s where leadership fits in, after all?
Who moves the dial towards a need for more formality, or towards more informal discussions, with the goal of moving the entire family system to a more appropriate equilibrium?
That work can only be done by those who take on that leadership role.
Lest you think that such leadership roles are assigned, or given based on age or seniority, let me remind you that this is not the case, and when leadership is set by this “default” setting, sub-optimal results normally follow.
Someone needs to step up to these roles, and take them.
Is that you?
