simplerich

“I will believe it a good comfortable road untill I am compelled to beleive differently”
~Meriwether Lewis’ Journal via
Into the Unknown: Leadership Lessons from Lewis & Clark’s Daring Westward Expedition.

Into the Unknown by Jack Uldrich talks briefly about Lewis & Clark’s expedition, but the focus is what leaders can learn about Lewis & Clark themselves both from their writings in their copious journals and notes and from their actions. I can say they were interesting men and the book has piqued my interest in them to the point where I will probably read a more bibliographical book to get a more complete story about them. It was published in 2004 and I’m surprised I didn’t hear of it sooner. I discovered it while looking for kindle books. I’m glad I did.

I started with a quote from Meriwether Lewis’ journal. After cresting the first of a range of mountains, and expecting to find a river leading down into a land of milk and honey he saw mountains as far as the eye could see, and no easy going. His response wasn’t to give up, wail or despair… it was to marvel at the beauty before him and to expect the road ahead to be an easy one until it proved otherwise. This optimism of Lewis & Clark’s is credited with being a primary reason they succeeded.

But as optimistic as they were, and they were, in the face of overwhelming odds, they planned extraordinarily and didn’t count on wishful thinking or the power of positive thinking to solve their problems for them. They packed a 200olb steel shell to make a boat with in anticipation of needing it. (It didn’t work out and they abandoned it… discarding ideas that didn’t work when it became apparent they wouldn’t work. New Coke anyone?)

My biggest takeaway from Into the Unknown: Leadership Lessons from Lewis & Clark’s Daring Westward Expedition was to plan exceptionally, proceed confidently, and believe unflinchingly in your success. I suspect this was my takeaway because this is how I strive to comport myself in my daily life. I confess to slipping at it at times. Sometimes my optimism bulb dims a bit. Sometimes I tend to see the shadows rather than the light, and sometimes, when I’m tired, I forget that I’m not alone and that I’ve got the help of friends, co-workers, and a support system out there willing to help if all I do is ask and trust them to help me.

The book itself has lots of lessons from the expedition which is exactly what it advertises itself as. What it doesn’t have is concrete, memorable examples of how to directly apply the lessons to real life. OK. That’s not fair what I did there. I added the word “memorable” because I can’t remember any of the examples they gave. I know they gave some. But what they mostly did was talk about the character of the men who were Lewis & Clark and how that relates to leadership on the whole.

Remembering I don’t know much about the men I’d like to stress that this book was written by a person who liked and respected the men. It’s possible they did things that others would like to talk about badly, he didn’t free his slave right away when he returned from the expedition for example, but I’m not interested in hearing about or studying famous men’s faults. I’ll assume they had some. I’ll assume that the men in the party had some. The part where they kept coming down with VD tells me they weren’t saints. I get that. Please… nobody take an opportunity in the comments to post some sort of Lewis & Clark expose of how they were Expansionist White Men who were only great by trampling minorities and blah blah blah. That’s a different book. The one I reviewed made mention of some of this stuff, but it wasn’t the focus and wasn’t intended to be.

“You can only lead others where you yourself are prepared to go.”
– Lachlan McLean
via Leadership Quotes on Sparkpeople.com

In recent years books have been trying very hard to separate managers from leaders, saying they’re not the same thing. Managers have been cast as bean-counters who keep the trains running on time while leaders were the trail-blazing mavericks that break new ground and boldly go where no one has gone before with throngs of adoring masses scurrying along behind them. Leaders are lantern-jawed while managers had, I believe, a slight squint and rarely looked up from their to-do lists other than to check the time clock to make sure nobody hit over time. That’s the trend in the books that I was seeing.

I don’t agree with it. I believe a great manager is also a leader, and the really poor managers out there aren’t leaders. I believe it’s possible to be both. I also believe it’s hard to be both. But if management were easy everybody would be doing it right? Look around, you can see places where everybody IS trying to manage. Those are places with lots of highly qualified people who have a manager who is not leading. Managers who don’t provide leadership, real leadership, not just the “Next Action is…” type leadership, are obvious within minutes of dealing with them.

Managers who are leaders inspire their employees to greater heights than they could get alone or with a manager that isn’t a leader. Leaders need to set the example and live it and do it every minute of the day. Their lives need to be congruent to the values they espouse at work. If they talk about responsibility at work but they’re unable to drive due to losing their license they aren’t leading from the heart, they’re leading from the mouth, and people can tell the difference. Leaders who lead from the heart, who lead from the front and go where they want their people to go are leaders that are followed to amazing lengths.

Management is a calling and leadership is too. Finding the rare individual who has a calling for both is really tough. Teaching the rote mechanics of management can be done. But if that’s all the manager has they won’t inspire. They won’t inspire other people to want their job so they can transfer or promote up. They’ll just slog their way through the day and so will their employees. Finding a manager with the spark to not only do the checklist, but inspire their employees to help develop new ways of doing things, faster, better, more efficient ways of doing things, that’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

A crew that talks about their manager as someone they like and are great friends with is OK. But finding a crew that describes their manager as someone they want to be like, that they want to appreciate their work, that they want to impress, and that they are impressed by, those are managers who are also leaders. They’re not buddies and friends, but something more.

As a manager of managers I love finding a leader in a management position. My job just got much easier when I encounter those people. I can aim them at a target and get out of the way. It’s not that easy I still get to play course correction type behavior, but I don’t find myself behind the bus pushing. Managers who are not leaders can be good as managers, they do keep the trains running on time, but they don’t tend to GO anywhere. The store will stay where it is and hold the line forever. These managers won’t make mistakes. They won’t forget deadlines or forget to file paperwork. They’ll chug along, cranking out widgets and being as reliable as a German car on the autobahn. That’s the type of manager I think that is sometimes belittled as “just a manager.” These types of managers are the kind I find myself behind pushing more often than not. But don’t write them off. If we as managers of managers are to be leaders we have to lead them too, not just the easy ones.

I don’t mean to write off these “just a manager” managers as some of them need only see an example to be inspired to learn to become leaders. Some have never seen a good example of what a leader can be and are afraid to take risks and so they stick to their lists and doing what they are told. Some, when allowed to be leaders, encouraged to be leaders, and they’re shown how leadership is accepted and expected will develop the taste for it and the desire for it. That’s a hugely rewarding part of my job. When I find a manager who will make that leap from “just a manager” to a manager who is also a leader who inspires their crew together we can storm the gates of any challenge. I suspect that when the dust settles from this economic mess we’ll find the places that did the best will have managers who were leaders at the helm. And places who didn’t encourage leadership in their employees will have lost out. The world’s gotten too flat for one centralized leadership monolithic culture to survive for long. That’s not nimble enough to react fast enough to today’s market.