Lead From Wherever You Stand

Since starting Dove Developing & Consulting in 2015, Cindy and I have focused heavily on providing leaders, not just folks carrying supervisor or manager titles, with tools that can apply immediately to earn influence with the teams they’re responsible for so they can achieve measurable results. We invested a tremendous amount of time, energy, and resources into developing material that could support these leaders through that process. My goal was always to share the information then get out of the way. I’ve seen far too many consultants work to embed themselves in organizations, doing things the people in those organizations were capable of doing for themselves. That intentional hands-off approach was a failure on my part; I assumed everyone we worked with would take what we shared and run with it. What I didn’t account for, albeit out of the purest of intentions, was that each of those leaders already had more plates spinning than they could keep up with and changing their routine to implement a new behavior was never going to happen automatically - even if it was the absolute right thing to do and they wanted to do it.

Over the last several years, Cindy and I have been very intentional about creating practical “frameworks” for applying nearly everything we teach, largely because Cindy has stressed how important those are for moving the material from good ideas to repeatable action. In fact, I closed the original version of The Values Advantage with one of those frameworks. That soon grew into an “Optimization Guide” that maps out how an organization can strategically move through five stages of Values Alignment and build processes that ensure their core values are part of the everyday routine - at every level. And that led to creating Optimization Guides for each of the other four pillars of our People Optimization System and another geared specifically at building effective communication into every aspect of how the organization operates.

In the fifth lesson of our Emerging Leader Development course, I stress how systems have helped me accomplish things I never would have dreamed of. I define a “system” like this: “The process of predictably achieving a goal based on a logical and specific set of how-to principles.” Even in doing that, it still took me several years to realize that I wasn’t providing systems the leaders we were working to serve could easily follow. 

With hopes of helping you make the harvest you pull from your bad situations more automatic, using the toolkit made up of the eleven leaders attributes we’ve discussed in so much detail to this point, we’re going to work through a framework leading from wherever you stand. We’ll work through six steps you can immediately build into your own routine. And here they are, six steps. Same order every time. Light enough to remember, specific enough to do this week.

1. Name it. Stop drifting. Call the bad situation what it is, without drama and without denial.
2. Find the seed. Reflect before you react. Look for the equal or greater benefit hidden in the dirt.
3. Own your part. Take full responsibility for your attitude, your actions, and the ripple. Do not take blame that is not yours, and do not hand yours off.
4. Decide and plan. Make the decision, then plan the work and work the plan. Filter both through purpose and values.
5. Sow more than required. Do more than paid for. Keep a pleasing approach and real sympathy in the mix. Consistency nurtures the seed.
6. Harvest through people. Cooperate. Pass the lesson on. Influence is the crop, and it does not require a title.

The next two segments will show these steps in motion, not as some poster for your wall. Making the best of a bad situation is not a mood. It’s intentionally applying these six moves. Before we do that, be sure to write each of the six on one card. You will use them before we wrap up!