The Mindful Leader

“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away” I was told I was responsible for everything my team did or did not do. A breath later, the maxim of delegation was presented: I could delegate authority but never responsibility. A proverbial buck stopped with me.

Leadership is about juggling. One of the balls perpetually in the air is when to engage at a personal level or not. If everything is made to seem important, nothing is important. Leaders must chose wisely where to focus and to what to give attention.

If leadership is about juggling, we must learn which balls must stay aloft through our personal involvement and which are less relevant and their crashing to the floor is meaningless.

However, a resource cancer is attempting to be all things to all people all the time. A Cancer kills and attempting to be on for everyone without boundaries on every matter will kill in some way. It may kill enthusiasm for the mission. It may kill engagement. It may kill relationships … but in some way, it will kill you. All is a cancer that leads to too many balls in the air. Yes, that is a mixed metaphor but …

In my personal case, my music background works both for and against me.

For is that the vast preponderance of the time, a musician is part of a team: a team of two (soloist and accompaniment) or gradually increasing in size to a much larger team (a symphony orchestra performing with a massed choir). The larger the musical team, the greater the need for a leader to move from participating within the group to taking on a mantle of leadership significantly different than actually playing an instrument. It would be ludicrous to see a symphony conductor to step off the platform and play a particular instrument. Would John Lennon or Paul McCartney ever have put down their instruments and taken over Ringo’s drum set? I suspect no.

That said, musicians have extremely high standards of what is “good enough”. In case you missed it, that might in leadership be a potential against. Often, not always but often, this excellence standard manifests itself in over functioning, or potentially trying to be all things to all people all the time. I am guessing it is excellence winning out over common sense but it is just a guess.

I once was told my over functioning probably meant another team member was under functioning.

Mission thinking is critical to mindful leadership and the larger the team, the greater the need to focus missionally on leadership development. Leadership development becomes a key ball in the air, a critical responsibility: perhaps the critical responsibility. Yes, there is a maxim about draining swamps and being hip deep in alligators, but it is a metaphor intended to remind us that while thinking missionally, we will have distractions, and they might be existential. Too many alligators, and I may not survive to drain that swamp.

Leadership is about juggling. A ball that you want to focus on is the development of other leaders and this is best done relationally: over food, around the water cooler, walking around, just talking and, importantly, with all your conscious powers, listening.

Leadership is about juggling and choosing wisely on which balls to focus. Leadership development is a ball of accountability worth being treated as an obligation and responsibility by the mindful leader.