by Dr. Sam Adeyemi, author of “SHIFTS: 6 Steps to Transform Your Mindset and Elevate Your Leadership”
It’s often said that anyone can be a leader; it sounds quite nice, and technically, it’s certainly true. In practice, though, it doesn’t matter what anyone can be; it only matters what they actually become. And we all know what separates a leader from the rest of humanity — they actually do the work of leadership.
Never content to merely see a vision of the world they want, true leaders drag the vision into concrete reality — a process that can be arduous, painful, and excruciatingly slow.
No matter how tall a mountain is, or how long your stride, it can still only be climbed one step at a time. And that is what separates those who can be leaders (the entire human race) from those who actually lead: the willingness to relentlessly, methodically translate a vision into consistent action, whether that takes ten steps or ten thousand.
A Destination Is Not a Direction
Each one of those steps is far more important than the actual endpoint of the leadership journey. Because without those steps, there is no leadership journey. A map that shows Disney World may be necessary to get your family to your vacation destination, but your children will hardly be satisfied with the map. The journey must be undertaken.
Likewise, many aspiring leaders are full of maps to Disney: ideas about how their company should operate, their community should improve, or their generation should change. But a destination is not a direction, and a mental map is not leadership. Leadership happens when they follow you on the journey.
The Journey Requires Constant Motion
Daily habits are the combustion engine of leadership. No matter the size of your organization, it’s safe to assume it includes people. And people respond to those who assume leadership and demonstrate that leadership by consistent, tangible daily actions that keep the wheels turning in the right direction.
Over thirty years of honing my own leadership style, teaching countless leaders around the world, and observing the results, I’ve come to use the shorthand SHIFTS to summarize these daily practices:
See: Vision isn’t leadership, but that’s only because it isn’t leadership yet. It’s still the necessary prerequisite for leadership — because no matter how many followers you have, you have nowhere meaningful to lead them until you have a vision. To craft and refine this vision, each day should include intentional visual explorations of your goal: What is the picture of success in your situation? What does a successful quarter (or year or meeting) look like? What expression should be on a client’s face when they leave your building? What will the fleet of company cars look like when you grow enough to afford them?
As a leader, it’s crucial to consistently get pictures of the things in your mind out there for those who follow you to see; this helps them understand specifically what you’re heading toward, and motivates them to join the journey.
Hear: Understanding the culture of any organization is often not much more complicated than listening to the words that come from its people’s mouths. Offices staffed by cynical salespeople who are derisive toward the customers they serve often have pretty unhappy customers. Schools where the teachers engage in sarcasm about their students at the staff lunch table often have poor faculty / student relationships. This is because what we hear regularly enmeshes itself in the way we interact with the world — so to change our world, we must change what we hear.
As a leader, it’s important to make this intentional and explicit: We are going to talk about where we’re going, how we’re going to get there, and what we’ll do when we arrive — rather than cynically focusing our communication on what’s wrong with where we are now. We are going to change what we think by changing what we allow ourselves to hear. One teacher I know had the practice of drawing one student name a week at random, then calling a parent with a short script of questions he’d refined over the years. He said that one ten-minute phone call a week taught him more about how he could help his students than any day-long professional development he’d ever endured.
Insight: Leadership isn’t just about the things you see or hear — it’s about making connections between them. Insight comes when you use that information to examine the beliefs, assumptions, and mental models that shape your decisions, your team’s reactions, and the culture created by the interplay of those two things. As a leader, cultivating insight means turning observations into understanding, and understanding into deliberate action to align your daily choices with the vision you’ve set. And that requires an investment of time and effort.
As you make a daily practice of intentionally seeing and hearing the things you need to see and hear, that granular data begins to lead to insight: “This process seems flawed; is there a better option? This product isn’t selling effectively; what could we replace it with? That division never quite hits expectations; what could we tweak?” When these insights begin coming, it’s time to:
Formulate: The insights about potential improvements are solid gold, but a leader must collect them as they come, rather than allowing them to drift away, where you’re sure to forget them when the next thing absorbs your attention. Catch them immediately, whether you use your phone or a voice recorder or a scrap of folded paper in your pocket. Make time each day to transfer that day’s insights to one central, prominent location, where you’re sure to see them constantly. You’ll be surprised how much your brain processes in the background, and how often you suddenly think of a new potential solution when you didn’t even realize you had been thinking about it.
Another benefit to this daily practice is that your team will see which problems attract your attention — and gravitate toward formulating their solutions, which can lead to options you weren’t even aware of coming from places you didn’t expect.
Transform: These daily practices, iterated constantly across your company, can be transformative. Controlling what you see and hear seem like small things; intentionally cultivating insight and formulating solutions sounds simple. Yet a 2020 study found that 84% of US workers blame poor managers for creating unnecessary work and stress in their office — so maybe it’s not so easy after all.
But employees who experience leaders taking intentional steps to ensure that the entire team is seeing and hearing correctly, reaching meaningful insight and collaboratively formulating workable solutions will gladly come on the journey.
Succeed: Flourishing begins when an office (or a school or a community) starts to experience the true change that comes from repeating the things listed above — when they develop a shared vocabulary and a toolbox of daily practices that allow them finally to begin to see the direction to the destination.
Dr. Sam Adeyemi is CEO of Sam Adeyemi, GLC, Inc. and founder and executive director of Daystar Leadership Academy (DLA). He is the author of “SHIFTS: 6 Steps to Transform Your Mindset and Elevate Your Leadership” (Wiley) and “Dear Leader: Your Flagship Guide to Successful Leadership.” He holds a Doctorate in Strategic Leadership from Virginia’s Regent University, and is a member of the International Leadership Association. Learn more at SamAdeyemi.com.
