Next week I’m delving into change and leadership. I know—boring and old-hat, right? Wrong, at least wrong when you use an historical example and dig into the real-world guts of it.
My topic will be the Battle of Tippecanoe of November 7, 1811 and the events surrounding it. I’m taking my attendees through the experience in a very unique manner.
This historical River will show us these perspectives on change and leadership: The evolution of your decisions into active resources
The link between goals on the horizon and events on the ground
The effect of different leadership styles and leadership angles
The well-defined present shifting into an undefined future
The startling face of diversity
The echoes of a cold, wet, and dark November morning will be heard 201 years later.
Today I'm launching a new page on my website. It's entitled A Person You Should Meet. It's located in the You section of the website. Today's inaugural entry is about William DePuy. Get ready for a new person from history that will affect you for the better. Check it out.
A favorite musical of mine is The Music Man. A song in The Music Man includes this line—“where is the good in goodbye?” Surely it’s true that in leadership knowing when to say goodbye, when to call it quits and move on, is one of the toughest decisions you’ll ever have to make. Tough.
I’m drawn to this point after the recent primary election defeat of Richard Lugar. His experience ought to give reason to pause. When is it right for you to say enough is enough, it’s time for me to go.
The stories in history surrounding this question could fill a library, ten libraries. One of the first that comes to my mind pertains to George Washington. There were three major occasions when Washington said goodbye to his followers—when he left the army of colonial Virginia in 1759 at 27 years old, when he left the Continental Army of the infant United States in 1783 at 51 years old, and when he left the American presidency in 1797 at 64 years old. In each moment, Washington acted differently as a leader in saying goodbye.
You’ll say goodbye as a leader. How do you want it to go?
We in Indianapolis have had somewhat the same thing happen to two major local figures with national reputations. Both Richard Lugar and Peyton Manning are leaving the positions where they gained national prestige and local reverence. Let's take a moment and see what this linkage of Lugar and Manning tells us about succession, leaving, and key leaders.
First, Lugar could learn from Manning. By now it's clear that Manning handled the organizational decision to end his Colts career with grace and class. Lugar should seek to show the same qualities.
Second, both leaders have had and still have enormous personal identity wrapped up in the positions where they won most of their fame. This tight connection between identity and position is not always healthy. Indeed, in my view, that is the predominent source of Lugar's defeat. In a seminar on Manning and leadership, I pointed out that this connection was also part of the reason why the Colts had such difficulty winning more than one Super Bowl with Manning as quarterback.
Third, my comment on Lugar's identity/position connection as the driver of his defeat can be linked to his lengthy tenure in office. In 2012, Lugar was a US Senator for as long as Peyton Manning has been alive, 36 years. Again, like the identity/position connection, on the face of it such longevity might be assumed a good thing. A closer look, though, shows it can be dangerous, too.
Fourth, and again we may point to the numeric fact of 36 years for this, Manning was probably more tightly aligned with the fundamental followers of his leadership--the fans. My use of the word "fundamental" should begin to tip you off to a further point. Manning's teammates, colleagues, peers, and so forth were not his fundamental followers. His fans were, and they were the focal point of his farewell speech in Indianapolis.
Lugar seems to have lost sight of his fundamental followers, the voters. He appears to have drifted in almost invisible increments away from the voting public and citizenry of Indiana and toward the rarified culture of high national office.
No one ever tells you about the problem of imperfection in leadership. The right thing isn't always done; in fact, the wrong thing may be done nearly as often as not. Requests for help aren't forthcoming, calls for moving in a particular direction go unheeded, and the commonsense courtesies aren't extended. Imperfection is as natural to leadership as breathing is to living.
Read the private letters and non-public words of George Washington or Martin Luther King, Jr and you'll learn about the anguish of imperfection in leadership. The leadership lives of Moses, David, and Paul are mind-boggling examples of rife imperfection. Even the experience of Jesus Christ shows the persistence of imperfection.
Christ aside, imperfection plagues both the leader and the follower. Coping with the far-less-than-perfect is a daily task in leadership.
Things have happened lately for you in perhaps the last few years. These things may form a pattern, a trend. Combining the collection of similar points or elements into a pattern and then combining that pattern with a concentrated flow of time produces, in my lexicon, velocity.
Your life, Your River, may have a velocity to it in recent times. There has emerged a natural power and momentum that will take something fundamentally new or different or in opposition to it for a clear change to be effected.
The same thing may be true for some other, earlier part of your life. For a while, a period that can be defined and measured, you experienced a collection of similar points along the way, and from them came velocity.
Whenever you take stock of yourself, be sure to see if there has been velocity at work.
Can you look back from right now to, say, two or five or ten years past, and see velocity at work in Your River?
We're headed straight toward another US presidential campaign season. Actually, we're in it right now. Before the event gets you too wrapped up or soured out, whichever the case may be, I'd like to offer a small piece of perspective.
In more ways that we might imagine, the American presidential election is a phenomenon unto itself. It is unique, and one of our unique contributions to the world.
I'm referring to the hype, the hoopla, and the oh-its-the-most-important-thing-ever frenzy that surrounds these campaigns every four years. Observers as far back as Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s noted that Americans were prone to temporary madness in presidential election seasons. Rallies, parades, festivals, and now commercials, internet ads, and dozens of other pseudo-events (h/t Daniel Boorstin) portray either dire consequences on one hand or glorious effects on the other in this quadrennial event. It's hard not to get either swept up in or turned off by the campaign fervor.
I understand that in history there have been important choices at important times. My point to you is that if you go back and look at any--and I repeat, any--of the campaign literature and media coverage of an American presidential election you would see the same sort of over-the-top assertions as you do now.
Perspective is all I offer. Remember to take a moment away or a step back and try to keep it all in perspective.
