Holding their feet to the fire

Friends,

I held my son’s feet to the fire. Four of us had ridden bikes to play tennis, and Jack for his own reasons quickly tired of the game and wanted to quit. I wouldn’t let him go home. I told him it wasn’t good team play, and I also wanted to teach him about perseverance. Life like tennis demands it. I challenged him to get back in the game, but as with many everyday leadership decisions, I couldn’t know for sure I was doing the right thing. The parental environment, like the leadership environment generally, doesn’t come with a neon sign that blinks between “Challenge” and “Accept” to direct your approach when your kids resist challenge or change.

Leading adults sometimes means holding their feet to the fire, too. Two questions arise: When was the last time you had that uneasy feeling of challenging someone’s behavior when it did not meet their commitments or your standards? Maybe you stood up to them when they were telling you “it’s good enough,” or “we just don’t have the time,” or maybe when they were just avoiding the painful reality that times had changed and required more or different effort. As Kouzes and Posner write, “Only challenge produces the opportunity for greatness.” And sometimes leaders need to present that challenge. They have to help people see that yesterday’s effort or strategy may not be enough for today. In highly changing and competitive environments leaders should find themselves offering challenges almost every day.

As you challenge others a second question arises: Who owns the challenge? The great leadership trick of course is helping them to own it as theirs. If Jack grudgingly got back in the game, but took away from the experience that his dad was “mean” for no reason, then what would I have really accomplished? My challenge was not just to get him to play, to go through the motions, but somehow to grasp his “work:” to choose to be a team player and not give up when he feels frustrated (and hopefully even to have fun despite inevitably frustrating mistakes). This is the deeper level of leading: not striving for someone’s compliance but instead stimulating their sense of ownership, pride, and confidence.

It takes some courage to challenge people to exert great effort. And then it takes constant commitment to their ability to take ownership of the challenge and thus gain long term success. In the coming weeks, I’ll offer some strategies on how to develop that sense of ownership, as you,

Lead with your best self,

Dan