Sometimes, leadership is pulling the sled

There will come a point in your job when you’re pulling a heavy weight, and it’s not you.

Teams can basically function in one of two ways. Loosely speaking, let’s call them the light side and the dark side.

On the light side, everyone is communicating and everyone is focused on the success of the team. People are willing to make sacrifices, and everyone knows who’s making the sacrifices. There is openness and solidarity; the team shares one objective.

If this sounds a little bit doe-eyed and delusional, then I don’t need to introduce you to the dark side.

While I call it the dark side, the thinking that pulls someone over to this side is completely rational. “Why should I give up my time and my effort to get something done for someone who’s just going to claim it for themselves when I’m done, like he did last month when we finished the Spearmint project?” The big question a darksider asks is simple and practical: What’s in it for me.

The other thing about the dark side is that it’s contagious. Once one person starts doing it, everyone gets pulled in.

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Now, I’m not going to claim that you should do anything for anyone if it’s only going to benefit them. But let’s consider what’s in it for you.

Did you ever think about what separates leaders from everyone else? Is it power? Money? The privilege of belonging to a special class, knowing special people? Education? Yes, all of those things matter. But what fills in the empty space when society no longer places them on a pedestal?

Leadership starts by being the one who acts when everyone else doesn’t.

Leadership starts by being the one who acts when everyone else doesn’t. Did you ever wonder, while you were sitting in the lecture hall, if you would ever stop being driven around by a system of authority beyond your ability to influence? Or why it didn’t seem to end when you left the high school classroom and found yourself in another set of forms and bureaucratic procedures driven by some unseen force?

There are two ways of coping in the workplace. The first way is the way of procedure, rule-taking, what’s in it for me. The rule followers are the dominant breed in high school and bureaucratic monoliths. You can’t change the rules, so you get what you can out of them. But the rest of the world doesn’t have to work that way.

The smaller the organization, and the simpler the bureaucracy, the more likely it is that part of the system and the rules is defined by you. When everyone else abdicates responsibility, that’s not an alarm warning you to rush to the doors while dodging all responsibility. That’s a vacuum, a power vacuum, and you’re going to fill it. If you choose to.