I am usually hired by business leaders who have become terribly trapped inside the walls of this kind of world. Their business leadership has run off the course of healthy patterns. It has gone off that course in a very subtle but serious manner. Furthermore, they are business leaders who believe they are not off course. They are also business leaders who know something is going very wrong with their business models but they do not believe they are the source of that misdirection.
This kind of pattern is as normal as the sun comes up and sets each day. I witness misdirection and failed leadership on a regular basis. I see terrible leadership patterns rooted deeply in the souls of the business leaders asking for help. They come to the request and repair table with preconceived notions about what is going wrong with their business models. Most of the time, none of the notions they carry reflect anything true about how misdirected they have become in their own leadership patterns. That kind of view is not in sight. It is missing from the landscape of described problems. They do not usually see themselves as part of the problem.
Therefore, most of the madness we find as we begin the work to determine what has gone really wrong with their business models, is not really found. We usually do not begin to nibble on the real problems of the business affairs until much later in our repair work. It takes time to finally discover the true source of the leadership errors. The mirrors do not come out in the early part of business repair. Self discovery usually comes to the table of repairs at a later time. It must come to that table in a more carefully orchestrated fashion. Most business leaders operate inside a firm pattern of established ways. They usually believe they are in charge, on the right track and doing their work in the correct fashion. Very few believe they are the source of their troubled business ways. It is what it is.
I have listened to hundreds of business leaders describe what is going wrong with their business models. Not once have I ever met one that has described how wrong their own leadership has become part of why they are missing the mark. Not once. Never. Yet, when my work is deeply entrenched inside the repair process I discover the sources of their most challenging ways and those challenges are often times caused by the poor leadership patterns those business leaders are initiating and employing. This happens every single time. It has been one hundred percent true. That observation includes me.
Therefore, as much as I do not desire to become one of those advisory assistants in the repair process of their troubled business models that stereotypes each one of them as a misdirected leader...I continue to end up standing on the very things they are doing wrong in their own style. My efforts to avoid those natural tendencies to stereotype all of them as misguided leaders is usually wasted by the sheer fact and plain truth that the source of their ills is coming from them. It is usually true. They are commonly the source of the problems their business models face.
Guess what? My business models suffer the very same challenge. We as leaders become the key source of our own misguided plans. We are the problem. Time and again. We cause the wrong things to happen. We protect our ill-fated ways. We support the inconsistencies that hurt the most. We devise the best protective killers of our business potential. We are the culprits. We are the source. We do the most damage.
Page two.
Business leaders see these things very clearly. They see not only these things on the list provided above, they see more. They see everything that is, can and will go wrong with every bit of their troubled business ways. Business leaders are not blind to these troubling things. The only thing they are blind to see is the simple fact that they are the main source of all of these problems. Every single one of them. Not one of these problems I have listed above is a problem that could have been solved before it happened, providing a great leader had the wisdom to prevent it from happening. Not one.
I am the reason why my business models fail from time to time. Every world problem comes to the business table equally fair to my model as it does to my competitors models. We all must face the same challenges. We hire from the same pool of choices, do the same taxation procedures, cover the same costly experiences and manage the same set of circumstances that everyone else faces. Some just do a better job of it than others. My level of success reflects my personal ability for managing the same set of circumstances and challenges others face. Their level of success reflects how well they manage those same mountains of challenges my models faced. It is all relative. My ills are my ills. Your ills are your ills. We manage them differently.
When my model gets hurt in a way that is hard to overcome, I am to blame. The old boy scout rule applies, be prepared. If my skill sets are lacking in an area that causes me to miss out on an earlier move to help prevent a future challenge, shame on me. I get my lesson when that challenge arrives. They call that lesson the school of hard knocks. My competitor may not face that same challenge. My competitor may have been blessed with more vision about what could have gone wrong in the future of thought. Thus promoting a sense to anticipate how to prevent that development from ever occurring. As a result, my competitor may have selected a different set of decision-making ways that helped to prevent that challenge from ever occurring in their path. I lived it, they avoided it. Yes, it can become true in my fort and not in theirs. My employees may become non-productive. Theirs were. That is how it usually works.
We are the source of the challenges we face. We can point fingers at how terrible certain things have become, but the truth remains, each one of us has the right, the resources and the ability to prevent trouble from growing up too big.
When business leaders come to my life with troubled ways, requesting help, I know for myself who is at fault with where they are. I spend my next few days examining what they see. I watch them speak, describe and define what needs to be done. I listen most to the things they avoid to report. As they search for better answers to the best ways to move I quietly discover why they avoid making those choices. In that effort I begin to see what they truly see. It is within that view comes the shining light that points its direction to where they should go...and rarely is it the direction they are headed to move. That is why they are in trouble with the model they lead. It is going the wrong way. They are leading it away from where it ought to be headed.
When business leaders search for help, what do they see?
They usually see what they want to see. They usually view what is not going well. They usually stare at the wrong things to do. They often peek down the misguided halls where the way things have gone reflect what is wrong. It becomes a view that certainly hurts the most. The trouble with this set of truths is that the pain they feel is only beginning to surface. The real truth has not yet been found. What is more, when the real truth is finally found, it will hurt even more. This is exactly how the repair begins. Without it...all will eventually be lost. It just becomes a matter of time.
Make sure you see what ought to be seen. Even when it hurts beyond what you might consider would be the most. More pain is coming. Trust me...I know this one well.
Until next time...
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