Lead While Staying Grounded!

After twelve earlier posts describing aspects of "A Vision of Leadership (now Leadership for Collaboration and Innovation)," you might expect one with this title to bring it all together. Of course it does not. It takes all fourteen aspects of A Vision of Leadership together to describe leadership. This post addresses our intention to lead or the value we place in leading.


A Vision of Leadership proposes that lead is one of four fundamental leadership values and that lead uniquely drives the three leadership practices of :

• Structuring our visualization of what we want and the organization to accomplish it.
• Respecting the people in our organizations and collaborations.
• Improvising our visualization of what we want and in the collaborations that refresh our direction.
  

If we overprioritize our need to lead those three practices will dominate the other three, responding, conforming and realizing and, relatively, diminish the outcome contribution which forms the base of the tetrahedron when lead is at the top.

But what are we leading for? It is always because we want to make a contribution ourselves and/or we want the contributions of others to bring about our visualization. If we want to make and support contributions, even while leading we must value follow, innovate and implement and continue responding, conforming and realizing. These values and practices comprise the ground on which we are privileged to lead.

(As I re-read this I recognized Markus of The Apprentice! This gentleman's attempts to lead were totally ungrounded in the necessity to make his own contribution or to support others as they made theirs.)

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