My view on the concept of Leadership

Recently I overheard a discussion about the concept of leadership within my company. The word makes me smile since a couple of years. There are many ideas and definitions about this word.

After attending the Problem Solving Leadership Workshop (2011) & the Change Artistry Workshop (2013), my view about leadership is summarized in a poem and a statement;

If you are a good leader,
Who talks little,
They will say,
When your work is done,
And your aim fulfilled,
“We did it ourselves.”
— Lao Tse —

 “Leadership is the process of creating an environment in which people become empowered.”
— Jerry Weinberg —

This environment must contain three ingredients:

• Motivation–the trophies or trouble, the push or pull that moves the people involved
• Organization–the existing structure that enables the ideas to be worked through into practice
• Ideas or innovation–the seeds, the image of what will become

Note: creating the environment is hard work, destroying it is easily done.

It is time to re-read “Becoming a Technical Leader an organic problem-solving approach” again.

Hans Teeuwen on Agilists

I just finished reading a blog about “religious wars” between different Agile schools of thought. Interesting short article, which ends with to striking sentences: (1) Do our customers really care, and (2) it is about the results. True.

Hans Teeuwen (Dutch comedian) would probably say the following about this religious discussion: “It strikes me that Agilists often have a tendency to claim to have the monopoly on the truth.”

Both got me thinking about Jerry’s  Rule of Three, which says; “If you can’t think of three things that might go wrong with your plans, then there’s something wrong with your thinking.” Replacing the word plans to solution (i.e. Agile) still makes the Rule of Three valid.

Let’s keep Agile a good practice and not the “best practice”. Let’s focus on the results.