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Stan Oakes taught me to ask Who? before I ask What?.

I’m a Birkman red leader. I’m a strategic thinker and planner. I tend to quickly see a path forward and launch aggressively. I tend to start towards a solution quickly and clean it up as I go. My mind gravitates toward questions like

• What are the success criteria?
• What are the milestones?
• What are the next steps?
• What resources are needed?

When we were conceiving of the Leadership University web project (www.leaderu.com), Stan would always lead by asking questions like

• Who else should we invite into this project?
• Who should lead this part?
• Who can contribute?
• Who has done something like this before and knows the pitfalls?

And I learned a new leadership focus.

Jim Collins addresses this Who? then What? focus in his powerful style. This is worth 3 of your minutes if you are a leader.

Using Who? then What?, Stan went on to re-launch The King’s College in the most famous address in the U.S., the Empire State Building.

What are you leading that could benefit from a Who? focus?

Bestselling author Seth Godin says:

Management and leadership are totally different things. You think you are being a leader, but you are probably being a manager. Managers figure out what they want done and get people to do it. Managers try to get people to do what they did yesterday, but a little faster and a little cheaper with a few less defects. But this is not leadership.

Leadership is about finding the right people, agreeing where you want to go, and getting out of the way. Leadership means embracing the failure of your people if it will lead to growth. Leadership means not knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow, just knowing its going to take you where you want to go.

Watch the video on Michael Hyatt’s blog.

Godin obviously has his preferred explanation of leadership and management based on his successes in life. He didn’t go bankrupt although he almost did. But more startups fail than succeed, so his rosy “Leadership means not knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow, just knowing its going to take you where you want to go” is foolish apart from a trust in God’s sovereignty and plan. Perhaps a better philosophy is: Leadership doesn’t meant you know what is going to happen tomorrow, but it does mean you are confident it will take you where God wants you to go.

There are good insights in this video. He actually covers many topics with a common theme of modern leadership.

• Management and leadership.
• Being willing to lead through the hard decision to fire unprofitable customers. In my leadership in a non-profit mission organization, I translate this into making the hard decisions to cancel a project or terminate an agreement that has become a barrier to moving ahead with our strategic plan.
• Do remarkable work that people cannot live without. Don’t settle for being a little cheaper or better than the next guy.
• Don’t wait for improved conditions, rather ship now, deliver results now.
• Put your work out there and allow a tribe to gather around who like what you do rather than going after those who don’t like what you do.

We should not disparage the former as we are casting vision for a new way to do things. This cartoon says it well (click on the image for a larger view):

I was in a meeting recently where vision was being cast for a new way to train others, and a new way to think about building multiplying groups. The former ways were denigrated as part of promoting a new way.

I’m guilty of this sometimes, so I’m not casting stones. We should remember this cartoon and not denigrate previous efforts as we move forward.

Trash-talking former strategies has no place in leading into the future.

We stand on the shoulders of many that have gone before.

How can we lead into the future without trashing the past?