Raw Leadership

I was perusing the want ads again and noticed a phrase that continued to echo in many of the seeking announcements.  It was the term; proven leader. 

  Having had my fair share of testing the many philosophies concerning how-to-get ordinary people to do extraordinary things, I reference something I read in Malcolm Gladwells book Blink that captured the how spirit of leadership.

“…On Paul Van Riper’s first tour in Southeast Asia, when he was out in the bush, serving as an advisor to the South Vietnamese, he would often hear gunfire in the distance.  He then a young lieutenant new to combat, and his first thought was always to get on the radio and ask the troops in the field what was happening.  After several weeks of this, however, he realized that the people he was calling on the radio had no more idea than he did about what the gunfire meant.  It was just gunfire.  It was the beginning of something ~ but what that something was wasn’t clear yet.  So Van Riper stopped asking.  On his second tour of Vietnam, whenever he heard gunfire, he would wait. “I would look at my watch,” Van Riper says, “And the reason I looked was that I wasn’t going to do a thing for fire minutes.  IF they needed help, they were going to holler.  And after five minutes, if things had settled down, I still wouldn’t do anything.  You’ve got to let people work out the situation and work out what’s happening.  The danger in calling is that they’ll tell you anything to get you off their backs, and if you act on that and take it at face value, you could make a mistake.  Plus you are diverting them.  Now they are looking upward instead of downward.  You’re preventing them from resolving the situation.”

  Of note, Paul Van Riper recognized the dynamic relationship between the worker’s effect, and what affects the workers effort.  This has been rediscovered time and again by conscious notice in experience.  What makes leadership so rare is its presence.  It’s patience honed by discipline during times of great panic.  Short version:  let things happen and keep your eye on the bull’s-eye of what you personally can influence; everything else is just noise.