Being the leader can be a lonely task, but
it shouldn’t be a task done alone. The leader bears the responsibility for the
decisions made, but they shouldn’t make the decisions alone. The consequences
for not having a group of advisors you trust to tell you the truth even when
they disagree with you can be catastrophic.
And we need advisors who disagree with us
sometimes. When we think our perspective is the only perspective we become
myopic, unable to see beyond ourselves, beyond our small view of the world. We
need to be able to see far into the future to see the second and third order
affects of our actions. We need advisors, not “yes” men.
One of the downfalls of our political
system, and especially in recent years, is the lack of true dialogue. We don’t
have a way to talk through an issue. We state our points and the other nods
their head and that is it. We so often don’t have any further understanding of
why the other person is passionate about their perspective. So we get stuck.
This happens at every level of leadership.
Even in a marriage we can get ‘stuck’ on an issue. We come back to the same
points again and again without much movement. And usually the more we come back
to the same points, the more we get stuck.
We get stuck at our workplaces. Unless you
work in a very dynamic workplace, organizations tend to move slowly, change
slowly, adapt slowly. The larger the organization, the slower and the more
difficult the changes come.
We even have difficulty within ourselves
when we want to change. The different parts of us have competing interests.
Safety says to keep things the same even if they aren’t working very well. Pain
relief says to make a change because anything would be better than the current
situation. Echoes of the past enter the dialogue with all sorts of messages for
and against the change.
So at every level we need some outside
voices in our lives. We need advisors. We need people we trust speaking truth
to us, even when truth hurts. We need alternative perspectives. They help us
see blind spots and hidden things of which we were not aware.
We can’t afford to be a lone ranger. We need
each other.