American author and poet Alice Walker has a quote I love which says, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
This is so true, and everyone I know does it — including me. It’s so much easier to pretend like a victim of __________ (whatever our current problem is), to think there’s nothing that can be done about a situation. It abdicates us of responsibility.
But it’s often not that hard to do something.
I recently watched a fascinating documentary called Food, Inc., which I highly recommend.
The most important thing I learned from this film is that we have more power than we think. It’s easy to look at something like our industrial food system, for example, and say, “That is far too big for me to impact.” But that’s not true. It is the collective consuming “us” who actually have the leverage, through the things we choose to eat and the items we decide to buy. Nobody makes us purchase anything, but through those choices, we are voting for what we believe in — because those companies are tracking every single thing we buy.
My wife and I were walking around Target this weekend getting household products (windex, toilet cleaner, etc.), and we decided to pay the extra thirty cents and go for the “natural” products. Are they completely natural? Maybe not, but it’s clearly a step in the right direction for product manufacturers. And we have the power to vote that they should make more of these kind of products, every time we buy them.
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Age really doesn’t have much to do with age.
A person’s true age is more about their mentality than anything else.
You’ve no doubt noticed that a twenty-five year old can be more mature than their forty-five year old boss. Or the other way around. Your grandfather can be more technologically adept than a high schooler. Or the other way around.
A person’s actual age doesn’t really matter as much as the individual’s background, personality, interests, and maturity.
This is a real problem for people who like to stereotype individuals based on generational definitions. Generational breakdowns become limiting very quickly.
This is also an issue in most organizations. We think age=experience=wisdom, but what about when it’s not?
Leaders need a better way to measure and assess the capabilities of individuals. Talent assessment is a step in the right direction, and the piece most often overlooked (particularly in recruiting). I believe there are two other pieces; more on this soon.
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UPDATE: Here are the other two pieces!
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KEY POINTS FROM THE VIDEO
“The Legacy Crisis”
Leadership is always about more than what’s happening now; it must also be concerned with creating the future.
But most leaders are notoriously shortsighted.
To fix this, counterintuitively, we begin to recognize that leadership is always more about what we leave behind (our legacy) than what we actually see happening in the moment.
Leadership Is Not For You
Leadership is for those that follow you.
Without followers you are not a leader; you’re just an explorer.
The 4 Things Followers Need
(Please buy the fabulous Strengths Based Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie to learn more about the last 4 ideas.)
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Copyright © 2005-2012 Josh Allan Dykstra
