“I have no problem being the
ultimate arbiter of discipline, but if I am the primary arbiter of discipline,
then our team will never be worth a darn!”
I used to say these exact words to my basketball team on a regular
basis. Okay, yes, I probably did use a
stronger word than darn, in fact probably a couple of stronger words. I was attempting to get my team to buy-in to
the concept of horizontal leadership, or shared leadership. Each of them knew what the expectations were
for members of our basketball team, yet I struggled to get them to hold one
another accountable. It is no
coincidence that once they accepted the responsibility of horizontal leadership
we began to accumulate more wins.
As mentioned earlier, horizontal
leadership is just another way of saying shared leadership. It really compliments Mark Sanborn’s book You Don't Need a Title to Be a Leader. The idea being that leadership is for all of
us, not just those with the title denoting leadership. I would suggest that most, if not all,
successful teams, groups, and organizations have very strong horizontal
leadership. When all members of a group
accept the responsibility associated with horizontal leadership, greatness
becomes a distinct possibility.
Imagine the athletic team that
does not require their coach, coaches, or team captains hovering over them to
do what they are supposed to do, to the best of their ability, when they are
supposed to do it—this is a team that maximizes their time spent
practicing! How about the office that
continues to hum along when their supervisor is out of the building—productivity
does not drop simply because “the boss” is not there to tell people to get back
to work. This happens because of
horizontal leadership. Each member of
the team, group, or organization first assumes responsibility for leading themselves
and then accepts the responsibility of holding their teammates accountable for
their actions. When I was coaching I
would share a quote from Alexander the Great with my student-athletes: “I am
not afraid of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.” The point is that the lion will
convince the sheep that they are, in fact, lions, whereas an army of lions led
by sheep will become convinced they are, in fact, sheep. I used to challenge my student-athletes to a step further: I challenged them to become an army of lions led by lions, but reminded them that this would only be
possible if they embraced horizontal leadership. Lions led by lions would be an unstoppable force, whereas the sheep led by a lion were in trouble if something happened to the lion leading them.
Horizontal leadership allows teams to weather
storms and assists in eliminating the possibility of a single point of failure—two
desired outcomes for any team. Everything certainly rises and falls based upon leadership, thus we must do our best to ensure that our teams have multiple leaders and are not dependent upon the presence, loyalty, or well-being of one single leader.
No comments:
Post a Comment