We often think of leadership in big, active ways: ambitious visions, well-articulated strategies, convincing speeches, compelling conversations.
Those things can be useful tools for a powerful leader. But they are not the essence of leadership. The essence of leadership is having the courage to show up differently than the people around you.
Most people I know — myself included — stop short of what we can accomplish because, simply put, we’re scared. Of looking bad. Of failing. Of being humiliated. We’re hiding, unwilling to be vulnerable, unsure whether to take a risk. But leadership calls us to step forward first and take the risk that others are afraid to take.
I was in a meeting with a number of senior executives who were all blaming each other for the company’s lackluster revenue numbers. The goal of the meeting was to uncover the causes and each person was pointing to someone else’s division as the source of the problem. The head of sales blamed marketing for targeting the wrong prospects. Marketing blamed operations for pricing the product non-competitively. Operations blamed the company’s technology for being too cumbersome and expensive.
Then the head of customer service spoke up.
He started by saying that the problems the company was facing were complex but he could think of at least three ways that he contributed to making them worse. His department wasn’t prioritizing the most critical customers, they weren’t effectively funneling information they were gathering from customers to the rest of the organization, and, maybe the biggest problem of all, he had morale issues in his group. Then he listed things he was planning to do to address those three issues.
After he spoke, there was silence in the room. Then, one by one, the others started claiming their part in the problems.
That’s barefoot leadership.
Barefoot leadership is about acting in ways that change the way others act. It’s about shifting a room, a team, or even the culture of an organization by taking a risk that others are scared to take.
https://hbr.org/2014/11/the-small-personal-risks-that-actually-change-behavior
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