High Performance Leadership

Have you ever found yourself searching for a magic formula for everything? Wouldn't it be great if there were a fool-proof process for leadership, or problem solving, or achieving your goals that you could apply and be guaranteed success. It's not so easy. What works sometimes can crash and burn another time. What seems to make perfect sense can be irrational under certain situations. It's not exactly going with the flow, but it is adjusting what we think and do based on what confronts us. When I was a firefighter we had an expression often repeated at training exercises: "Never say never, never say always." Respond to the needs at hand. -- Douglas Brent Smith

Developing leadership skills has similarities to training to be a fire fighter. You need a combination of study, direction, and experiential application. But the experiential part of the training should build according to your skill level. A first day fire fighter trainee for instance never sees any real fire – they could easily get hurt or hurt someone else. The really difficult tasks must build on skills that have been learned before. Knowledge must be internalized and feel fully integrated before you apply it on a dangerous ground – and leading others can often be dangerous ground.  Leadership develops in scalable stages I’ve been both a fire fighter and a manager and so I can find many similarities in the development process. You can be a novice and inexperienced fire fighter and still contribute to the effort of the crew, provided that you are surrounded with more experienced, patient, and yes even insistent fire fighters who will be assertive and courageous enough to keep y...