Dry land is not a destination, and leadership is not magic

I am asked frequently what differentiates leaders from others, and if, in fact, we can actually teach that difference. I attended a Gala event at a local university recently where one of the university's benefactors asked me that exact question when he discovered what I do for a living. Of course, he asked the question to let me know that he thought it was impossible to teach leadership.

"Well," I laughed, "I suppose we should all just throw up our hands and go home then. And maybe shut down the university's MBA program while we're at it."

As opposed as I am to his view, his perspective is not unusual and his point is not altogether unserious. In fact, I appreciate the point, because it forces me to go back from time to time and assess what truly does differentiate leaders and how effectively we are teaching it. And as is always the case, because I am bent this way, his comment made me think of a movie --- in this case, Waterworld, a film set in a post-apocalyptic, post-diluvian world and, depending on your perspective, a film that accurately captures where we're heading or where Kevin Costner's career has already gone. But I digress.

There's a great line in the film, delivered by Dennis Hopper's character, in which he rallies his team of deliriously deviant criminals to their mission by saying, "dry land is not a destination, it's our destiny." It's a line that I've used repeatedly to illustrate a critical leadership ability ---the ability to shift to the promotional mindset, if appropriate, when seeking to achieve a difficult goal. Now, I always feel I have to qualify my use of the line, coming from the character it does as portrayed by Hopper. Dennis Hopper, of course, is a brilliant actor, and he has played some rather unusual people in the course of that career. So, make no mistake, I am not advocating becoming a tyrant or a despot who seeks world domination, either in a pre- or post-apocalyptic context.

But I am saying find a way to communicate your goals in a manner that connects with your teams and in a manner that aligns with how they need to hear from you. So listen to that line again --- go ahead --- say it out loud: "Dry land is not a destination, it is our destiny." It's poetic, eloquent --- high sounding. And with that you've probably already leapt to the conclusion, "see! It's an innate skill. Some of us are better at that than others and we either have it or we don't."

I would suggest, however, quite the opposite.

Because, beyond signifying that Hopper's character must have thought about how he wanted to say that line, the real genius of it lies in what it shows this leader knew about his charges. And that is entirely teachable --- we can all learn it, if we apply a framework for understanding the people we're trying to lead to achieve results.

I would refer you to the great book, Multipliers: How the best leaders make everyone smarter, by Liz Wiseman. It's a wonderful approach to unleashing the power of teams and increasing one's own impact within an organization. And it's solid evidence that you can teach leadership ---it's all about applying effective frameworks.

But back to the quote for a second --- how does this exemplify the Multiplier approach? It's a great example of a leader deploying the "promotion" mindset to motivate his crew. Wiseman talks about people being strategic optimists or pessimists --at various times we are more or less optimistic, more or less pessimistic, about the goals we must achieve and our organization's ability to achieve them. And an effective leader, paying attention to how his team reacts, responds to and discusses those goals can tell which direction (s)he should lead in.

The framework emphasizes the following: future focus, looking to answer, speech use, and past focus. And it asks the leader to discover if s(he) and their teams are thinking about the future in terms of gain or loss; looking to answer why or how; using adjectives or verbs to communicate the opportunity; or thinking about past experience in terms of successes or failures. If you followed along there, you probably already put together that a person or group who looks at the future in terms of gains, is looking to answer why, and uses adjectives to communicate the opportunity, while connecting to past successes is in the promotion mindset, while someone or a group on the other side is within the prevention mindset.

So, if someone on your team says, "this is huge!", (s)he is in a different place then someone who says, "there are probably five steps to getting this done" or "this is about building a new sales platform".

Now, it's important to note ---that one mindset is not morally better than the other. They simply are what they are. But they shape how we will respond to an opportunity or a challenge, and thus require that a leader adjust his/her behavior accordingly. I learned this firsthand as I coached my daughter's soccer team when she was in middle school --- from winless struggling to a division championship no less (forgive me, I was over the moon after their last season together). I saw very quickly that they just did not respond to my urging them toward greatness, and the heights of soccer achievement --- they did not want to hear my equivalent "dry land is not a destination, it's our destiny" speech.

For the life of me, I don't know why!

But, you see, they were terrified of failing and of looking bad. They saw the opportunity in front of them as one that offered calamity and the spotlight of ignominy, not celebrity. They wanted to know how to do things, how they would need to execute in order to not look bad, and wanted me to communicate using verbs that illustrate what and how to do something, not how great something was. And of course, they were stuck listening to a tape in their minds about how the last time they had tried soccer, they had failed.

Needless to say, my coaching changed dramatically, focusing on skill building, practicing those skills over and over, and using language of how and what and then “catching them doing something right" --- to steal a phrase from a more successful coach --- to embed feelings of success in their "past repertoire" tape.

Alas, no "dry land is our destiny" speeches for me, and no Herb Brooks moments as well. Just the hard slog of speaking to them as they wanted to be spoken to, showing them how something is done, and then allowing them to practice safely and providing guidance as they tried new approaches, as well as praise when they nailed it.

Now, surely, that is teachable. Not something in our DNA. Leadership is all about applying effective frameworks. I've found the Multipliers approach to be one useful framework and perhaps you will too.