Just finished Byrne Murphy’s excellent book, “Le Deal” about the startup of ArthurGlen’s designer outlet centers in Europe. It’s a great story about how Byrne and his colleagues learned to dance communication minuets with French politicians, deploy important gestes, survive their many many mistakes and achieve success.
One of the pivotal moments in the story is when Byrne learns that it is going to take the French supreme court a couple of years to go through the appeals against his permits to start construction. What Byrne decides is that instead of waiting for the court to tell him he can start, he’s going to go forward until the court tells him he must stop.
Leadership is about inspiring and enabling others to do their absolute best, together, to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose.
Your vision as a leader is completely irrelevant until others can see themselves in the picture. By definition, that means it has to appear real to them. In some cases, you can paint word pictures that others can see. In other cases, you have to make something real before others can see it. This is part of why early wins are so important – they make things real. This is why concrete examples in interviews are so important – they describe things that really happened.
It turned out Byrne was right. It was much harder for the French Supreme court to stop a project that had already created jobs and enriched peoples’ lives than it would have been for the court to deny permission to start a theoretical project that wasn’t real.
Paint your pictures in ways that make them appear as real as possible so others want to jump on the bandwagon you’ve started instead of stopping you while it’s still a theory.
George Bradt – PrimeGenesis Executive Onboarding and Transition Acceleration
