This is a half story half analogy; in the end you will see how it relates to the story at the end.
So here we stand, looking back on what used to be and looking forward for what might be. My life has been through a lot of changes through out the years, some good, some not so good. I learned from my mistakes and changed what needed changed. Over the years I have been in a few leadership positions. Over time you realize some things and this is one of those things.
Well anyway, lets move on to my story. I have always been a huge fan of go fast things, meaning cars, trucks, motorcycles or anything else that has wheels, floats or flies; so we will use that as the analogy
Lets take 100 people all of these people love to go fast and are always wanting to go faster. Lets put these 100 people in go-carts with a goal of 125mph. The first trip out they get up to about 75 mph and 50 of them will flat out piss themselves and want off right then. The ones that got off, these are the followers in life. They want to lead but they can’t because they will always need someone over them to show them the way of life.
We take the other 50 this time and they get up to 100mph. Now another 25 ask to get off, the other 25 of those people say they really want to hit the 125mph goal. Now we take those 25 people left and take them to 100mph and it almost crashes, 15 more ask to get off.
Now some would say these 15 people that got off were pretty determined. That is not entirely true, I say these are the ones that don’t truly know the consequences of their doings just yet. These are the people that will do anything to get a management position. Once they get it they don’t know how to run the business because they don’t realize the impact of their decisions.
Now we take the 10 that wanted to continue for a serious run of our goal of 125mph. On their way to the goal but at 115mph they wreck and roll the cart. Now they are safe because this is an analogy and plus they were using the correct protective gear and the cart is caged, but they still got some scrapes, bruises and overall they got pretty banged up. There are 8 people that gave up after the crash. These people make good sells managers but not leaders. They know consequences of not having a perfectly tuned team to do the job at hand, and they will do anything to keep from failing. These managers usually are up tight and sometimes have a high turn over rate on their teams.
The 2 of them that come back, they went to work figuring what the cart needed to reach the 125mph goal. They spoke with experts on site to help them. With the knowledge gained and a big trial and error process they went to work on their go-cart adjusting suspension and altering the go-cart to handle the higher speed. These 2 people continued to ride again and again and finally made the 125mph goal. These 2 guys did not give up after falling or failing at some point, they kept at it determined to meet their goals. They continued to push the edge a little bit at a time at everything they did from racing to becoming the best project leaders at their jobs. These two people are not naturals at what they were doing. They got there because they had a striving talent many people do not have. It’s called dedication, the dedication to succeed. That is what makes someone seem like a natural leader because with dedication comes heart, if you have the heart and dedication to do something you will accomplish it. You have to keep trying until you get what you are after. You cannot train a good leader because its part of their life, you can only mold them into better leaders by pushing them harder and giving them challenges they haven’t faced yet in life.
So the moral of the story is there are a lot of people capable of being managers, but only about 2% of them are capable of being true leaders. Leaders produce the information that is needed to meet a goal. A manager is only a dissemination point for this information.
So the question is; do you have the heart and determination of a leader?
Mr. Will
