Don’t EVER print your own business cards have them professionally done.

Part of an ongoing and irregular series of articles on leadership.

As a leader are you a filter or a lightswitch?

By this I mean how does your decision making process work? Is it even a process at all? Are you a filter? Do you listen to suggestions from varying sources, weigh the options, collaborate and move forward with the decision – sometimes even decisions you may not agree with?

Or are you a binary decision maker? Yes. No. No. No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. etc?

There are overlaps between these styles. Binary decision makes have filters and filter decision makers are often driven by circumstance to quick binary decicions – but we have tendancies toward one or the other.

Now I should say up front that context and circumstance contribute significantly to the decision making process a leader makes. A lieutenant in the midst of a combat firefight may not be able to take time to filter decisions through a complex matrix that involves collaboration with peers, seniors and those under her or his supervision – they may need to decide on instinct and hope for the best no matter which style they tend toward.

I am more of a collaborative filter decision maker. Sometimes I allow things to happen that I personally would not choose. As leaders we do this for various reasons not the least of which is always remembering we may be wrong. Other reasons could include the reality that the value of what can be learned by going a certain way outweighs the detriment of failure in the moment.

Regardless of your style you should know what it is. There are places where a binary yes/no approach does not work. Larger, team structured organizations for instance may not thrive under this form of leadership and thus the whole organization suffers.

Learn the styles, learn where you learn and most important;y, learn when you may need to use the other style and why it is valuable to do so from time to time.

 

bleed it all out until you are an empty husk
that you might be blown away as dust
or walk the world like a marble ghost
silent, cool and empty as a dead lake
donate it all to the ones who need it
fill them up that your hollow echoe
sounds a warning rattle to passersby
like a cold, white lighthouse of sound

press your face
against the leaded glass
to see a rippled world
just on the other side
on wonder on how
imperfection
creates a beauty
all of its own

look at the parabola
that stretches cross my face
i am a geometrist
plotting emotions
one equation at a time
a perfect axis of symmetry

what shit is this when the warm water
is death cold despite the steaming heat
and one small, grey cloud
covers the entire blue sky
as though one lived entirely
on the verdent green edge
of a deep and black chasm…
such a simple thing to tip
such a small thing to trip
to lean back into a welcome fog
could take the razor to shave
but leave it with a shelf-full
of why bothers and who cares
don’t want to move/eat/dress
just sit and stare and fall
these are the stupid chains
these are the lead weights
these, the consequences of sad
that leaves the wires taut
and the sound so out of tune
one would scream
if one could muster the will

Act II, scene iii – you fucked those lines up;
you left your peers to clean your mess
while stumbling backstage with no words
wanting to run back out and fix it all,
but you can’t, the curtain doesn’t work that way;
so you wait and you worry and you regret until…

Act II, scene iv – you pick up the pieces
and walk back out and act like it never happened
then you go home and hope the critics missed it;
maybe next time it will be perfect.

Act II, scene iii – you fucked those lines up;
you left your peers to clean your mess
while stumbling backstage with no words
wanting to run back out and fix it all,
but you can’t, the curtain doesn’t work that way;
so you wait and you worry and you regret until…

Act II, scene iv – you pick up the pieces
and walk back out and act like it never happened
then you go home and hope the critics missed it;
maybe next time it will be perfect.

a series of vignettes,
small, slight minuets
for you and i
to spin in pirouettes
that’s what these
small glimpses are

the tortured scream
of the espresso machine
harmonized with her voice
and a new song was born
of coffee and Spotify
a hydraulic and musical moment
lost when the order was done