Thanksgiving is still a recent memory despite the onslaught of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I have been thinking that the holiday goes beyond just the time off from work, the time with family and friends, the good food and football. To me the holiday provides a chance to be grateful which Wikipedia describes as:
Gratitude, thankfulness, gratefulness, or appreciation is a feeling or attitude in acknowledgment of a benefit that one has received.
That description is true for me when I reflect on the positive leadership I have experienced in my career that informs my work I’m doing now with executives to help them develop their own leadership and leaders. The leaders I’m grateful to encouraged me to see things in myself that I could not see for myself at just the right moments. These leaders work focused on my and others success before their own. It is this type of leadership I’m grateful to have experienced myself.
My observation from working with and for great leaders is that they are constantly open to and looking for where they were blocked themselves just as much as they are helping me with my own blocks that they were coaching me on at the time. In other words, they were simultaneously working on themselves while they helping me work on myself. They did this by seeking to identify the things they were doing, which they may not even know they were doing, that were getting in their way of being as successful as they would like to be.
As leaders move up or the organizations they start grow, they have to rely on others to help them be successful. The transition from an individual contributor or entrepreneur to a manager or leader of an organization requires the ability to let go, trust and mange results through others. It is exactly at these points of transition where most leaders own blocks typically start to appear and impact performance. It is also the exact same time most leaders stop looking hard at themselves because they believe they are past that.
Why am I talking about blocks, blockers and blocking you ask? I would be lying if I didn’t say that I did catch some football over the holiday. In football a pass, kick or field goal that is blocked is generally a negative event for the offense that prevents something from happening successfully. On the other hand, successful blocking usually goes unnoticed, but is critical for good plays (running or passing) to occur that lead to points being scored. Blocks, blocked, blockers and blocking are all words from the same root, with very different meanings and outcomes on the football field.
In terms of successful leadership that I’m grateful for, I would say the difference in outcomes with these words is just as significant as it is on the gridiron. Having a boss that has their own blocks and is not aware of them or willing to work on them can be very challenging to work for. In fact, just like in football if those blocks continue to be missed the result can often lead to a number of blocked outcomes despite everyone else’s best efforts. Funnily enough, these types of leaders that are blind to their own blocks often end up getting labeled as “blockers” for all the wrong reasons because of their inability to share the stage with others or give their direct reports opportunities for growth that may expose or challenge the leader’s own unidentified blocks.
Yet the leader that is open to learning, looks for feedback and is committed to growing themselves and all the people around them becomes the ultimate blocking machine in my experience. They are committed to identifying and removing both their own and other’s blocks as well as the larger organizational obstacles that present themselves. These blocking leaders focus on setting other people up for success and more often than not they are not acknowledged for it because they are not expecting it. This type of blocking leader is a true servant leader as Robert Greenleaf originally described in 1970.
For those of you who have had the good fortune to work for or with one of these blocking leaders I have described, I invite you to express your gratitude toward them during this extended season of giving thanks as they are not easy to find or come by. I myself am grateful to have had exposure to them along my professional journey so that I know what it feels like to work for them. The feeling I imagine must be similar to the experiences a running back has when a giant hole opens up in the defense to run through or a quarterback has with lots of time to scan the field from within a secure pocket that protects him. When that type of leadership blocking happens, good players become great and teams experience success.
So my hope with this post is that more people within organizations will have the same positive leadership experiences that I’m gratefully recognizing because my belief is that they all start with knowing the difference between blocks, blockers and blocking.