Leadership – The Cell Phone Theory
Throughout the day, your cell phone can jump from antenna to antenna multiple times. Odds are, you never notice. Why? Because your service remains the same, calls are still sent and received successfully.
In other words, you stay connected.
Your cellular company has spent countless dollars placing identical, adaptable and intuitive
communication towers across the country and even the world. This is so when a customer moves outside their “home” region, their service continues uninterrupted. As a result, communication is fluid, even in foreign territory.
This, in a nutshell, is a metaphor of leadership in the 21st century, the ability to remain equally influential no matter where you are. An ability to “connect” at the grass-roots level even though you are far away from your home base or natural comfort zone.
The face of leadership is changing. Old worn out theories are being bagged up and taken to the corner for trash pickup. New brighter and highly developed concepts of what leadership really means have emerged and taken hold.
It’s all about connecting.
Connecting isn’t a trite, simplistic concept. Leadership was once an exercise in charisma and political know how; today it’s is more about mastering the nuances of culture, taking groups of diverse individuals, and through multiple inter-personal connections, moving everyone towards one objective.
In many ways, great leaders simply nudge. Once people have been motivated or nudged to accomplish things they could, but didn’t do on their own, great influence is handed to the motivator.
Well known leaders from previous centuries may have been powerful, but the leaders of the 21st century are empowering. Why the change? As the world becomes increasingly connected, connecting has become the most admired characteristic. The ability to log in from Miami and talk to people online from the Ukraine has affected everybody’s perspective. People now want their leaders to “connect” offline just as they do online.
Connecting to those who follow is necessary for a leader to be influential. A trade mark of historical leaders has been their attempts to connect to their audience through sophisticated and inspiring speeches. However, connecting with people in our time is less about speaking and more about listening. It is in quality listening and not in well rehearsed words that we can affect the deepest changes in others.
The leaders’ ability to see potential in people separates her from her followers. Rather than feeling limited by her own experiences and views, she sees the world’s abundance of untapped possibilities.
She is capable of giving words to what is possible, making what was only an abstract thought, a tangible goal. This belief in potential is contagious.
When given the opportunity to lead others, accept the challenge as more than an exercise in charisma and political navigation. Take the opportunity to unearth untapped potential.
Michelangelo said it best when faced with a slab of rock “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
That is leadership, using today’s communication mediums.
