The Tribe Gathering - Sunday Mindset For The Week Ahead

“We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.” Rabindranath Tagore

A perfect day on the beach in Florida. Sunshine, no flags, no clouds, and no worries. It could’ve been the setting for a Jimmy Buffet song. My family and I were on vacation in the summer and all was right with the world. My daughters were playing in the water near the beach and I was about to head out to join them when I had to make a seemingly miniscule decision. Do I leave my sunglasses on or take them off? Wait, what am I saying? I bench press xyz pounds and and super cool dad, of course I’m wearing them. The ocean won’t knock me around enough to lose them…..As I searched frantically and recruited my daughters to help, my very new, very expensive sunglasses had been ripped off my head after a wave smacked me around, reminding me that nature has been around much longer than I have. I left the beach that day with two things very much not intact. My sunglasses wherever they were, and my ego. If only I’d left both on the beach before going for a swim.

Phillip Franklin, White Star Line vice-president, 1912

Ego, it’s the number one killer of leadership. Ego clouds judgement and awareness, enables entitlement, blinds us to our weaknesses & the possibility of failure, and is empty of empathy.

Four major flaws caused the sinking of the Titanic on April 14, 1912. Bulkheads that weren’t tall enough, a hull made of steel plates that would become brittle at freezing temperatures, cheaply made rivets holding the plates together at the seams, and Captain Edward Smith’s decision to not slow down because he was trying to reach New York a day ahead of schedule. As the massive ship neared an iceberg field, they steamed ahead despite numerous ice warnings. The result, the loss of 1,517 lives.

“At some point, safety just is pure waste.” - Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate Expeditions

The topic of conversation online, in coffee shops, on major news networks, and at dinner tables is THE submarine. Coincidentally named, The Titan, the submersible was also built with a recipe that included folly and foolishness. Post-tragedy analyses have concluded that the submersible was made of carbon fiber materials rather than titanium and had been on more than two dozen excursions without diagnostic checks of the vessel’s stability, which was refused by Rush. Repeated dives causes microfractures which can be identified and fixed if analyzed properly. Furthermore, the submersible’s shape was elongated to allow for more passengers. The typical design is spherical in order to evenly distribute water pressure. The Marine Technology Society warned Rush and the company in 2018 that their practices would be catastrophic. 5 lives lost.

If you look in your dictionary you will find: Titans – A race of people vainly striving to overcome the forces of nature. Could anything be more unfortunate than such a name, anything more significant? -Arthur Rostron, Captain of the rescue ship Carpathia

The leadership lessons we can take away from both of these tragedies abound. But, at the heart of the lessons, the root ideology we can extract is to lead with an absence of your own ego. Servant Leadership takes into consideration the hopes, goals, desires, and well being of the people you lead. And, it does not care for your vanity, accomplishments, trophies, wins, profit, or social media posts. Servant leadership is being too busy “washing the feet” of your people/team/employees to even notice that YOU have been successful, because your concern is whether or not THEY have been cared for.

So, how can we apply these lessons this week? Let’s use the flaws of these ill-fated vessels to provide the imagery we need and apply to our leadership pathway immediately.

Council-Exterior-Rivets-Shape-Checkups & Awareness-Ego

When faced with decisions to make that will affect the people you lead, you must dive deeper to see the entirety of the “iceberg” you’re faced with. To do so, take into consideration the COUNCIL you receive from the people you lead. Both Captain Smith and Mr. Rush were forewarned by those they held superiority in rank over. But their ego had made the waters of decision making too dark & murky to see logic and reasoning. As servant leaders we must take advantage of the 2:1 ratio of ears to mouth that we have, as well as listen to our people’s concerns and ideas.

When you practice mindfulness, taking into consideration those around you and how they are affected by your actions, as well as their well being, you strengthen your ability to lead. You can easily do this by first intentionally practicing AWARENESS of people’s body language and mannerisms. Follow up with them by engaging in CHECKUPS. Speak to them and find out what’s going on in their lives and in the environment you lead them in. If you fail to do so, you fail to see fundamental “cracks” in your team’s foundation.

A brittle EXTERIOR can cause even the strongest of ships to crumble. Do you or your team members suffer from “cracks” in the exterior of your team? Are there bad decisions leaking into the compartments of your culture, flooding the habits or your team with poor behavior? Accountability and awareness are overlapping titanium plates that you need to solidify your team’s seams and to make you all IMPERVIOUS to outside influence, negative attitudes, and poor behaviors. See the flaw and deal with it, right then and right there, because once the water starts seeping in, time to get the lifeboats ready has passed and good people will “abandon ship.”

Team environmental expectations are the RIVETS that hold your culture together. If you fail to use them or they are weak, brittle, and not reinforced, the seams of your team’s culture will bust open and allow in a torrid of negative influence that will overwhelm the bulkheads of your core values faster than you can pump it out. Work together to develop these into strong pieces, implement them together, & solidify them everyday.

What SHAPE is your team in? Are they emotionally, mentally, & physically prepared to be pushed harder, to meet a short deadline, or to climb a profit margin peak? If you don’t know, you’re not CHECKING IN. If you do know that they’re not ready, then don’t push them! Slow down, get them ready, be more aware, & strengthen culture. Servant leadership is seeing the trouble ahead for the people you lead and slowing down to care for them and prepare them, not blasting through an objective in order to say you did so.

Lastly, when making leadership decisions, leave your EGO at the harbor. Once you and your team are on a goal or mission pathway, you can’t make decisions in the water that put the team at stake in order to make you look good. If you have to sit players with injuries and you lose, so be it. If you don’t make a project deadline ahead of time because a team member has a death in the family and you tell them to take the week off and others pick up their workload, so be it. If the profit margin doesn’t line your pockets because your team needed to hire a consultant in order to get the job done correctly, so be it. If you make it to New York a day late, so what, we ALL get to New York. If your submarine is round and not aesthetically pleasing, who cares, we all get back to the ship.

This week, check up on your people. Solidify relationships and expectations. Have both difficult and meaningful conversations. Practice awareness and mindfulness. Analyze culture and slow down if needed to strengthen it. But first, leave your ego at home. Seek to “wash feet” rather than chase praise. Summer is here and temps are warming up. If you find yourself on vacation reading this, good on you! Enjoy it! And, before you go into the water check the flags, apply sunscreen, for goodness sakes take off your sunglasses.