Leadership is a lost art in my book. It is one of the most wrote about topics imaginable. Go on Amazon and there is a ton of books written about leadership. I could write one maybe ‘Everything I know about leadership I learned in the Marine Corp'. It's true, and I know a few things that have worked and a few that don't in my thirty plus years leading people. The one thing I know for sure is that you have to engage the ‘whole' person. Each one of us brings three things to the party, our hands, our head and our heart. Let me explain.
For starters each one of us brings our hands; that is our skills to the job. If we work at McDonalds they have pretty much idiot proofed their processes and the skill required is to show up. If you're a builder you hire people with carpentry skills, a trucker then you hire truck driver skills and so on. For many leaders and organizations this is where their engagement of their workers stops. They hire skills and they get skills and that is that.
The next part of the person a leader can engage is the head. The head represents a person's intellect, their engagement to think and bring more to the job than skills. When I worked at Compaq Computer in the mid-nineties they hired a lot of intellectual people who brought their heads to work. But as leaders, do we engage their heads in their work or allow them to just be involved to the minimum?
The third and most important element a leader can engage is a person's heart, their passion. This can't be bought, it must be led. In the early days of Compaq, or any start up for that matter, the hearts of the people are engaged from the excitement of the start up. Great leaders keep the engagement of the hearts because of their leadership, not because of the start up.
The three parts of the whole person must be engaged to get the most out of your organization. Think about Gandhi for instance. He inspired an entire country with his leadership although he never held an elected position. Gandhi's leadership brought down the British Empire and he never held an official position. Why, because he engaged the whole person, not just one or two of the parts. He led by example and people knew they were important to him.
In my days as a Marine sniper, two consecutive years in the Vietnam War, I found the very foundation of this concept. We were highly trained in marksmanship and that was our skill. We were highly trained in tactics, given incredible support troops and trusted to complete our missions. We were allowed and expected to use our intellect. Then we were part of an outfit with a strong and proud history, with outstanding leadership above us and while our country wasn't behind us, our Corp was ... we had passion.
Why did fifty percent of us volunteer for more time in country than required? It sure wasn't because of the money; I think they paid me $290.00 a month with hazardous duty pay. No, it was because of our passion to serve the man next to us, our Corp and to be the best at what we did. Leaders engage the passion in their follows while engaging the whole person.
Ed Kugler
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