Tension, according to my clients IVY League 360, is a negative attribute of his leadership and something he needs to work on. His team, his boss, his peers, and his IVY league experts had spoken and he was looking to me for some new tools to adapt. Somehow, he needed to calm down.
How, he asked as did I.
You won’t find that answer in your 360 or in the mind of your manager. You won’t find that answer out there. We invested the next 60 minutes getting to the root of his tension and started with the clinical definition of the word. Funny how we use words to mean what we want with little or no knowledge of what the word actually means. Funny, huh…
My client does not have too much tension in his system. My client is not too tightly wound. My client is simply “owning” too much of the tension. Today, he learned that dispersing tension is what all the great leaders do. Tension isn’t going away from any system. Tension, remember, is what holds it together, what makes it taunt, and what brings out the best in high performers. It just is.
Today, my client began to understand that he needs to put more tension on his high flyers, his mediocre middle, and his bottom feeders. He will find out who his high performers really are and he just may be surprised. Today, he tweaked his OPUS by adding a unifying strategy around dispersing tension and he even decided how to scorecard it. He got busy thinking about his first PA to bring this strategy into reality. As we walked out of Starbucks, we smiled. We had done some good building together and he had learned how to find the “melody line” of his 360 and turn it into something productive, instead of getting overwhelmed and all up in a ball.
Tension. Who knew everybody’s got it, every system is full of it, and high performers want more of it.
How are you dispersing tension to it’s rightful owner in your system?
How do you know?
Tell me more, my friend.
Tell me more…
BUILT TO LEAD 