There is a lot of good to be said about leaders and their organization which are agile and able to make changes and solve problems on the fly. In today’s environment, it’s a crucial skill and one which I have spent a lot of time developing. However, my greatest asset is my ability to make quick decisions, flex around problems, and calm the chaos is the high level of preparation I do prior to walking onto the playing field. I do this personally and I do it with the teams I lead. I try to make sure that we are fully prepared to do things as planned, and more importantly, prepared for whatever improvisation needs that may arise. I’ve said for years that although I am able to ad lib, I don’t like to plan on it. It is just too risky to ad lib with an entire group. Even the best jazz musicians have spent countless hours practicing, so that when they are called upon to ad lib, they are prepared with all the musical tools they need. It may sound spontaneous, but you can count on the fact that they know exactly what they are doing.
The other evening I was working with one of my teams as we prepare for the largest performance event we do all year. The discussion had to do with the amount of full-scale run-through rehearsals we do in the last few weeks of preparation. There are a lot of groups that do events much more at the last minute with a high level of uncertainty by the team going into the final few days. In many cases they pull it off, but not without a healthy degree of anxiety from the members of the team, but sometimes things don’t work well at all and an audience experiences just what lack of preparation looks like. It’s not pretty. I explained to my team that even though we could do things the same way others do, I’ve made a commitment to myself and to my team to never intentionally take us into performance nervous, unprepared and waiting for disaster to happen. The leadership term for this is “uncertainty avoidance,” and I have a high, high case of it. I don’t like to take unnecessary risks. No, I hate it. The way I prepare our team is so thorough that we are always confident going into opening night. Sure, there will be the normal jitters that happen in non-professional performances, but it won’t be because they are unprepared.
Leadership is about taking care of the people in our care. As an authentic and servant leader myself, I am particularly committed to making sure that I never put them in a position where the odds are stacked against them, which lack of preparation will do. When we get up in front of an audience, whether it is for single song or a full production, I will have done everything I can to make sure that the team is confident and ready to do great things together. That’s why we practice and practice and practice. Sometimes things still go wrong and we have to solve problems on the fly, but we always handle it because we’ve prepared for anything and everything that could happen. I encourage you to continually up your game when it comes to preparation. There’s nothing that feels better than great execution of your plan, including when you’re forced into improvisation without any warning!
Lead well.