INsight/ Be the Drop

Photo by jill wELLINGTON on Pixabay.

Manila, 6 October 2021 — Are you willing to take the plunge every day?

Story 

It happened in 2021. This week, leaders for sustainability from countries across the planet joined the Grow3Leaders Challenge together with the 3 colleagues they invited to influence a positive change with. What happens next is now unfolding as they use the laboratory of the Challenge to go through ups and downs to create their own unique stories of change, in their workplaces and in themselves. We will keep you posted.

Not long ago in the field of leadership development, the story was about leaders spending a lot of time individually on gathering more knowledge, complemented by some time working on case studies. Over the past decade, however, we have seen a lot of change happen in this field, and we can now speak of a 21st-century approach that is turning the classical way upside down. That change is to be welcomed, as the world is in urgent need of more leaders to influence change and to do so faster and on a bigger scale, by working together ‘on the job’ instead of individually in the classroom. 

While the need for positive change in our time has increased exponentially — think of the climate crisis and the sustainability challenge — there is still much to learn from the stories of leaders in the past, especially those that generated significant innovations. How did they do it? While we see a lot of expectations about near instant success nowadays, the stories from the past underline how success comes from hard and often unglamorous work. The modern version of saying so is that leaders need grit, defined by Angela Duckworth, a professor in psychology, as the power of passion and perseverance. Very true.

Challenge

In this week’s photo, we see a drop landing in the water and creating a ripple. What we learn from leaders in the past is that change doesn’t magically happen from one drop. Rather, they needed to keep generating drops to create enough ripples to overcome resistance and make change happen. Change that sticks and catalyzes more change.

Some of them famously said that innovation requires 1% inspiration and 99% transpiration. That’s a lot of drops. Others wrote that habits create your future. That means you have to repeat actions many times. For leaders, this means showing up with effective leadership behaviors very frequently, more often than before.

At first, I felt challenged by this need for repetition. When I attended Thought Leaders Business School, I thought that, surely, having a great idea would matter a lot? My mentors corrected me on that, and I learned that quality comes after quantity rather than the other way round. What does that mean? It means that it is impossible to know which of your ideas will turn out to be aces until you do the work of putting them into practice, seeing them through to results, and getting feedback from those involved.

Question

Having bright ideas is not innovation. Showing leadership behavior once a day doesn’t make you an effective leader. Like the Nike slogan says, we need to keep doing it, to repeat, repeat, and persevere in repeating our behaviors while learning and getting feedback. For leaders, this is personal because leadership happens in our relationships, and in our conversations, both in and outside work. Our laboratory is the people in our workplace and the world, and, of course, our personal life.

To live up to Gandhi’s exhortation to be the change that you want to see, we personally need to be the drop that hopes to make change happen. Drop after drop. Every day. Every meeting. Every conversation. Every moment of quiet reflection. Every moment when we observe others around us, including our colleagues and other leaders. 

My question for you this week is this: Are you willing to Be the Drop of change? Not just once but diving into the water of life and work many times every day and week? To invest yourself in influencing change around you by showing up changed with a positive mindset, curiosity, and grit? While you won’t know which drop will generate a significant change, you can be confident that it will happen when you keep at it. That’s what leaders have always done and still do today.