Leadership | Talent Vanguard

Dec 28

What the People I Learned From in 2018 Learned in 2018

Well, it looks like we made it. 2018 is moving into our rearview mirror and I’ll bet I’m not the only one with mixed feelings about that. This year was turbulent, both generally and personally. I left a beloved team, made the leap into independent consulting (and managed to pack all the usual rookie mistakes into a very short time-frame #overachiever), did a bunch of public speaking, and jumped back into a fascinating new role in an interesting organization, all while grappling with defining a side project related to sexual harassment, complexity, and power. Oh, and the world seemed determined to drift into dystopia.

I felt uncertain and unbalanced the entire year. The upside was that I was especially receptive to learning from others. This year I questioned everything, and was comforted to find others who had already been asking the same (and better) questions; people who didn’t rush to fill the air with simple answers and singular solutions, but inspired me to sit with my uncertainty and try to learn from it. I’m grateful for that, and for them.

Leadership Capacity and Constraint

“Leaders are made not born”.

We must believe this, since our organizations spend a staggering amount of money every year to improve the managerial and leadership skills of their employees.

We also place a high value on leadership as individuals, treating those recognized as great leaders with a kind of cultish reverence. Inspiring quotes about leadership abound on social platforms, often in the same intense language used to describe CrossFit.

Zero Points for Effort

A weekly post in which I share (some of) the most thought-provoking content I read this week(ish), which I am too lazy to write full blog posts about.

Leadership Lessons from Crack Mayor Rob Ford

As the late, great Whitney Houston said: “Crack is whack”. Truthfully, it’s pretty hard to expand or improve upon Ms. Houston’s assessment of this particular issue, which is why it’s taken me a while to extract the deeper lessons that I knew lurked under the sordid surface of the Rob Ford fiasco.

Rob Ford is my mayor. That is, he was inflicted on me by a significant proportion of my fellow Torontonians in our most recent mayoral election. But I don’t hold it against them; truly we lacked compelling alternatives, and they were all probably in a drunken stupor anyway, so how can I hold them responsible? The point is, while the world held witness to the most surreal, ‘Daily Show’ worthy portion of Mr. Ford’s downward spiral, the good people of Toronto have had to endure actually having him as the mayor of the fourth largest city in North America. This reality holds some genuinely important lessons about leaders and the organizations that create and empower them, buried as they might be under a fine, white powder.

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