We are talking about how your influence goes past yourself, and I entered into that space with leaders and CEOs, and executive things and cultures that, what I call the middle space, the in between the discipline of leadership itself and the human side of it, the human dynamics because ultimately you’re the one that has to make all of this stuff work. We’re going to spend a few minutes this morning talking about some of the human dynamics inside of you and with other people that drive and sustain your influence. And I want to start with a little bit of just a picture that you can take back and use I think.
Anybody know what that is? You’re right. It’s a boat, not a very good one. How many of you have ever been on a boat? If you stand on the aft end of a boat, the back end of a boat and it’s going that way and you look behind it, what you’re going to see is something called a wake. A boat leaves a wake on two sides. And as you think about influence, I want you to think about you as the boat because you as the leader, you leave a wake behind you in every interaction, in every day, in every project, in every strategy, in every season that you lead. And you take all the research about leadership in the world and you can boil it down to basically two things. Your wake has two sides to it for your influence.
Number one is the results. There is no such thing as a leader with influence who doesn’t get results. Results will erode influence. But the second side of it is the relationships, the people. And there’s a lot people or leaders that get results but they kill everybody in the process and they lose their influence. And there’s a lot of really nice people that don’t get results and they lose their influence. So as you’re evaluating your own growth as a leader remember these two sides of the wake. And what we’re going to talk about here are some dynamics that can help you both not only increase and sustain that influence, but make sure that it goes past yourself.
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