| Are you a penguin or an elephant? | |
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When I was at the Melbourne Zoo the other day, I had an interesting conversation with one of the Zoo Keepers. It prompted me to think about leadership and how many of us run on instinct as compared to strategic leadership.
The Zoo Keeper explained to me that Penguins operate mostly on instinct. They don’t pay attention necessarily to the others in their group but respond to their environment based on their instinct. The group of fairy penguins that I was watching had to contend with two divers cleaning their tank so they were avoiding the water. Their instincts told them that something big and black in the water was dangerous. And to make matters worse, another zoo keeper was attending to their dry land habitat forcing them to choose between the shore and the water. They were stuck, diving in and out of the water.
Elephants on the other hand, learn from the matriarch of the herd. She teaches the younger members of the tribe what she has learnt through a lifetime. Which plants are edible, which animals to fear, the best path to the waterhole. The elephants integrate this with their own experience.
You can see where I am going with this.
As a leader, you are a role model for future leaders. Through your experiences, you will have developed a particular leadership style. It is important for all of us to enhance our leadership skills and ensure that we are strategic in our approach. Consider that your staff will be integrating your learnings and demonstrated behavours with their own views of the world.
Operating based on our reactions is likely to result in situations where we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, making work and creating flurry. We have all been in situations where we have had a knee-jerk reaction to a situation and ended up worse off for it. So let’s leave that for the fairy penguins because they are much cuter than us, and opt for the strategic leadership of the elephants and develop the leadership culture that you want to see for your organisation. |
