Evangelical and Unashamed

A challenging article from the latest issue of Kairos journal by Os Guinness.

Leadership Lessons from Sodoku

I’ve been starting to enjoy Sodoku over the past few weeks. The Calgary Herald newspaper has one each day that I’ve been using to practice my skills and logistical arrangements. And I am realizing there’s a lot of Leadership Lessons to be learned from Sodoku.

1) Don’t be afraid to do the simple, obvious things first. It seems to me that leaders often want to do something flashy and impressive, especially in the early days of a new position. But the best thing to do in Sodoku is just to start filling in the simple, obvious numbers that follow the rules of the game. That’s probably a good principle for starting in leadership too. (K.I.S.S. still applies!)

2) One piece of the puzzle affects all the others. Sodoku is essentially a domino-effect game. If one number goes here, then another number can or cannot go there. But the key to Sodoku - and to leadership - is to realize that every “answer” in one space affects how the other “answers” fit in the whole/big picture. Which leads to the next leadership principle...

3) One false assumption can cause significant problems. Once you get past the obvious stuff, making an “educated guess” or “assumption” is risky. And if you make the wrong one, it can really lead to significant trouble for two reasons. Most obviously, the false assumption will lead to other "answers" not fitting in the puzzle. And as you try to re-arrange or re-organize the other "answers" based upon your false assumption, lots of other "answers" start to also get messed up. Even worse is the fact that the false assumption may actually not show up for quite a while and you may work away on the rest of the puzzle with no evidence that your assumption was not in fact correct until the very end – and then you have a big problem that is almost impossible to backtrack and undo. (And so I look at the Sodoku answer key, find out where I got messed up, and shake my head. Not so easy to do in real life and leadership). Especially as it relates to personnel decisions, a poor hire can influence a whole department/division and it may be months before one realizes the person who is the real source of confusion in an area, and then there can be lots of human, financial, and organizational damage to be repaired.

So… I’ll keep developing my Sodoku skills, and hopefully move cautiously though steadily through various leadership challenges.

I like a leader who leads like I would

Though not particularly profound or revolutionary, esp to anyone who’s done any reading on leadership, I discovered in a new way yesterday how much I like a leader who is like me. You see we had a group meeting yesterday at my workplace and the assistant group leader led the meeting. For the first time in a few months, I felt like we actually got something done in that meeting. We spent the last year talking about a document, asking everyone for input on a document, and putting so many parts of it on the table, one didn’t know if it was a document in process or a corpse receiving an autopsy. (And there were more than a few times over the last year that most of us as group members left a meeting wishing we were dead!) So Monday when we finally got stuff done and we were led through the process of getting it done, while there was a sense of exhaustion over the details we got into, I think most people also felt a sense of “finally we got something decided!”

As a leader, one needs to be self-reflective and I realize that I am a “get things done” kinda guy. I’m willing to discuss things with the team, but not ad nauseum. There’s only so much talking you can do and then you gotta DO something. As an anonymous quote I read the other day said, “You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.” Interestingly, I led a meeting the other night where more than one person in our group said, “we obviously should have had more discussion on this topic.” And I was somewhat insulted by that comment a) because it presumed the leadership team had NOT discussed the topic and did not have a clue about some of the concerns people would express. In fact, the leadership team had talked about most (if not all) of the “factors” that various people thought we should have discussed more. Of course second of all, it was time for a decision, not for more discussion. There is stuff to be done; people’s lives to be touched.

So, I realize I need to learn to appreciate different leadership styles, and I also know, appreciate, and believe I am practicing the wisdom of surrounding myself with other leaders NOT like me. But it sure is a joy to work with a leader who leads the way I like leadership to function.