Leadership is an Art
- Max DePree
Intimacy is at the heart of competence. It has to do with understanding, with believing, and with practice. It has to do with the relationship to one’s work.
Everyone knows you can’t run a good restaurant with absentee management. A young man I know went to eat lunch one day at his regular restaurant. It was unusually busy. He managed to get a menu, but before the waitress came to take his order his lunch hour had evaporated. Genuinely concerned that the owner should know what had happened, he mentioned it to the cashier in a friendly way and went back to work. That night, the owner of the restaurant arrived at the young man’s house, unannounced, with dinner – enough dinner for two nights.
This kind of intmacy with one’s work leads to solid competence.
Being an effective department supervisor on a manufacturing floor is fundamentally different from giving seminars about it.
In the same way, war games are different from battle. Those who have been there know the heightened sense of reality and unreality, and the odor of fear and risk and death. Only the heart-pounding experience of battle can bring that intimacy.
Those of you who have had real experience with machinery and equipment and even buildings know that they have personalities of their own. Intimacy with a job leads one to understand that when training people to do a job, one needs to teach not only the skill of the job but the art of it as well. And the art of it always has to do with the personality of both the operator and the machine. Intimacy is the experience of ownership. This often arises out of difficulty or questions or exasperation, or even survival.
Beliefs are connected to intimacy. Beliefs come before policies or standards or practices. Practice without belief is a forlorn existence. Managers who have no beliefs but only understand methodology and quantification are modern-day eunuchs. They can never engender competence or confidence. They can never be truly intimate.
Intimacy with our work directly affect our accountability and results in personal authenticity in the work process. A key component of intimacy is passion.
You should not think that you can come to intimacy easily or by following a formula. Nor is intimacy easily preserved. It has its enemies. In our group activities, intimacy is betrayed by such things as politics, short-term measurements, arrogance, superficiality, and an orientation toward self rather than toward the good of the group.
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Chama - North Highway Pasture
