For anyone familiar with the Care and Growth leadership model, it is apparent that the leadership challenge is more than just giving employees the means and ability. It is also essentially involves unlocking their willingness. This is essentially about helping employees become genuine contributors who are committed to excellence in the execution of their duties.
But what precisely do these ideal employees look like? There are different sorts of people in this world. Some people do things only if they stand to benefit in the short term. A person like this will always do the bare minimum for the greatest benefit and generally do not make for very effective employees and cannot really be considered to be “contributors”.
There are however a different sort of people. Some people manage, because of an inspiring leader, to go the extra mile and give attention to how they can contribute, independently of any immediate gain that might come their way. Such individuals are by far and away more productive and can be genuinely considered to be “contributors”.
Of these two sorts of people it is of course preferable to have the second sort as part of your teams. The second sort of people stop being a burden on others and instead occupy a place in which they generally enrich their working environment and the lives of others. There is however a third sort of person that stands out above the rest. There is a small subset of people that are so committed to their own excellence and contribution that they go the extra mile irrespective of who their leader is or what task they are busy with.
This third sort of person differs from the second because they are self-motivated to strive for excellence. The second sort of person goes the extra mile and strives for excellence because they are inspired by a good leader. Very often you find that if they loose their inspiring leader or if they have to do a boring task, they loose their will to strive for excellence. Such individuals suffer badly from neglect and cannot be left to their own devices whilst remaining as committed to excellence.
This will not happen with the third sort of person. They are individuals who will stay committed to going the extra mile even if they work for tyrants or are told to scrub the toilets. These are people who do not view any task as beneath them and do not require an inspiring leader. Their aim is to do whatever is put before them to the best of their ability for the sake of living well and achieving excellence.
I have had the privilege of knowing one such person in my life. Surprisingly this person is in his early twenties and works as an apprentice turner doing repetitive tasks of machining hydraulic components. Just this week I witnessed this person work everyday, including Saturday and Sunday, till 10 o clock at night. He ended up spending the nights ,and the whole of Sunday, working alone in the factory in order to get an order out. I was completely impressed because there was no expectation that he does this and not even his bosses were willing to join him.
When I asked him why he was busting his guts to fulfill an order even though it would be no skin off his nose if the order was not fulfilled on time and his bosses were not willing to do the same. He told me that he was doing it for the challenge. He wanted to do all he could to do the job to specification and get it done on time because that would mean he has fulfilled his own expectations of himself.
This is clearly something that stands head and shoulders above any other way of being at work. This is about striving for excellence in everything that we do, simply for the sake of achieving excellence. The true leadership challenge is to produce people of this caliber. This is about producing people who strive for excellence for the sake of excellence. By so doing you furnish the company with an indispensable asset but also do the individuals an immense service by teaching them how to live good and excellent lives. Ultimately this way of being s the goal we should all be pursuing.