Navigating Your Leadership Journey (OPINION)

As a young pilot, I remember flying a night surveillance mission off the coast of Hawaii. It was an exercise between two groups of ships and we were restricted from making any radio or radar transmissions, so as not to reveal the location of the ships in our group.

Despite the fact that I learned the basic and essential skills of navigation in flight school, we relied entirely on technology and air controllers to navigate our missions in the fleet. However, this particular night we had neither technology nor controllers and we struggled as a crew to regain the skills of dead reckoning and inertial navigation to keep us on-course and remain undetected.

The most important lesson I learned from this flight was not my need to relearn celestial navigation, but the fact that responsibility for navigation ultimately rested with me and my crew. But, I also learned that my success as a pilot was dependent largely on how well I integrated that responsibility with all the other technology and systems that supported my journey. 

The same lesson applies to leadership development. While there seems to be a growing reliance on “how-to” books, seminars, speakers and an endless supply of quick-fix kits guaranteeing improved leadership abilities, none of those things independently guarantee success as a leader.

Ultimately, responsibility for development rests within the leader. Without question, the best leaders actively and effectively integrate a host of tools and systems to draw the most benefit from their leadership learning.

So, to successfully navigate your leadership journey, here are four important factors to consider:

For every leader, the starting point should actually be the end point of your journey. Just like a flight plan, your leadership destination is a function of the purpose that guides your life, shorter term personal and professional goals, and important checkpoints or milestones established along the way. Leaders must continually assess their progress and correct course, in the same way that pilots adjust a flight plan to account for an increase in headwinds or turbulence along the way. 

Without a chart or some means to plot your journey, it’s nearly impossible to assess your progress or even know if you ever reach your destination. By reflecting, journaling, and seeking input on your leadership course you gain a sense of the terrain or context, through which you are traveling, as well as a better understanding of the boundaries and hazards that affect your path. A leadership map, with all its markings and data, also serves as a means of accountability, showing others where you intend to go. However, a map has the potential to reveal opportunities, like shortcuts or more favorable conditions, to leverage, improve and accelerate your outcomes.

Just like navigation, leadership is a complex and ever-changing task that demands a high level of skill to master. Tools and technologies, like smartphones, email and analytics, make the important skills of communicating and decision-making much easier to master. However, leaders, not technology, are solely responsible to communicate and make decisions and your success will be judged not on the speed of your text or expansive analysis, but by the impact of your message on the people you lead.

Despite all of our best efforts to plan and train for the journey, quite often we end up flying into bad weather and we need the steady, comforting voice of the controller who guides us to the final approach course and keeps us on glide path until the runway is in sight. Mentorship and peer accountability foster the essential relationships that provide support to leaders who find themselves in stormy conditions. Words of alignment, correction and reinforcement from those with knowledge of both you and the destination are the voices that will keep you on-course.

On that dark and quiet night, we relied on some basic time and distance measurements to estimate which ship was ours, and we managed to return home without turning on our radios or radar. As leaders, we all face times when our journey is disrupted by unplanned changes or limitations.

In times like that, if we have come to rely too heavily on just one aspect of our leadership abilities and support networks, it’s likely that we’ll end up far from where we need to be.

Capt. Steve Trainor (U.S. Navy, retired) holds a Ph.D. in sociology and serves as director of research for The Soderquist Center in Siloam Springs. He contributes to the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal on topics of leadership, ethics and values.