I am the author of the new book, Herding Tigers be the leader that creative people need here on the show. We talk about some of the practical, tactical things we can do as leaders to set our team up to be prolific, brilliant, and healthy. And really we need all three of those things. If we want to produce great work over time, we need to be prolific.
We need to be brilliant. I mean, we're doing good work and we need to be healthy, meaning that we're doing it sustainably. So many leaders focus only on doing a lot of work or doing a lot of work. That's really good.
And they miss out on the sustainability piece. And when that happens, your team eventually will begin to produce machine like work because they're not a machine. You're not a machine. I'm not a machine.
We're not machines. We're wired for rhythm as human beings. And if we want to produce brilliant, creative work consistently over time and produce a lot of it, we have to embrace the rhythmic nature of the creative process. And by the way, that applies to you as a leader as well.
And that's something I want to talk about today. I want to talk about how to keep your leadership fire alive, how to stoke the flame of your own inspiration. There are a lot of leaders out there that are far too many uninspired leaders out there doing uninspired work and saying uninspired things. If you lead a team of people, you have the responsibility to keep your flame burning bright and hot.
Yes, you can still do your job for a while without inspiration. But eventually your team will catch on to the fact that you're not really smoking what you're selling. And they'll start to wonder whether their sacrifices are really worth it and make no mistake, your team is making sacrifices. They're spending their precious time, energy and attention following your leadership.
And if they begin to sense that your heart isn't really in it as a leader, then they'll begin to meter their own engagement. They'll begin to wonder, should I really follow this person? They don't really seem to be all that into what they're asking us to do. And this is a real problem for us as leaders.
It's difficult to earn the respect of our team if our team doesn't see that we are ourselves inspired by the nature of the work that we're doing. So how do you keep yourself inspired as a leader? How do you stoke the flames of your own engagement? I wrote about this and heard in Tigers.
There are a bunch of tips throughout the book, but actually the very last chapter is called Be a Leader Worth Following. And in that chapter, I write a lot more about how to keep your own leadership fire alive and engaged. But I want to talk today very specifically about what you can do on a personal level to keep your fire lit and to make sure that you are setting yourself up to be the kind of leader that your team needs. The first thing is I want you to think about communing with great minds.
So how much time do you spend each week reading, absorbing, inspiring stimuli, engaging in conversations that spark your imagination? As Stephen Sample, the former president of the University of Southern California put it, we need to make it a practice to, quote, commune with great minds, end quote. We must absorb the insights and doubts of great leaders and thinkers in our industry and beyond our industry, by the way, because the next great idea for your work is probably not going to come from inside your industry. It's probably going to come from somewhere out there.
So how often are you communing with great minds? How often are you allowing the thoughts of other people to shape your own understanding of your role and your responsibility to the team? Do you make it a regular practice to read and study and then to consider how what you've read applies to your daily work? Do you funnel inspiring ideas, articles, videos, and more to your team to show them what's inspiring you and to stoke the flame of their inspiration?
Do you engage in conversations with others who challenge you, who push you to think in new ways, who share what's inspiring their own work? All of these are practices that take intentional time and effort. They don't just happen. If you don't put study time on your calendar, it's not going to just magically arise.
In the midst of your day, it's not going to happen. It doesn't just materialize. You have to carve out buffers. You have to carve out space in your life for these things.
So ensure that there's time on your calendar each week for filling your mind with the inspiring ideas of others. Commun with great minds. That's number one. Number two, connect with the deeper stream.
So you've probably heard a million times by now about the importance of why, right? You must know your why. Your why should drive everything without the why, the what doesn't matter, et cetera. We hear this over and over and over.
What does that mean? Really? It's not enough to just adopt some why from your organization to make it your own. It's not a reliable source of inspiration.
Frankly, there are a lot of people out there who when asked, you know, why do you do this? They just parrot something from their organization and it just feels hollow and it is hollow because it isn't really reflective of what motivates them on a personal level. There has to be something deeper that drives you something more fundamental to who you are as a leader and frankly as a human being. So when do you come alive?
I mean, think about that. When do you come alive in the midst of your work? Where do you draw battle lines in your life and work and say over my dead body will you cross this line? Like what is so important to you that you take a stand every single time you refuse to budge?
What matters to you so much that you're willing to suffer if necessary in order to see it? Accomplished. Where is that for you? What is that for you?
What is the thing that might be? By the way, it may not have anything to do with your organization's mission or the values on the wall, chiseled in marble on the wall. You may have nothing to do with any of that stuff. This could be a very deeply personal thing that you put on display and people that know you, they recognize, wow, that person really cares about this thing, whatever that is.
This really matters to them and they will see you as a person of integrity because they know that something matters to you more than just pleasing the client this week, more than just getting your numbers up. Right? Really, really important. So this is the core of your productive passion, which is what I call it.
And I call it in, die empty and then I expand it on it louder than words, two of my other books. It's much more than some lofty organization of why your team will resonate much deeper in the more primal way when you put your productive passion on display in meetings, when they can see what you really care about. When they say that you truly have skin in the game, they will trust you enough to take risks. So spend some time this week considering your core productive passion and how it animates your work and how you can put it on display for your team.
Show them what you care about. Some leaders become very, very closed off. They become very relationally closed off and they feel like they have to build a shell around themselves, project some sort of image of competence and clarity. And the reality is that we're all kind of figuring this out as we go.
And so when your team sees there are things that you care about and sometimes it's messy, sometimes productive passion is messy. Sometimes you maybe pick fights that you shouldn't. Sometimes you draw lines that you shouldn't, but you're doing it because you care deeply about something. They will trust you more because they know where you stand.
It's hard to trust someone if you don't understand what matters to them. All right. So what is that for you and how can you connect with it and how you put it on display for your team so that you earn their trust. And the third thing I'm going to encourage you to do is be a human being in the world.
Okay. You were not a machine. You were a rhythmic being. We talked about this earlier with all the highs, lows, joys, doubts and hopes that come with it.
If your team never sees these cycles and you're hiding who you are from them, it will be difficult for them to trust you. Worse, if you don't allow yourself to connect on a personal level with the people on your team, then it will be difficult for you to have the context necessary to stay inspired. As a leader, you have to talk to your team. You have to be engaged with them.
You have to be a human being. You have to be interpersonally connected in some way in order to be able to lead them, to be able to stay inspired, to understand what matters to them so that you can lead them effectively. When was the last time you had a genuine human experience with your team? When was the last time you had a conversation about the things that are inspiring you, giving you pause or otherwise challenging your perspective?
Are you trying to be something akin to what you think a leader should be or are you genuinely bringing yourself to your team? If you try to posture as something you're not, it will begin to erode your own sense of inspiration. You will be like a child wearing their parents' clothes, right? This is playing at leadership.
It's not real leadership by connecting personally with your team and allowing them to see your thinking, your morphing thoughts, your morphing ideas and your emotions. Quite frankly, you're providing them with a leader worth following and you're also preventing yourself from becoming the form of a leader with no substance. However, you do this. You must first connect with those deeper themes.
You must understand what those deeper themes are in your life and your work and in your leadership. Spend some time journaling, engaging in contemplation or meditation or just taking a long walk several times. We give yourself the space you need to be able to connect the dots and intuit the themes in your life and your work. Here is a core truth of leadership.
If you are not inspired, you cannot inspire. Period. Take time each week to inspire yourself and to connect with the deeper stream of your motivation. Remember, and this is very important.
Remember that great leaders have great rituals. If you want to be a great leader, you need to build great rituals into your life to help you stay aligned, help you stay engaged, help you stay inspired so that you can in turn inspire others. Alright, so come in with great minds. Connect with the deeper stream and be a human being in the world.
These are three ways that we can stay inspired so that we can in turn inspire our team. Hey, we'd love to hear your thoughts, your feedback, your comments about this. Interact at axialcreative.com. By email address, you can reach me at axialcreative.com or Todd Henry.com.
We'll see you on the next episode. Until then, be a leader who makes high goals.