Season 6 Episode THREE of the Intrepid Way podcast series, Leadership on the Ground, with Erica Peitler and co-host Todd Schnick
The Context Mindset
[Tweet “If you have a ‘WHY’, you will find a ‘HOW'”]
SEASON 6 EPISODE THREE – The Context Mindset!
Discussion Guide for this episode:
Victor Frankl said, “If you have a why, you will find a how.”
Organizations can achieve anything if you give them the context, the ‘why’, the meaning behind what they do.
Negative things happen in business, but being anchored in the why is how you survive, grow, and learn.
The modern leader has all of these roles: Visionary, storyteller, narrator, and meaning creator….to generate inspired action!
Mindset isn’t achieve by sending someone a memo. Mindset is achieved by how you make someone feel.
The Jigsaw puzzle: Our people need the why, or the edges of a puzzle, to give them some sort of vision of how to get where we are going.
Operating with the right context mindset enables a leader to work ON the business, versus IN the business…focusing on the resources need to get the job done.
Your mindset needs to focus on life-cycles too. Do we have a lot of experienced people? Or do we have a lot of raw talent?
Language, or any type of communication, said out of context, does not help get people into the right mindset.
Conscious competency: One has skills and abilities, but if they are the wrong competencies to deploy to achieve the mission at hand, they are useless.
The what and the how are important, but when you communicate the why, the additional perspective achieved changes everything about how you move forward.
A key role of leaders, and frankly, anyone within an organization, is to make the hard decisions. One of the reasons we struggle in making the tough decisions is that oftentimes we are operating in the wrong, or out of, context.
Being in the right context provides a vision of why the decision needs to be made. Too often, it’s a decision (or a problem), that doesn’t really need to be made.
In the end, it’s all about providing the safe space for your team to operate and do their jobs, providing them with that freedom within structure, to boldly move forward to achieve the organizational why.
