Real Leaders are Restless
Real leaders are restless. They can’t stand standing still. They’re always looking for ways to try new things. They are your business innovators. They can do amazing things for your organization — if you’re ready for change.
From Chaos to Order
Leaders are skilled at bringing order to chaos. They love coming into an undisciplined environment and setting up systems for doing things better and more consistently. The end result of this is a smoothly running organizational machine fitted with precision cogs (remember cogs aren’t necessarily a bad thing). When a leader does this well, the entire organization takes ownership in their new processes, routines, and workflows.
For most leaders, bringing order to chaos is pretty much all they know how (or want) to do. As soon as everything is running smoothly, they want to do the same kind of thing again in a different organization. It’s not burnout; it’s boredom. When things get calm, they need to move on. They can never be happy with the status quo, even if it’s the status quo they themselves create.
From Order to Chaos
Sometimes true leaders, however, are driven to take a group from order to chaos. They need to shake things up. They need to give the organization a kick in the pants. They know that people have become complacent and that the once smoothly running machine has descended into bureaucracy with no one really understanding why things are done anymore. People and departments have become cogs (in a bad way). These leaders know that in order to make things better, you have to tear things down. In order to get rid of the rust and the cruft, they need to take the machine apart and rebuild it.
It’s hard to pull the trigger on this type of change. If the organization is still meeting its goals, then people may be willing to tolerate the inefficiency of the status quo. However, if there are new goals that the organization is incapable of reaching, it’s probably time to smash the machine to pieces in order to reinvent it. Real leaders can do this. Real leaders love doing this.
When a highly capable leader is in charge of an organization for a long period of time, the organization will be constantly changing. Sometimes going from disorder to order; sometimes going from order to chaos. The one constant is that the organization keeps getting better, keeps increasing its abilities, keeps moving forward.
If you have a smoothly running organization, don’t put a real leader in charge — unless you’re ready for a shot of healthy chaos en route to something remarkable.
