Are you willing to be your best?

When I’m on the honored journey with my clients to “be their best,” I ask that very question from time to time in our EOS® Sessions. At first, it may be a rhetorical question, but over time, it must be answered. An extension of that question, one that I have been pondering recently, is, “How much are you willing to invest to be your best?”

Many know that I had the honor of leading the USAF Auxiliary, the Civil Air Patrol, and our 61,000 airmen serving our nation. Spanning across the US and Puerto Rico, our team prosecuted more than 85% of all the search and rescue missions, as well as performing disaster relief missions, cadet programs, and aerospace education to ourselves and our communities. Each of these mission types has a flight component – with all of the good and the bad that could come with flying missions, departing the earth in a small plane. While we were credited with saving over 400 lives in my four years as national commander and CEO, it was not without risk.

To mitigate that risk, we would invest many, many hours to increase the probability that we would achieve success safely. Mission planning. Briefing crew members. Debriefing crew members. And a little bit of flying in the middle of all that planning and communication. Was it as much fun planning, briefing, and debriefing each sortie (flight) as it was to actually fly? Not for me, it wasn’t. Did I understand deeply the reason why we prepare so thoroughly? Heck, yes. Lives are on the line—theirs and ours.

Now, let’s step back into our leadership role at our organization. What do we do that’s so important that we would invest hours to get it right? (I’m not asking this rhetorically.)

Don’t we have lives on the line when we are leading in any organization? Some of you may be in organizations where it’s clear there are risks to life and limb, and that may be an easy “yes” for you. I would advocate that each of us in any leadership capacity is impacting lives (clearly, we’re impacting livelihoods). By virtue of the authority vested in us as leaders, if we aren’t willing to plan for (safe) success as diligently as if lives depended on it, then perhaps we should find someone who is.

To be our best as leaders and as organizations requires a combination of leading and managing. Leading to share the big picture of vision – the “who” and “why” – that aligns the hearts and minds. Managing to have clarity of mission – the “what” – helps our team members perform as expected and needed. The teams with whom I have the pleasure of teaching, facilitating, and coaching know we keep it simple. But it isn’t always easy. We have to invest time to get it right. To ensure we are being our best as leaders and as managers. Why wouldn’t we, when there’s so much on the line?