Someone recently said to me that leadership is making a decision. It sounds so smart, so decisive, so simple, yet it bothered me a lot. Leadership is not that simple, whether you lead a country, a company, a community or heaven forbid, a homeowners association. I was fortunate many years ago to see brilliant leadership in action.
I was on the Host Committee (a group of volunteers) for the Canada Winter Games when it was held in Whitehorse, Yukon many years ago. Piers McDonald was the Chair and the Host Committee, through a Hiring Committee, hired a General Manager who lasted all of a few days before he left the position. Piers, a former Premier, called a meeting of the Host Committee and 22 volunteers gathered around a boardroom to be informed of the issue and decide on a path forward. Piers laid out the situation and asked every person to speak one by one around the table.
The group was diverse and represented so many facets of the community – arts, sports, culture, fund raising, logistics – and every person spoke their mind for as long as they wanted. Some cried, some moved to solutions immediately, some just spoke about the loss of trust, some talked about the candidate who finished 2nd, and some passed without saying much.
At the end, Piers summarized what he had heard, that hiring a replacement was something to attend to immediately. He asked the Hiring Committee to reconsider the candidate that finished second and to work to secure a new General Manager. They did and the person who took the job was fabulous, no one could have been better. The event was a huge success.
But the backstory, after the meeting, I went to visit Piers and asked him why he wanted every person to speak their mind when I was pretty certain he knew the solution before he walked in that room.
He told me that Whitehorse was about to host the largest sports and cultural gathering in its history, and in order to do that, he needed the entire Yukon community to come along. We needed 3,000+ volunteers in a town that didn’t have 30,000 people, in a territory that did not have 40,000 people. The 22 people in that room represented this community. To guarantee success, every person in that room had to be part of the decision and the solution.
That is leadership.
