1,000 Bridges…

I closed last time with a less than stellar example of how influence, good or bad, can impact the overall direction of a team. And in that particular scenario I detailed, the person who had the influence and did more than his share of steering the ship carried no positional authority at all. If anything, he was more focused on sinking the boat we were in than guiding it up the stream toward the departmental goals our supervisor was responsible for seeing accomplished…

While that fellow, we’ll call him Tim, didn’t seem to have any intention at all of making a positive impact, he had earned influence with most of the people in our department. And even though we all liked our new supervisor, being a nice guy and earning influence are two very different things!

Earning influence, especially the kind of influence we need for effective team leadership, requires time and effort. Much like building a solid reputation, which actually happens as a result of earning influence, we’ll be required to go above and beyond what’s written in our job description - regardless of the job title we currently hold! But make no mistake, cutting even a single corner can be catastrophic!

In early 2015, I was doing a new employee orientation along with my boss at the time. In that particular company, we were required to provide eight full hours of industry specific safety training before a new team member could enter the work area by themselves. As you can probably imagine, eight hours of training on any topic all at once is a tough pill to swallow but that much time, on top of an hour or two filling out the regular new hire paperwork, ranks right up there with waterboarding… That said, we did everything we possibly could to make it tolerable.

At some point during that process, we were discussing how critical it would be for this new team member to build strong relationships with the team since they’d be relying on him heavily every single day. That’s when my boss, who had recently separated from service with the United States Marine Corps, explained that “you can build 1,000 bridges and never be known as a bridge builder but if you (do one particular thing) just once…” He didn’t say one particular thing though. Woody Harrelson made a similar comment in a movie once, but my boss’s explanation was a bit more direct - and definitely something I had never heard in a new hire orientation before - but he certainly made an effective case for the importance of being someone the team could count on for what they needed!

When it comes to the importance of team leadership, earning influence is an absolute must if we want to make a lasting impact on the employee engagement or even the profitability of the organization that we’ve looked at so far. Next time we’ll start looking at the specific things we need to exhibit if we have any hope of building that kind of influence. After that, we’ll dig into some specific team leadership skills we can develop to ensure the impact we make really lasts…