“Fishing” For Leaders
I have been known to tell my leadership students that everyone is a leader – someone is always watching you and taking their cues from you, the only difference between those who are “leaders” and those who aren’t is how seriously they take this responsibility. I hope that they don’t confuse taking their responsibility seriously with being perpetually serious, because leadership can be, and maybe should be, fun. If you’ve ever had a supervisor who has no sense of humor, then you understand how important play and fun is in leadership.
Fish book by Stephen C. Lundin, Ph.D., Harry Paul, and John Christensen
Although I subconsciously responded to playful leadership, that knowledge didn’t migrate to my conscious understanding until I read the Fish book by Stephen C. Lundin, Ph.D., Harry Paul, and John Christensen. The book takes a look at the culture at the famous Pike’s Place Market in Seattle, and applies it to office culture. According to the authors, and attested to by my personal experience, by using four key points one can change their own outlook and influence their team’s collective culture. The foundation of the fish philosophy is:
Choose Your Attitude
Be There
Make Their Day
Play
Choose Your Attitude
Personally, “choosing my attitude” has made the biggest difference in my life, personally but especially professionally. We don’t always get to choose our circumstances, but we can control how we react to them. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl, who built his psychology theory based on his experience in the concentration camps during WWII, states, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way”. Surely if those in such extreme situations can choose their attitude, then I’m not going to let another meeting that should have been an email steal my joy. Choosing my attitude involves looking for the bright side, but more often it is looking at the situation from another’s viewpoint–experiencing and acting upon some empathy.
What do you allow to influence your attitude?
Are you choosing the attitude you want to perpetuate?
Be There
“Being there” is often the most difficult concept of the fish philosophy for me. I recently learned in a Steele Roar workshop regarding the CliftonStrengths, that three of my top five strengths are related to strategic thinking; this means that it is easy for me to spend a lot of time in my head. This can be a strength, but my strength can be a weakness if I ignore those around me while lost in my own ponderings. If I want to be there for my team, I need to be there. This means keeping my attention on the situation, and more importantly, the people around me. People know when someone is daydreaming or when they leave the conversation mentally.
How many powerful conversations never happen, because someone was not being fully present?
How often are important points ignored because someone was thinking of how they were going to respond instead of actively listening?
Make Their Day
“My pleasure” is how Chic-Fil-A demonstrates “make their day”, and is the reason they are always busy. Their employees go out of their way to make their customers’ day. And, amazingly enough, Chick-Fil-A employees appear happier than other fast food employees. It may be an act, but it is amazing to me how helping someone else improve their day makes my day better too. So, maybe that’s what’s happening behind the counter act Chick-Fil-A; by making others happy, they are making themselves happy too. Don’t believe that this works? Try it yourself. Be generous or kind to someone else, and then notice the little mood lift you get. Check out Gary Chapman and Paul White’s book The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace for ideas on how to make your teammates day.
How can you help your team see the direct impact of their work on customers and the organization?
What are simple ways you can show appreciation and recognition to your in your daily interactions?
Play
Finally, the last aspect of Fish is “play”. As Simon Sinek says in his book Leaders Eat Last, “Let yourself (and your team) have fun. This may sound trivial, but genuine enjoyment is essential to developing psychological safety. In fact, laughter is a key indicator of a safe and well-connected workplace.” It may not be appropriate to throw fish at your place of business, but you can use some creativity to find ways to bring fun into your work. This can include celebrating your people with office birthday parties or gamifying sales goals, but it can also be as simple as a well-timed (appropriate) joke. Leaders don’t have to be serious all the time; in fact, being genuine and showing human emotions, both tears and laughter, makes leaders more relatable and increases their impact.
How often is laughter heard in organization?
How often do you joke and play around?
Once I embraced the fish philosophy, I felt lighter. My work and leadership improved so much that my supervisor noticed. I have shared this philosophy with student leaders, and even in challenging times those teams were strong. In the midst of the daily grind, it can be difficult to play, we look for ways to make our own day, we are anywhere but there, and we choose to complain and commensurate with our co-workers; we need to acknowledge the difficulties, and then make a decision to respond differently than we have in the past. When we can choose a better outlook, our positive attitude will help us personally, but it will also spread to those around us and the heaviness will start to lift.
