Anyone Can Steer the Ship, but It
Takes a Leader to Chart the Course
In 1911, two groups of explorers set off on an incredible mission. Though they used different strategies and routes, the leaders of the teams had the same goal: to be the first in history to reach the South Pole. Their stories are life-and-death illustrations of the Law of Navigation.
One group was led by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Ironically, Amundsen had not originally intended to go to Antarctica. His desire was to be the first man to reach the North Pole. But when he discovered that Robert Peary had beaten him there, Amundsen changed his goal and headed toward the other end of the earth. North or south—he knew his planning would pay off.
AMUNDSEN CAREFULLY CHARTED HIS COURSE
Before his team ever set off, Amundsen had painstakingly planned his trip. He studied the methods of the Eskimos and other experienced Arctic travelers and determined that their best course of action would be to transport all their equipment and supplies by dogsled. When he assembled his team, he chose expert skiers and dog handlers. His strategy was simple. The dogs would do most of the work as the group traveled fifteen to twenty miles in a six-hour period each day. That would afford both the dogs and the men plenty of time for daily rest prior to the following day’s travel.
Amundsen’s forethought and attention to detail were incredible. He located and stocked supply depots all along the intended route. That way they would not have to carry every bit of their supplies with them the whole trip. He also equipped his people with the best gear possible. Amundsen had carefully considered every possible aspect of the journey, thought it through, and planned accordingly. And it paid off. The worst problem they experienced on their trip was an infected tooth that one man had to have extracted.
SCOTT VIOLATED THE LAW OF NAVIGATION
The other team of people was led by Robert Falcon Scott, a British naval officer who had previously done some exploring in the Antarctic area. Scott’s expedition was the antithesis of Amundsen’s. Instead of using dogsleds, Scott decided to use motorized sledges and ponies. Their problems began when the motors on the sledges stopped working only five days into the trip. The ponies didn’t fare well either in those frigid temperatures. When they reached the foot of the Transantarctic Mountains, all of the poor animals had to be killed. As a result, the team members themselves ended up hauling the two-hundred-pound sledges. It was arduous work.
Scott hadn’t given enough attention to the team’s other equipment either. Their clothes were so poorly designed that all of the men developed frostbite. One team member required an hour every morning just to get his boots onto his swollen, gangrenous feet. Everyone became snowblind because of the inadequate goggles Scott had supplied. On top of everything else, the team was always low on food and water. That was also due to Scott’s poor planning. The depots of supplies Scott established were inadequately stocked, too far apart, and often poorly marked, which made them very difficult to find. Because they were continually low on fuel to melt snow, everyone became dehydrated. Making things even worse was Scott’s last-minute decision to take along a fifth man, even though they had prepared enough supplies for only four.
After covering a grueling eight hundred miles in ten weeks, Scott’s exhausted group finally arrived at the South Pole on January 17, 1912. There they found the Norwegian flag flapping in the wind and a letter from Amundsen. The other well-led team had beaten them to their goal by more than a month!
IF YOU DON’T LIVE BY THE LAW OF NAVIGATION . . .
Scott’s expedition to the Pole is a classic example of a leader who could not navigate for his people. But the trek back was even worse. Scott and his men were starving and suffering from scurvy, yet Scott, unable to navigate to the very end, was oblivious to their plight. With time running out and the food supply desperately low, Scott insisted that they collect thirty pounds of geological specimens to take back—more weight to be carried by the worn-out men.
The group’s progress became slower and slower. One member of the party sank into a stupor and died. Another, Lawrence Oates, a former army officer who had originally been brought along to take care of the ponies, had frostbite so severe that he had trouble doing anything. Because he believed he was endangering the team’s survival, he purposely walked out into a blizzard to keep from hindering the group. Before he left the tent and headed into the storm, he said, “I am just going outside; I may be some time.”
Because Robert Falcon Scott was unable to live by the Law of Navigation, he and his companions died by it.
Scott and his final two team members made it only a little farther north before giving up. The return trip had already taken two months, and still they were 150 miles from their base camp. There they died. We know their story only because they spent their last hours updating their diaries. Some of Scott’s last words were these: “We shall die like gentlemen. I think this will show that the Spirit of pluck and power to endure has not passed out of our race.”1 Scott had courage but not leadership. Because he was unable to live by the Law of Navigation, he and his companions died by it.
Followers need leaders able to effectively navigate for them. When they’re facing life-and-death situations, the necessity is painfully obvious. But even when consequences aren’t as serious, the need is also great. The truth is that nearly anyone can steer the ship, but it takes a leader to chart the course. That is the Law of Navigation.
NAVIGATORS SEE THE TRIP AHEAD
Former General Electric chairman Jack Welch asserts, “A good leader remains focused . . . Controlling your direction is better than being con-trolled by it.” Welch is right, but leaders who navigate do even more than control the direction in which they and their people travel. They see the whole trip in their minds before they leave the dock. They have vision for getting to their destination, they understand what it will take to get there, they know who they’ll need on the team to be successful, and they recognize the obstacles long before they appear on the horizon. Leroy Eims, author of Be the Leader You Were Meant to Be, writes, “A leader is one who sees more than others see, who sees farther than others see, and who sees before others do.”
“A leader is one who sees more than others see, who sees farther than others see, and who sees before others do.”
—LEROY EIMS
The larger the organization, the more clearly the leader has to be able to see ahead. That’s true because sheer size makes midcourse corrections more difficult. And if there are errors in navigation, many more people are affected than when a leader is traveling alone or with only a few people. The disaster shown in James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic was a good example of that kind of problem. The crew could not see far enough ahead to avoid the iceberg altogether, and they could not maneuver enough to change course once the object was in view because of the size of the ship. The result was that more than one thousand people lost their lives.
WHERE THE LEADER GOES . . .
First-rate navigators always have in mind that other people are depending on them and their ability to chart a good course. I read an observation by James A. Autry in Life and Work: A Manager’s Search for Meaning that illustrates this idea. He writes that occasionally you hear about the crash of four military planes flying together in a formation. The reason for the loss of all four is this: When jet fighters fly in groups of four, one pilot—the leader—designates where the team will fly. The other three planes fly on the leader’s wing, watching him and following him wherever he goes. Whatever moves he makes, the rest of his team will make along with him. That’s true whether he soars in the clouds or smashes into a mountaintop.
Before good leaders take their people on a journey, they go through a process in order to give the trip the best chance of being a success:
NAVIGATORS DRAW ON PAST EXPERIENCE
Every past success and failure you’ve experienced can be a valuable source of information and wisdom—if you allow it to be. Successes teach you what you’re capable of doing and give you confidence. However, your failures often teach greater lessons. They reveal wrong assumptions, character flaws, errors in judgment, and poor working methods. Ironically, many people hate their failures so much that they quickly cover them up instead of analyzing them and learning from them. As I explain in my book Failing Forward, if you fail to learn from your mistakes, you’re going to fail again and again.
Why do I even mention something that seems so basic? Because most natural leaders are activists. They tend to look forward—not backward—make decisions, and move on. I know this because that is my tendency. But for leaders to become good navigators, they need to take time to reflect and learn from their experiences. That’s why I have developed the discipline of reflective thinking. I write about it in detail in my book Thinking for a Change, but allow me to give you some advantages of reflective thinking here. Reflective thinking
gives you true perspective,
gives emotional integrity to your thought life,
increases your confidence in decision making,
clarifies the big picture, and
takes a good experience and makes it a valuable experience.2
Each benefit gives a leader a great advantage when planning next steps for a team or organization.
NAVIGATORS EXAMINE THE CONDITIONS BEFORE
MAKING COMMITMENTS
Drawing on experience means looking inward. Examining conditions means looking outward. No good leader plans a course of action without paying close attention to current conditions. That would be like setting sail against the tide or plotting a course into a hurricane. Good navigators count the cost before making commitments for themselves and others. They examine not only measurable factors such as finances, re-sources, and talent, but also intangibles such as timing, morale, momentum, culture, and so on. (I’ll discuss this more in the Laws of Intuition and Timing.)
No matter how much you learn from the past, it will never tell you all you need to know for the present.
NAVIGATORS LISTEN TO WHAT OTHERS HAVE TO SAY
No matter how much you learn from the past, it will never tell you all that you need to know for the present. No matter how good a leader you are, you yourself will not have all the answers. That’s why top-notch navigators gather information from many sources. For example, before Roald Amundsen’s expedition to the South Pole, he had learned from a group of Native Americans in Canada about warm clothing and Arctic survival techniques. Those skills and practices meant the difference between failure and success for his team in Antarctica.
Navigating leaders get ideas from many sources. They listen to members of their leadership team. They talk to the people in their organization to find out what’s happening on the grassroots level. And they spend time with leaders from outside the organization who can mentor them. They always think in terms of relying on a team, not just themselves.
NAVIGATORS MAKE SURE THEIR CONCLUSIONS REPRESENT
BOTH FAITH AND FACT
Being able to navigate for others requires a leader to possess a positive attitude. You’ve got to have faith that you can take your people all the way. If you can’t confidently make the trip in your mind, you’re not going to be able to take it in real life.
On the other hand, you also have to be able to see the facts realistically. You can’t minimize obstacles or rationalize your challenges and still lead effectively. If you don’t go in with your eyes wide open, you’re going to get blindsided. As Bill Easum, president of Easum, Bandy, and Associates, observes, “Realistic leaders are objective enough to minimize illusions. They understand that self-deception can cost them their vision.”
Balancing optimism and realism, intuition and planning, faith and fact can be very difficult. But that’s what it takes to be effective as a navigating leader.
Jim Collins confirmed this balance between faith and fact in his 2001 book Good to Great. He calls it the Stockdale Paradox. He writes, “You must retain faith that you will prevail in the end and you must also con-front the most brutal facts of your current reality.”3 Balancing optimism and realism, intuition and planning, faith and fact can be very difficult. But that’s what it takes to be effective as a navigating leader.
A LESSON IN NAVIGATION
I remember the first time I really understood the importance of the Law of Navigation. I was twenty-eight years old, and I was leading the second church in my pastoral career. Before my arrival there in 1972, the church had experienced a decade-long plateau in its growth. But by 1975, our attendance had gone from four hundred to more than a thousand. I knew we could keep growing and helping more people, but only if we built a new auditorium.
The good news was that I already had some experience leading a construction project because I had taken my first church through the process. The bad news was that the first one was really small in comparison to the second one. This was going to be a multimillion-dollar project more than twenty times larger than my first one. But even that was not the greatest obstacle.
If the leader can’t navigate the people through rough waters, he is liable to sink the ship.
Right before I came on board as leader of the church, there had been a huge battle over another building proposal, and the debate had been vocal, divisive, and bitter. For that reason, I knew that I would experience genuine opposition to my leadership for the first time. There were rough waters ahead, and if I as the leader didn’t navigate us well, I could sink the ship.
CHARTING THE COURSE WITH
A NAVIGATION STRATEGY
I should probably confess at this point that I am not a strong navigator. I don’t take joy in getting into details, and I tend to go with my gut instinct—sometimes a little too quickly for my own good. In the last fifteen to twenty years, I’ve often staffed my weaknesses and hired good navigating leaders to help my organizations. For example, for many years when I was a church leader, Dan Reiland was on my staff as executive pastor. He is an excellent navigator. Currently at EQUIP, the nonprofit organization I founded in 1996, John Hull works as its president, and he is a fantastic navigating leader. However, back in 1975, I had to take responsibility for the navigation process myself. To help me do that, I developed a strategy that I have used repeatedly in my leadership. I wrote it as an acrostic so that I would always be able to remember it:
Predetermine a course of action.
Lay out your goals.
Adjust your priorities.
Notify key personnel.
Allow time for acceptance.
Head into action.
Expect problems.
Always point to the successes.
Daily review your plan.
That became my blueprint as I prepared to navigate this change for my organization.
I had a strong sense of what our course of action needed to be. If we were going to keep growing, we needed to build a new auditorium. I had looked at every possible alternative, and I knew that was the only viable solution. My goal was to design and build the facility, pay for it in ten years, and unify all the people in the process—no small feat.
Any plan I introduced would have to be voted on in a congregational meeting, so I scheduled one a couple of months ahead to give me time to get everything ready. The next thing I did was direct our board members and a group of key financial leaders to conduct a twenty-year analysis of our growth and financial patterns. It covered the previous ten years and projections for the next ten years. Based on that, we determined the requirements of the facility.
We then formulated a ten-year budget that carefully explained how we would handle financing. I also asked that all of the information we were gathering be put into a twenty-page report to be given to the members of the congregation. I knew that major barriers to successful planning are fear of change, ignorance, uncertainty about the future, and lack of imagination. I was going to do everything I could to prevent those factors from hindering us.
My next step was to notify the key leaders. I started with the ones who had the most influence, meeting with them individually and sometimes in small groups. Over the course of several weeks, I met with about a hundred leaders. I cast the vision for what we needed to do and fielded their questions. And any time I could sense that a person was hesitant about the project, I planned to meet individually with him again. Then I allowed time for those key leaders to influence the rest of the people and help them accept the coming changes.
Major barriers to successful planning are fear of change, ignorance, uncertainty about the future, and lack of imagination.
When the time arrived for the congregational meeting, we were ready to head into action. I took two hours to present the project to the people. I handed out my twenty-page report with the floor plans, financial analysis, and budgets. I tried to answer every question the people would have before they even had a chance to ask it. I also asked some of the most influential people in the congregation to speak.
I had expected opposition, but when I opened the floor for questions, I was shocked. There were only two questions: one person wanted to know about the placement of the building’s water fountains, and the other asked about the number of restrooms. That was when I knew we had navigated the tricky waters successfully. When it was time for the motion asking everyone to vote, the church’s most influential layperson made it. And I had already asked a leader who had previously opposed the building project to be the one to second the motion. When the final count was tallied, 98 percent of the people had voted in favor.
Once we navigated through this tricky part of the process, the rest of the project was pretty straightforward. I continually kept the vision in front of the people by giving them good news reports. I made sure we celebrated successes. And I periodically reviewed our plans and their results to make sure we were on track. The course had been charted. All we had to do was steer the ship.
That was a wonderful learning experience for me. Above everything else, I found out that the secret to the Law of Navigation is preparation. When you prepare well, you convey confidence and trust to people. Lack of preparation has the opposite effect. In the end, it’s not the size of the project that determines its acceptance, sup-port, and success—it’s the size of the leader. That’s why I say that anyone can steer the ship, but it takes a leader to chart the course. Leaders who are good navigators are capable of taking their people just about anywhere.
In the end, it’s not the size of the project that determines its acceptance, support, and success. It’s the size of the leader.
Applying
THE LAW OF NAVIGATION
To Your Life
1. Do you make it a regular practice to reflect on your positive and negative experiences? If not, you will miss the potential lessons they have to offer. Do one of two things: Set aside a time to reflect every week, examining your calendar or journal to jog your memory. Or build reflection time into your schedule immediately after every major success or failure. In either case, write down what you learn during that discovery process.
2. Navigating leaders do their homework. For some project or major task that you are currently responsible for, draw on your past experience, hold intentional conversations with experts and team members to gather information, and examine current conditions that could impact the success of your endeavor. Only after taking these steps should you create your action plan.
3. Which way do you naturally lean—toward facts or faith? Rarely is a leader especially talented in both areas. (I’m a faith person. I am highly visionary and believe that anything is possible. I often rely on my brother, Larry, to help me with realistic thinking.) Yet good navigators must be able to do both.
To successfully practice the Law of Navigation, you must know your own bent. If you’re not sure, ask trusted friends and colleagues. Then make sure you have someone with the opposite bent on your team so that you can work together.