What actually inspired me to write about liquid leadership was a lesson that I'd started to garner from. I come from a fairly diverse range of different backgrounds, and I was working as an HR director for a number of years in the corporate world, and my background is sports psychology as well. So I've worked as a sports coach, and it was almost learning lessons that leaders were all around us, and it was very much dependent on how we choose to view them. So one of my heroes is a guy called Robert Rosenthal. He was a child psychologist in the 1960s in Chicago, who'd identified that certain children are born with a certain rich golden seed of talent inside of them, is what the phrase he uses. And he said, "If we could only discover which children have this golden seed of talent, we can get them into the right environment and allow them to flourish and blossom." In one particular study that is, he identified five kids from a class of 30 that fitted his criteria. And when he based himself in the classroom for the next 12 months, the five kids he'd identified, outstripped and outperformed the other 25 kids on every measure you could possibly want. And the authorities clamored to get a hold of Rosenthal's study 'cause they thought it had the potential to revolutionize the American education system. He created a real furor, when he revealed that he'd made the whole thing up, and there was no such thing as a golden seed of talent. He said he'd merely pick five names at random from the list that he'd been given. He said what he did produce, and he had a wealth of evidence to prove it, was that the only thing that had changed in that classroom during the 12 months that he'd been there, was the beliefs and the expectations of the teaching staff towards those five individuals, because they thought they were dealing with five supremely talented kids. Five kids that had been identified as having a budding seed of genius within them. And that was the major principle behind the idea of a liquid leadership, that I was struck by the fact that there was such a rich, diverse source of talent that is all around us. And liquid leadership was very much around starting to help us to identify that talent, even if they're not in traditional leadership positions. And then to actually celebrate them, and also see how we can develop those individuals and others to be like them. What I see one of the principles in liquid leadership doing is about challenging our own frames of reference, our own views of the world and being prepared to see it from a different angle. And that's really where the idea of the, well 'cause people often say why liquid leadership? It stems from a quote that Edward de Bono, the creativity guru was attributed, where he said that 90 percent of our errors in life and our failings in life are attributed to the fact that we possess, what he describes as "solid thinking," where we are not prepared to see things from a different angle or see a wider perspective on it. So the idea of liquid thinking is the direct opposite of it. If 90 percent of our problems were caused maybe in solid thinking, surely liquid thinking and liquid leadership is the polar opposite of it, where we are prepared to see things from a different angle. Leaders, liquid leaders are all around us. The challenge is for us to identify them and start to work out how we can find that seed of talent and allow it to blossom. And I don't think it's about being in a formal hierarchy or whether you are in a position where you wield power. Leadership can be developed in any context wherever we're operating in. And that was the idea behind liquid leadership in helping us to recognize it and helping individuals to recognize it in themselves, and then go and express it to its absolute fullest. If I was gonna give you three top tips, I think the first one is actually know where you're heading. So it's an old saying that - start with the end point in mind. So take your time to actually work out where is it that you are actually going for, because when we talk about a vision in organizations, that's simply having a destination in mind. The second point I'd ask is this whole idea of understanding, why do you do what you do? In other words, understand your mission, your strategy, your purpose if you like. I mean, this is something that in Jim Collins, in "Good to Great" talks about, great organizations have a strategy that he says can change constantly, but what they're underpinned by is a purpose that very rarely changes. And he offers the example of Nokia. So Nokia started life in 1886 as a paper company, and they've gone through several different strategy changes since then, but their purpose has always been essentially to help people communicate. So I'd encourage people, and there's exercises in the book that challenge people to say, "So why do you do what you do?" That then suddenly starts to answer a whole range of different questions about where you invest your time, your energy, and your resources. The third and final element of the book though, and, there's a tip I would give you, is about actually recognizing how important courage is as a leader. Because I look at examples and I talk about examples, and I've seen it in the range of interviews in the industries I've worked in, where the real leaders are the ones that have the courage to do something different. I mean, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, he said that when you want to create change in any industry, three things follow. The first thing is people will laugh at you. When they stop laughing, they'll then oppose you. When they stop opposing you, they'll start copying you. But to get to stage three, where if you like common sense becomes common practice, you have to go through the first two stages of ridicule and opposition. What liquid leadership really looks at and encourages and helps people to determine is how they can have the courage to get beyond that first stage and the second stage of being opposed, before they finally get to the stage, where everybody says, "I always knew you were gonna be a great leader anyway." © 2022 Mind Tools by Emerald Works Ltd.