Promote, Organize, Deliver

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I worked at the neighborhood coffee shop growing up. Ordering lattes or cappuccinos from me was a risky proposition (my barista skills were shall we say subpar), but if you were looking for a black coffee and some lively conversation I was your man. I liked the morning shifts as the orders were primarily from adults purchasing coffee and pre-made baked goods rather than the feral children of our neighborhood demanding sandwiches and pizza (as a general rule seven year olds on tight allowances are lousy tippers).

One loyal customer would come in early every morning and get his usual, a large black coffee (my favorite order given its limited steps to make) and always leave an entire dollar as a tip (which is a lot of money when you’re making minimum wage in the early 2000s).

I always enjoyed talking to him (partially because of the consistency in his tipping) but also because he had a phenomenal professional career in different leadership roles at a Fortune 500 company which he followed with work serving all over the world as part of the USAID. He was generous with his time and always genuinely interested in the goings on in my life.

As I got older and moved beyond serving coffee into my own professional career from time to time I would reconnect with him in an informal mentorship capacity. During one of these meetings he gave me one of the most important pieces of leadership advice I’ve ever received:

He went on to say that the more complex the challenge, the less a leader’s individual skills and abilities mattered. Their ability to recruit, organize, and align talented people toward the same goal is what it actually meant to lead.

I was reminded of this mentor and his advice when I came across a passage in a Benjamin Franklin biography recently. Franklin, my favorite founding father, summed up his life’s work simply, to be “a great promoter of useful projects.”

Franklin’s “useful projects” are a laundry list of essential activities and civic functions which we now take for granted but that he organized in 18th century Philadelphia. Libraries, a university, fire / police departments, a militia, and, my personal favorite, an effort to, “sweep, pave, and light the city streets” all because he, “was bothered by the dust in front of his house.”

While Franklin’s life and writings offer many practical tips for any aspiring leader it is this notion of being, “a great promoter of useful projects” which reminded me most of the advice from the coffee shop mentor of my youth.

Promote

It might be because the majority of my career has been spent in sales, but the greatest leaders I know are those capable of shaping the agendas of others. There comes a point in any leader’s career where your value to an organization is not just in your ability to do as you are told by others, but to show up with informed opinions of your own which shape that organization’s roadmap.

This ability to influence the agenda of others is fundamentally what Franklin means when he speaks about being a promoter of useful projects. I’m always inspired by the fact that where most people would have seen dust on their front door and simply cleaned it up, Franklin convinced those around him that Philadelphia would be a better place if all of its streets were clean. From this, a public private partnership to maintain Philadelphia’s streets was born paving (see what I did there) the way for a reality many of us now take for granted.

This is the definition of shaping the agendas of those around you toward useful means.

Organize

In pursuit of cleaner streets in Philadelphia, Franklin started small. He initially paid someone a small sum to clean just the streets in front of his home. He then approached his neighbors to ask if they wouldn’t mind chipping in toward the payments in exchange for cleaning in front of their houses also. Seeing the value of Franklin’s proposal they agreed. Before long, the majority of streets in Philadelphia were paved, cleaned routinely, and lit at night.

It isn’t enough simply to shape the agendas of others for them to execute. Begin forming a coalition across your team which leads to an organized group marching in the same direction.

As the famous flywheel analogy goes, the more people you’ve organized to your cause the easier it is to promote your agenda to the next person. Back to my favorite coffee patron and mentor in the introduction to this piece. He told me that his strength as a leader was not being the smartest or most talented individual himself, rather it was his ability to assemble teams of talented people and organize them toward a common purpose. While there was some modesty in that statement as he was quite smart and quite talented in his own right, the point still stands.

Do the same on your team and you’ll find success.

Deliver

Outside of think tanks and academia, rarely are the merits of our deeds simply the arguments or ideas we advance. It’s important for any leader to remember that the success they’re striving for should be a defined end state which delivers tangible value to your organization and the world.

If the promotion of ideas alone lies in the realm of strategy, then organizing, and delivery are the crossover toward execution. Great leaders aren’t made great because of the ideas they hold, but the results they and their team deliver. Don’t lose sight of this fact.

Franklin wanted Philadelphia to have clean streets. When he was finished, it did. When promoting useful projects be clear on the defined end state of the project, organize others toward your cause, then work toward delivering it. Promote, organize, deliver.

See y’all next week.