Good afternoon, I hope this edition of Leadership Notes finds you hale and hearty!

I’ve had some very interesting conversations this past week with leaders in different sectors and circles. All of them, to some degree involved a transition; moving towards retirement/or not, moving towards a change in relationship status, moving towards death, moving towards a new challenge at work, to name just a few. One of the conversations, interestingly one of the shortest involved a leader who found himself working in a culture that was quite different from his own; he was a Canadian, living and working in a regional centre in ‘middle America’. Now this conversation was interesting because it was the third one I’d had in less than 24 hours about the differences between the US and Canada.

Now for those of you who live in other parts of the world, you may well be scratching your head; a difference between the US and Canada?! Well in some ways our two nations are sisters; genetically quite similar, but the genes are put together quite differently. You can see the family resemblance in the eyes, or in the smile for example, but we are very clearly individuals. We have, generally speaking, quite different relationships with guns, for example.

Now the leader with whom I had the conversation found himself living in a place where the local zeitgeist was socially and fiscally very ‘conservative’, and I might describe him as socially and fiscally much more ‘liberal.’ I asked him, ‘how do you operate in a place where there are likely value conflicts between you and the people you serve?’ His answer was great; he spent most of his time listening; trying to understand where the people he served were coming from, and choosing his battles. He had come to understand that small wins were far more important and effective in the long run than trying to change people’s minds on big issues and values. For example, people would find it reasonable that the “eccentric guy down the street needed to have a criminal record check done before he could get a gun.” They would fight tooth and nail though if there was a suggestion that there be any kind of “gun control.”

What I find interesting in all of this is the importance of small steps; any transition, any journey from one point to another is a matter of one metaphoric foot in front of another. Yes, it is often best to simply tear off the band-aid quickly, but by the same token, you wouldn’t quickly tear a cast off a broken arm or leg. Our work as leaders, especially in difficult terrain is to move carefully, even while all around us is moving quickly or in panic mode. We need to listen more, to try to understand where people are coming from and to choose our battles. Sometimes we do need to turn up the heat; we do need to challenge, to provoke and to engage, and we always need to do that consciously and carefully, knowing that turning the heat up too much will cause the system to overheat. It is most effective to take a series of conscious small steps towards the big change.

May this week be one filled with small successes for each and every one of us.