The 5 Minute Leader: How Leaders Can Balance Flexibility and Control At Work

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to another five-minute leader. Yes, I am still in Florida. And I know what you're wondering: Does he still have that cup of coffee? Yes, I do. With each video I'm doing, the cup of coffee is slowly becoming less and less full, and I'm becoming more and more caffeinated. So this video might be very exciting with the three or four shots here.

Today's video is going to be about something and I have my laptop here on my lap, because it's a laptop. So I can reference a couple things. If you've been a subscriber to my substack, for a while, you might remember, May of last year, I wrote a post called the kite and the string. And I want to quickly summarize and recap that and tie it to something that I'm seeing and hearing about now.

The idea of the kite, and the string is that the string of the kite represents control, guidance, and expectations, the string is ultimately what dictates where the kite can go, how high it can go, what direction it can go in, and it keeps the kite from just drifting off into the sky and blowing away somewhere. And those types of leaders are important because they have that sense of control of standards of staying grounded. But similarly, we also need the kite. The kite represents creativity, ambition, aspirations, dreamers, people who are curious, who play around in the clouds, and who are constantly coming up with big-picture ideas and visions. And you need both of these things, right? You need to have that level of groundedness. But you also need to be able to have that big-picture vision.

Now today, I want to take that analogy and apply it to something that I am seeing and hearing about. And it ties into a couple of things. So I recently wrote a post on why we need strong leaders inside of organizations, which many people have been emailing me about. If you haven't seen it, it's on substack. It is a paid article. So you do have access to that if you're watching this. And what I want to tie that to is, again, I met this event in Orlando, and this conversation has come up, man a handful of times when I walked down after I gave my speech on leading with vulnerability and walking through the halls and a lot of people that pulled me aside and asked me about this.

And why think what we're seeing is this kind of battle inside of organizations between the kite and the string? In other words, we are not directly related to these business topics. So I'll tell you what I mean, for example, working from home or hybrid work. The way that we have been approaching a lot of this is with the mentality of the kite, show up when you want, don't show up, do what you want come in on days if you want to. Right, it's just sort of floating around. And a lot of leaders out there trying to figure out how do we get the string back? How do we get that string back? How do we get more control? How do we set clear guidelines and expectations? How do we rein things in, so to speak? this is a huge topic of conversation for so many leaders out there.