Outback Wisdom #2 - Don’t Cut Up a Muddy Road
Don’t cut up a muddy road - ie stay home if it rains. If things are fragile, and need extra care, observe the environment, and adjust appropriately to suit.
Living in an area where the roads were unsealed (ie no bitumen) meant that they became slippery and boggy when wet. Although it rained rarely, when it did rain, it took very little rainfall to make the roads impassable. It was an unwritten rule in the bush that you don’t “cut up” the road, unless it was an emergency. (eg dying from snakebite).
If you ventured out onto the muddy road in your trusty 4WD, you’d be sure to make very deep tracks, which when the roads finally dried, would be a semi-permanent reminder of your insensivity. The ruts became a hazard at least until the council graders came to grade the road again – which happened every 18 months or so.
Sometimes in our organisations we unknowingly “cut up the road” – go blasting our way onto fragile ground without giving thought to the conditions of the day. How often are decisions made and policies created, rules put in place without consultation and consideration? How often do we charge ahead for our own gain without thinking of the long-term consequences for the good of the whole organisation? As leaders we sometimes behave like “4WD’s in the wet” – what tracks are we leaving, and how do we impact the people we’re supposedly leading?
As leaders, we could also see the ruts as “telling people the answers” rather than trusting them to discover things for themselves… when we set rigid pathways for others, there is no room for them to add their creativity and ideas – and they quickly learn to shut off their minds and hearts, and just operate on “auto-pilot” in the tracks we’ve laid down. Where are you currently keeping your team “stuck” and what could you smooth over / delegate to let them discover new pathways?
