Gordon Ryan

Fare thee well, Boston University.

Nearly seven months after leaving Boston for the South, next week I will begin a new stage in my career, working for another esteemed institution of higher education. Starting Monday, February 15, 2010, I will be joining the staff at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Specifically, I will be undertaking the duties of Public Communications Officer for the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History. I am eager for my transition from the academic department setting into a university center where I hope my talents will have an even greater impact on the campus community and beyond.

Now that my job search is over and I have finished my master’s degree, blog activity should pick up once again, as should my photo blog, and music endeavors (As a celebratory gift to myself, I just invested in my first high-end acoustic guitar, a Larrivée D-03R. It’s incredible, and I’ll likely post about it in the near future).

Great things are ahead, that’s for sure.

I’ve been to see a doctor a couple of times recently for two unrelated maladies. I’m ok, no need to worry about me, but the experiences got me thinking about how we communicate information that could perhaps be critically important.

A visit to a physician inevitably entails a series of questions regarding your condition. It usually starts with “why are you here?” or something similar. These questions are asked so that the doctor can extract insight from the patient, possibly revealing information that can help avoid unnecessary tests and procedures, or prompt them, depending on what is revealed.

Regardless, this is one of the most critical stages of the health care process. If the patient can give first-hand information regarding his experiences, it enhances the doctors’ knowledge and provides them with a tool that would otherwise be impossible for them to obtain. If only part of the story get told, or the patient lies because he is afraid or embarrassed about something, the matter becomes far more complicated and treatment failure becomes much more probable.

This is an important idea for marketers to grasp. One of the key elements of a sound marketing initiative, regardless of it’s communications vehicle, is an intimate understanding of what drives its target audience to convert. This understanding is usually gained through all sorts of research tactics, but the ultimate goal in every situation is to know why people will or will not do what your marketing is attempting to get them to do.

The problem is, how do you know that the information you are collecting on and from these people is accurate and depicts the whole story? Unfortunately, short of becoming mindreaders, we can’t with 100 percent certainty.

Our best chance for success is to channel “the doctor.”

What does that mean? Listen really, really well. Use your professional training and formal education, but don’t forget to be human. Learn from each person you meet and bring that knowledge to your analysis of others. Understand your targets better than they understand themselves. Make this a lifelong endeavor.

And finally, always—always—respect them.

Not everyone needs to be a leader.

Forget what college ad campaigns have told you, society has convinced you of, and your parents hoped you would be. We’re not all cut out to be leaders (at least not all the time), and that’s a good thing.

Disturbing, I know.

It’s been drilled into our heads that true success is largely the result of leadership capability. The thing is, if every person were to be a leader, we would go nowhere as a society. Personal agendas would govern each individual’s actions and teamwork would be impossible. And with absence of teamwork, we lose the capability to achieve truly important goals. The saying goes “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” I can guarantee you Rome also wasn’t built by a bunch of big egos doing their own thing.

What I can guarantee, is that there were a lot of exceptionally smart, talented, and successful future Romans who knew how and whom to follow. Those people may have been leaders in their own right, given a particular situation. That’s what makes good teamwork so dynamic—if leaders are willing to follow team members who are more qualified to lead particular tasks, the probability of overall success for the greater objective is bound to be higher. Being a good leader is often about being able to be a good follower. It’s about having the flexibility—and the reason—to step aside and let someone else take the reigns when it benefits the team.

Pretty simple, right?

Yet in business, we inevitably stumble when it comes to how we approach leadership. How many of you would rate your “leadership skills” as “high” if your boss gave you a survey on the topic? I’m guessing all of you. But why? We rush to be team leaders when the “opportunity” arises—regardless of how well we know we would lead a given project—because we believe that showing leadership (or at least the willingness to lead) is what will propel our careers forward. As you can imagine, this propensity and eagerness to be a leader in any situation can be extremely detrimental to a team. Aside from the inevitable animosity and jealousy fuming from the team members who also wanted to “show-off” their leadership abilities, chances are pretty high that the eager volunteer just isn’t the right person to lead in that situation.

It’s an unfortunate side-effect of how we’re indoctrinated in much of Western society. How many college brochures say something to the effect of “We help build the leaders of tomorrow”? We’re told from a very early age that leadership is what “makes a man” (whatever that means) and that if we fail to be great leaders at some point in our lives, we’re not all that important in the grand scheme of things. Bull.

Next time you’re in a team situation where a leader must emerge, think critically about the role before you push everyone aside to take it. Should you be the leader? Is the team better served by your skills if you are not burdened with that responsibility?

Photo courtesy by Mandi Lynn Photography.