Of Beaches and Books and Leadership

Sitting on the beach. This is what people do right? Sit on sand and get hot. I’ve never been a crazy fan of sitting in the sun not doing anything, but in an attempt to broaden my horizons I journeyed down to Clifton. 

I don’t really care about looking tanned. In fact I am quite happy with my trucker tan. But in the interests of trying something new I took the shirt off and got some sun on the torso. I was about to run out of sun-cream so I lay as flat as I could and applied to my top half. This ended up not working out and my back got burnt. Apparently the 15 minutes I was swimming was enough to give my back a work-out in the vitamin D department.

Despite the spot of sunburn I got, I can’t say it was an altogether bad experience. I think it’s all about who you’re with and what you have to read. I have good friends so that’s sorted, and I’m reading a kiff book on directing. In fact I’ll talk some more about the book.

It’s called ‘Directing the Film’ (which sounds like a badly phrased title), and it’s a compilation of what directors across the ages have said about the various aspects of film-directing. They have some great directors including Hitchcock, Spielberg, and Polanski. I’ve learnt a lot, but the most important thing I’ve learnt is that directing film is all about leading people and getting the most out of them.

I think this is an important point. That leading is more about getting the best out of people around you, than necessarily being the best you, personally, can be. It’s the idea of synergy, that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Leaders need to know how to extract the most out of people, because leading isn’t about you. It’s about others.

A quick thought about leading

I went onto Jon Acuff’s blog recently (the guy who wrote Stuff Christians Like), and one of his blog posts was about how good leaders celebrate. That a good leader shows others when a job is well done, and almost gives them permission to also be stoked.

I realized that I don’t do that at all. I’m not big on celebrating anything or receiving praise for anything I’ve done. I’m quite British you see and we like to keep our emotions in check (until we watch football or decide to go looting). We’d rather just drink tea and potter away.

So pretty much I’m saying that if you’re not a celebrator, like me, you should change. I’m starting to change and am going to try this celebrate thing, because being a leader is not about being devoid of stokedness.

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