Instinct: The Power to Unleash Your Inborn Drive (11 page)

R
elying on your instincts is not enough. You might survive but you won’t thrive without due diligence and the research needed to sharpen and hone your instincts. I’m convinced instincts operate most accurately when they have as much data as possible. Our instincts then process the facts, figures, and financials through the filters of our personalities, experiences, and goals. It’s where art and science meet to create this most unique navigational system for living.

As we learn to live by instinct, we will draw on all we’ve experienced: all our tests and tragedies, triumphs and setbacks. Curiously enough, the word
science
is derived from the Latin word
scientia
, which at its core means “knowledge.” And knowledge comes in part from experiences and in part from encounters.

Every systematic enterprise must build and organize
acquired knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and calculated predictions about its environment. As surely as my backyard turned into a jungle at night for my dogs, your new level of achievement will become your laboratory for innovation and improvisation. Before making assumptions based on prior knowledge, compare what you’ve learned to what you observe around you. If you study your strides, you’re less likely to stumble!

While it’s wonderful to know what you know, wisdom requires that you also know what you don’t know without getting the two confused. There’s much to be learned about where you are and how what you know fits into what you do not know. When the technician ascends to management, she must quickly recognize that people require more than mechanisms. When the employee becomes the employer, he must resist hiring and firing based on where he used to be instead of where he is.

I shared in the last chapter how I’ve tried to avoid becoming partisan in a politically charged situation. Several years ago during an election year, I was invited to the Christian Coalition of America because I was an up-and-coming minister whose biblical views might
have made me a good prospect for the right wing. And that same year I was asked to speak at the Rainbow Coalition! Its members recognized that there were many issues that the coalition cared about that deeply concerned me also.

Both groups had invited me in part because of my growth in ministry and my arrival on the shores of this new world of public policy and political activism. As I went to both meetings and listened and watched and sniffed and prayed, I knew that I had stumbled into a big field of ideas and dangers, secrets and sciences, that I would spend the next few years trying to untangle. And in the midst of all the push-pulling of my new peers, the operative question in my mind reflected the query of any new immigrant: where do I fit, if at all, in this new and exciting world?

Now, you might say, “I’m not Bishop Jakes and I don’t have those issues to balance and sort through.” But before you draw this conclusion, think again. Whether you’re a new hire, a new business owner, a new partner in the club, a new investor in the firm, or a newlywed, this applies to you. If you’re a new alto in the choir or a new council member in the city, you have stepped into a field filled with fire and folly. Don’t think for one minute that you can pretend to be unaffected by the forces flying at you from every direction!

Don’t assume that you can rely on your instincts for information that’s easily accessible in other ways. In
other words, know the facts before you reflect on your feelings. Do the work necessary to be up to speed and informed about all angles of a problem, conflict, or issue.

I would like to think that I’ve been able to serve presidents and other political leaders in both major parties because of my ability to understand where they’re each coming from. Although I may not agree with certain stands, statutes, or strategies, I try to respect others by seeing things through their eyes.

In other words, your instincts need to know the boundaries before they can help you get your bearings. Just as animals mark their territory so that they will recognize it later, we need to know the lay of the land before we begin traipsing through it. Is that the North Star or a train coming toward us? Is this snowball going to roll until it causes an avalanche or will it melt at our feet? Without tending to the basics of investigation and research, it’s impossible for our instincts to guide us accurately.

Now, you can read the employee manual, or Google the data on your new venture. You can gather the statistics and memorize the demographics in your mind. But the truth remains that in each new jungle you enter,
an unwritten code of conduct guides its inhabitants. Each world has a host of special interest groups, causes to join, fraternities and sororities, and secret societies. These various groups will be blazing trails to mark their territory while you’re still using GPS to get across the street!

Remember that while you’re the immigrant learning the lingo, everyone else is native to the process. So before you take a nap under a tree, or make camp in a clearing, you better sniff around the bushes and discern what else is lurking around you.

There are ways to get things done that aren’t recorded. There are ways to inherit enemies, encounter bullies, and sabotage your success that you haven’t even thought about. And there are thousands of predators right in your own backyard who don’t come out till the sun goes down. You might not see these night stalkers, but wherever you go, the gang’s always there!

Balancing who you are with where you are is another science all to itself. On one hand, if you do not define yourself, your enemies will try to define you. So you have to be busy in the business of branding. But while you’re trying to get the right message out about who you are, you must also learn to locate yourself within the context of currents swirling around you. Variable conditions, allegiances, and allies shift frequently. If it weren’t enough to adjust to the new world to which
you’re acclimating, you must also become adept at negotiating negatives and leveraging positives about what you came to do.

You’ll barely have time to unpack your bags in Bugtussle, USA, before you’re dancing with danger and waltzing with wolves. Strangely enough, your accomplishment cannot fully be celebrated before it’s time to decamp, defend, and debrief. Whenever you’re thrust into the wild, someone or something will immediately pick up your scent and make strategic decisions regarding their response to your arrival.

The agendas are endless, the enemies everywhere, and the allies often apathetic. Fan clubs and fight clubs all meet on the same street corner. The difference between a friend and a foe can be as subtle as the distinction between identical twins. That is to say, you can scarcely tell them apart! Anyone who has ever taken a position at a new company, or married a pastor, or moved into a new neighborhood, ought to give me a good amen!

If you don’t find a way to enhance your instinct through research, you forfeit the opportunity to belong. I’ve had to let many people go from my company and occasionally from my church staff. It wasn’t
always an indication that the person wasn’t good at what they do. Many times the problem arose from their inability to acclimate to their new environment. They could do the task but could not socially and professionally adapt to new ways of interaction, communication, and delegation. It doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do if you can’t fit into your new environment.

It’s a science, so study it. It’s a laboratory experiment to discover what you can and cannot say. It’s listening to your instincts as well as the insinuations of your new associates. And learning in the lab remains dangerous, since not all chemicals mix well! Chemical reactions can produce powerful results that either destroy or create energy for the organization.

And keep in mind that scientists must get outside their laboratories. Like zoologists in the jungle, you must learn to study the creatures with whom you cohabit. You must dwell among them, but you can’t be one of them. They’ll let you know that you live on the same street but you might not be a part of the gang. Learning to survive with the gangs without wearing their colors to work is a tricky business. It is a process and, God knows, it is a science.

You’ll realize fairly quickly that most species tend to stick together. The rabbits may scamper like squirrels, but they don’t play with them. The coyotes are strong and quick, hungry and ruthless. They’ve learned how
to join forces in a pack without inviting the bobcats or the jackals. Record the habits of those in your new jungle, but don’t allow yourself to follow the same patterns unless you’re making a deliberate choice.

The challenge is to accomplish your assignment without losing your identity. Your presence changes the ecosystem and alters the environment for better and/or for worse. In the process of adjustments there will be conflicts. There will always be those moments where principles you used in your former life disappoint you in your current environment. This lesson is fundamental. You can’t take everything you used before with you. Your ability to survive has everything to do with your ability to adapt.

Adapting and surviving requires that you know your own proclivities and preferences, your default settings and disciplines. You must protect your soft areas and use your strengths to provide cover. Increasing the power of your instincts means learning more about yourself than ever before.

Like all sciences, there will be failed experiments and lost investments. But these will teach you something—if nothing else, through the power of elimination—if you’re willing to proceed patiently. The loss of time, effort, and dollars becomes the price to be paid when
your ultimate objective is to accelerate and not just acclimate. When you want to reach solid conclusions and not tentative theories, then you must be willing to risk what you know for what you want to know.

Inform your instincts and you’ll improve your potency, no matter what jungle you find yourself in!

W
e instinctively know how to lead if we allow ourselves.

While no two leaders are exactly the same and each will vary their style and method, all individuals leading by instinct explore the distance between where they’ve been and where they’re going. Some approach leadership based on their strength or the strength of the team, others on their previous organization’s culture or the culture that was established when they got there. They inherit systems and struggles that in no way resemble the vision and mandate that they are most passionate about. They must then decide: who stays and who goes?

At my core I am a motivator, and I love to invest in people. The question for me was centered around people resources. Can I develop what I have, or should I look outside of my organization for what I need? This dilemma
has led to inner turmoil many times as my heart said “Let them stay” when my head said “Let them go!”

You see, I have spent years as a pastor where the goal is retention. Spiritual leaders are often evaluated on their ability to sustain momentum, maintain the budget, and retain the membership. All of that works well if you are involved only with members or, perhaps in your case, customers or clients. But most businesses, as well as the enterprise of pursuing our God-given destinies, require more than just customer service. There has to be a team approach to unite the various departments required for success, whether those are human resources and internal technology or your personal resources and your laptop. The big question remains: how do I retain what I need and release what I do not?

I had to learn as my staff increased that my model of leadership needed a serious overhaul. The same proclivities that made me an effective pastor did not necessarily produce the skill set required for greater leadership of my business team and personal staff. But I learned that from the moment a pastor employs people, his propensity to shepherd a flock can come back to bite him.

In short, your gifting and opportunity can bring you into a new arena that your skill sets may be able to manage but not maximize. With these new opportunities, your mentality is influenced not by where you’re going but more aptly by where you’ve been. But surely you see the danger in such an approach. A new
suit doesn’t change the old man! A new hairdo won’t transform the woman beneath the bangs!

You can’t function on the next level if you still have the old style of leadership. Many people move into a new opportunity, but they have the past mentality and soon they find that they are having experiences that poison the fresh chance with old contaminates. You can’t revamp a department if you yourself carry the methodology of where you were and not where you are!

As my business involvement beyond the pulpit grew, so did my struggles to lead in these new endeavors. Suddenly I was hiring staff, maintaining a for-profit entity, and developing people around new goals. Unfortunately, while I had the corporate structure of a business for my enterprise, I still had pastoral tendencies. I had to learn to distinguish ministry from management and potlucks from portfolios. The Sunday school classroom is not the boardroom!

You can’t reform the organization if its leader communicates old messages and ideas by virtue of language and habits from the past. A new logo is nice, a new brand is wonderful, but if the old culture persists you are destined for self-sabotage!

I found myself in meetings with high-level CEOs one moment and strong pastoral leaders the next. While
there are many similarities between business and pastoral leaders, there are also many differences. I struggled with the models of my friends, who were sacred leaders functioning largely with a pastoral focus not only with the flock but also with the team. They, more times than not, lacked the fortitude to make the decisions that needed to be made for their organizations to thrive. They often chose the retention model: catch all you can. Often they were not leading by instinct but by tradition. They kept the peace and maintained the status quo but later became frustrated as the church suffered from their indecisive leadership. It was withering not because of lack of vision but because there was a serious disconnect between the leader and those who represented him.

Often the ministry doesn’t flourish because the leader lacks the ability to prune the vine they worked all their lives to grow! Instead of growing in productivity, it is really the same old things from days gone by. The soil never rests and new seeds are never planted. The harvest still yields fruit, but it’s proportionately less with each passing season. This is not growth; it is simply swelling, with the infection of the past world mixed with the new opportunity!

But the antithesis of this, based on what I witnessed from my associates in the business world, is the release model. Their idea is to be slow to hire and quick to fire. Sudden turnovers, they say, are the nature of the beast. My corporate friends believe that releasing should
always be quick and definitive. They choose change at any cost, often overriding the wisdom of their instincts for stability.

However, sometimes retention is a good thing. Developing and training those who have been loyal can create a sense of family that’s very important to the well-being of the whole organization. If team members do not feel secure and invested, they will not commit their personal gifts toward full productivity for the organization.

The recent recession we faced in our nation and all the layoffs that ensued showed us that when people are uncertain of what will happen next, they withdraw to “wait and see.” Spending shuts down, anxiety mounts, divorces increase, and productivity is compromised as team members develop an “every man for himself” stance. Many people are traumatized by uncertainty. It is the silent killer of relationships at work and at home. Anytime people don’t know where they stand, they either leave physically and/or detach emotionally. Either way, when you’re paralyzed by fear of the unknown, it doesn’t matter which direction you’re headed because you’re not moving!

Similarly, when you operate based on a formula or a one-size-fits-all model, you miss the power and insight your instincts can bring. Tradition and innovation must work in harmony for maximum success, and our instincts know how to maintain this equilibrium. Based on specific data, context, and timing, instinct
can become a leader’s greatest tool for knowing when to stay the course and when to change direction.

Honing your instinct for creative change at the right time sharpens the instincts of those around you. In this regard, leading by instinct can become contagious. If the people you retain don’t respond to that retention and reward it with an earnest effort to remain relevant, then it backfires. The onus rests upon the team to avail themselves of all available opportunities supplied to stay cutting-edge. While the company can identify training, the persons who are a part of the team share some serious responsibility not to become inflexible or irrelevant by virtue of thinking that a good relationship and personality will cover a poor performance.

If such complacency develops, the organization will suffer from paralysis and lose its sense of direction. This is also true in the home. Both parties have to maintain vigilance to be progressive and innovative. Just because people stay married doesn’t mean that they are happily married. In that same sense, just because you’ve been with a task a long time doesn’t mean that you have remained relevant. It is wise to stay abreast of the latest information that will cause you to be able to grow forward and not just go forward. An ancient book of
wisdom tells us “Iron sharpens iron,” and indeed it does.

But rust also results in rust! If the team atmosphere becomes strained, the vitality dissipates and gradually toxicity ensues. So if the stagnancy is not eradicated, then growth is compromised and other good people gradually move on. It’s hard to gain speed in the present, let alone map future destinations, when certain tires are stuck in reverse!

Removing the bottleneck that is the stagnant staff member or leader is also appreciated, because truly creative people actually feel like they are asphyxiating when they are placed beneath someone whose only contribution to a meeting is “that’s not how we used to do it.” I can’t tell you how many homes, churches, and businesses are engaged in a civil war, because they don’t have a sincere appreciation for the individuals. They are at war between what
was
and what
is
.

Whenever
what was
begins to fight against
what is
, they both jeopardize the future of
what can be
! The damage will be collateral and the impact will be comprehensive.

Now, just because an idea is new doesn’t mean that it’s progressive. And when new ideas are seriously evaluated and considered before being dismissed, those
who present them feel affirmed. But when those ideas have no more chance of consideration than a snowman in hell, the instinct for creativity is dwarfed by the toxic cultural work environment! So you may have succeeded in appeasing the vanguards of the organization, but you do so at the expense of retarding the growth of what you had hoped to build.

So then if you are in touch with the pulse of the team you are leading, you notice the new creative life ebb from new inductees in the firm. Additionally, those who have been long-term veterans of the organization are stuck, and the paralysis immobilizes relevance. Gradually you will notice people who were once excited move on—or worse, they remain on the team with nothing in view but pensions or personal gain. They will channel their creativity into personal ventures or mislabel line items on your budget sheet as costs that are actually a deep waste, so you get little to no return on your investment!

These dynamics create an apathy throughout the entire organization, a slow paralysis of which few will even speak openly. This paralysis may not start out flaunting itself on a ledger sheet. That is to say, there’s more to running an organization than numbers. It may not initially show itself in the death of dollars; rather, it shows in the slow, agonizing death of new ideas.

It begins like a silent cancer waiting to metastasize throughout the corporate body. When new and
creative ideas stop coming in, energy dissipates and morale declines. When team members do not experience instinctive leadership, they retreat to safe models that ensure job security even as their retreat ironically threatens the health of the entire organization. There’s no immunity to fight the growing dis-ease. Eventually, lower profits will reflect that the infection has spread to the balance sheet, and the economics will be a symptom and not a source of the deeper problem.

Without an infusion of instinct and an elevation of its importance in the company or team, eventually productivity dries up and the stream of innovation trickles to a stop. Instinct is that important to how you lead. When instincts are ignored, leaders become followers, and followers become unemployed!

Many leaders fall into one of two categories, while instinct-led leaders know both areas are required for healthy growth and advancement. Builders are those people who are motivated by challenge. They have to have something to build, something to fight, or something that gives them quantifiable results. These people are designed to keep the entity vibrant. They are sometimes spontaneous, always creative, and perpetually most engaged when there is action.

And then there are bankers. Bankers are like country
wood-burning stoves. They feel a sense of achievement from maintenance. They like to sustain and maintain what someone else built. These people are great at the critical systems that need to be put into place to make sure that we aren’t always building without banking enough wood for the next fire and the long winter ahead. Builders make money; bankers save it. Builders keep the marriage exciting; bankers keep the home grounded. Builders can draw a crowd; bankers can train the crowd that’s gathered.

Both are required for the growth of a healthy company, relationship, or endeavor. The dynamic, productive tension between them works beautifully until you put a banker in charge of project development or a new business acquisition! The bankers can’t lead because they only want to keep it like it was originally. The builder who needs fresh incentive is stuck in gridlock on a highway of unrealized opportunity. And the lion and the lamb lie down together in a nightmare of frustration. So you’re left looking at a quarterly report humming Marvin Gaye’s hit song from the seventies, “What’s Going On.”

It isn’t just about having the right people in your life. It’s also about location, location, location. We’ve cut away the hemorrhaging resources from wasted energy and income on those who refuse to grow. We have retained the best and brightest, keeping them challenged and innovative. Like spark plugs in the engine, everyone is in place and this thing begins to lurch
forward. Those fueled by instinct know how to maximize their engine’s horsepower by building it from the very best components.