Leadership Note #5
I’ll Respect the Guardrails. I Just Won’t Follow the Tire Tracks.
I’ve never been a particularly conventional leader. I’ll play within the rules. I just don’t assume I have to play the same way everyone else does.
Every organization has real boundaries—regulatory requirements, security controls, financial constraints, customer commitments, and policies that exist for good reason. But organizations also accumulate conventions that eventually start masquerading as rules.
Some of the best solutions come from understanding the boundaries well enough to challenge everything inside them. I’m comfortable being a little unconventional. I’ll respect the guardrails. I just won’t automatically follow the tire tracks.