...Be the Leader...Follow the Leader...Take your Turn...

Tim Welsh

Youth Leadership -South Bend/Mishawaka

Graduation Address -Class VI

May 12, 1999

 

In Africa, I am told, they speak of two hungers. There is the lesser hunger, which arises to satisfy the needs of the body, and there is the greater hunger which arises to satisfy the needs of the spirit [Charles Handy, The Hungry Spirit]. Having just satisfied the lesser hunger with a graduation dinner, please join me for a few minutes and consider with me a few thoughts about the greater hunger. The beauty of leadership, our topic for this evening, is that depending on how, and where, and when it is exercised, it can, and ideally it should, satisfy both hungers. The world, both the large world you read about in the newspaper, and on television, and also the small world you live in every day, is hungry for both kinds of leadership. That is where you come in, and that is what I will ask you to think about for the next few minutes.

 

Already, I am ahead of myself. Let's back up to the beginning, and begin where graduation addresses are supposed to begin: with congratulations

 

Congratulations to you - Class VI of the South Bend/Mishawaka, youth Leadership Program. On the second Wednesday of each month since August, you have met together as a class to learn about our community and to prepare for your role in it, both now and in the future. Tonight, with your Commencement, your year of preparation comes to an end. Beginning tonight, you are a graduate of this wonderful community leadership program.

 

If I were to guess how you feel at this moment, I would guess that a part of you is saying "Congratulations. Thank you… but Now What? What am I supposed to do now?" If you go a bookstore, you may find that Bill Cosby, a well-known graduation speaker in addition to his television success, knows exactly how you feel. His new book on graduation is simply titled Congratulations! Now What?! I have borrowed Bill Cosby's title to help organize our thoughts tonight. We are in the Congratulations part now; we will get to the "Now What?!" part soon.

 

Congratulations tonight also go to all of the people who believed in you when you applied for and were accepted into this program, who believed in you while you were going through this program, and who believe in you now. Your parents, your teachers, your friends, even people you may not know have believed in you. It is no small thing, you know, to have someone believe in you. Leaders, after all, must have followers. In fact, one of the best tests of who will be a good leader is as simple as this: who can be a good follower.

 

We are all … and in turn … both followers and leaders. Life is like that. Life, in fact, is often quite a bit like the game of Follow the Leader we all played when we were young. We took turns being the leader, then. When it was our turn to lead, we led by example, by modeling exactly which actions we thought would be best at that moment. Our followers tried to live up to, or even exceed in their actions the example we had set for them. When it was our turn to be a follower, we tried to imitate the leader's actions as precisely as we could. The strength of the game, and the fun of it, depended completely on how well the leaders led, AND on how well the followers followed.

 

Every athlete, in every sport, who has ever played a team game at any level understands this concept. For the good of the game and for the good of the team, you must sometimes be a leader and sometimes be a follower. Sometimes, it is your turn to play; sometimes, it is your turn not to play. Sometimes, it is your role to score; sometimes, it is your role to help your teammate score.

 

As it is in the lesser game of athletics, so it is in the greater game of life. So - tonight on this night of Commencement and Congratulations, here is Rule #1 for you: Believe in Yourself; Believe in Others; and Take your Turn; Be the Leader and Follow the Leader.

 

Rule #2: Hearing me offer a Rule may remind you of the famous graduation address given by novelist Kurt Vonnegut at M.I.T., which he began by saying "Wear Sunscreen." Everything else, he went on to say would be simply his opinion, but wearing sunscreen had some scientific validity to it. So, he said, I recommend that you do it. Kurt Vonnegut's advice is currently playing as a song on the radio. My Rule #2 for tonight carries more philosophical than scientific weight. The Rule is this: Acquire, Trust, and Use Good Brakes.

 

Well, you may be thinking, Thanks for the common sense safety tip about good driving. In recommending this rule, I am thinking about more than driving a car. I chose the driving image because driving is still new to most of you, and you are, I hope, still interested in learning how to drive better… With that said, let's go on to the rule about brakes. One reason manufacturers put brakes on cars is because good brakes allow the car to be driven faster. Good brakes allow the car to change speeds when appropriate. Good brakes allow the car to travel to places that might be too dangerous to go without them. Good brakes help to make driving both safe and fun. You can imagine what driving would be like if there were no brakes. In this town, we might not go anywhere at all in the winter. I leave you to think of more of the lesser implications of brakes and no brakes. I want to go on to speak of the greater role "brakes" play on the roads of life. Putting on the "brakes" in life allows you a chance to pause, to reflect, to refresh yourself, to plan, to play, even to dream. Like they do in our cars, the  "brakes" allow you to control the speed of your life. They allow you not only to get more done and to live life faster, they also allow you to evaluate the road you are on, and to make changes when you choose to. "Brakes" allow you time to sharpen our vision, and to check your values, and to make a plan for accomplishing your dream.

 

Having a dream, and sharing a vision are the primary jobs of the leader. The leader by definition, is the person who knows what we are doing, and why. There are people who say that the chief job of all leadership is to communicate a vision to the followers that everyone can believe in and can work to help accomplish. In his work on personal leadership entitled The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey writes about the importance of "sharpening the saw." In order for the saw to cut well, he writes, it must be sharpened regularly. "Sharpening the saw" is Stephen Covey's term for applying good brakes.

 

Your year here in the Youth Leadership Program has been a way of applying "brakes" (even though it may have speeded up your Wednesdays). All of education, in fact, can be viewed as way of applying good brakes to our lives...a time of preparing which precedes a time of action. Meditation, prayer, church...these are all forms of brakes. So important are good brakes for good leadership that, in the Grandest Plan of All for human living, one full day in seven has been set aside for using them.

 

Rule #3: As good as they are, brakes are not all there is to life or to leadership. If all you did was to step on the brakes, you would never go anywhere. As important as the seventh day is, it is most important in the context of the other six. Leaders not only dream of action and plan action, leaders also take action, and inspire others to take action. This is the "Now What?!" part of the program.

 

Now What???? "Screw your courage to the sticking place" (as Shakespeare put it) and put your thoughts into action. In other words, do something...good. Rule #3 is the driving metaphor writ large. Now what?? Step on Your Own Gas, and Go. This is very existential. It is also very personal. It is also the very essence of leadership. Existentialism used to be known as the theory that no one could take a bath for you. Leadership, I believe, is characterized by the idea that no one can lead your life for you.

 

Genuine leadership has integrity, and it has respect. Genuine leadership gets its integrity by matching what the leader believes, with what the leader says, and with what the leader does. Integrity and respect, including self-respect, comes from knowing that what you say is what you believe, and that what you do is what you say. Leadership, in short, begins on the inside. It begins by paying attention to your greater hunger.

 

Somewhere in all of the programs that you have seen this year, or in all of the programs of your high school, or in all of the programs of your community...somewhere there is at least one that resonates within you, whether because you are inspired by it, or because you want to change it, or because you want to contribute to it. Rule #3 says: Step on your own gas, and go to that one. Leaders are defined by their actions. Go where your greater hunger tells you to go, and when you get there, "screw your courage to the sticking place" and take action.

 

We are deep in the heart of leadership now, so I want to go directly to Rule #4: Here it is: Accept Responsibility for Your Own Life. "Leadership" is a big word, suggesting big ideas and big adventures. "Responsibility" is sometimes seen as a smaller word, suggesting undone chores, and unwelcome duties. The fact, however, is that leadership begins with responsibility. Leadership doesn't get any simpler, or more fundamental, or more important, or more challenging than this. Leaders accept responsibility. That is a fact, and that is the truth.

 

My friend, George Block, who coaches in San Antonio, explained it to me this way, "Leadership" he said, "is the flower; Responsibility is the seed." Let me say that again. Leadership is the flower; Responsibility is the seed. Clearly, what this means is that if you want the flowers of leadership, you must plant the seeds of responsibility. And - since this is an organic metaphor - you must nurture the seeds, and cultivate the seeds, and allow them to grow until they flower. Here in Indiana, you know that if you set out to grow 90 day corn, it's going to take about 3 months. No matter how much food, or water, or sun, or fertilizer you apply, you cannot speed up the process very much. Developing leaders is an organic process also. Leaders grow at their own rate. You cannot make "instant" leaders anymore than you can make "instant" corn. You have to grow both, and in each case, the process takes a while.

 

Let me put it to you this way: on your journey through life, who is in the driver's seat? The leader answers "I am." Leadership begins inside a person, when the seed of responsibility takes root in the soul. All good leaders lead from within. On the outside, a person's title does not make a person a leader. A title only gives "permission" to lead. Neither does a person's position make a person a leader. Position only gives the "power" to lead. Together, title and position may give a person "control", and control can "get things done", especially things for the lesser hunger. Control does not make a person a leader either. None of these things make automatically make a person a leader because none of them automatically satisfy the greater hunger of the spirit.

 

Every organization has leaders in it who have neither title, nor position, nor control. What they do have is integrity. These leaders accept responsibility for their own lives, and for the lives of others. They lead themselves and others into action based on a dream, a vision, and a plan that pays attention to both the greater and the lesser hunger and that is firmly rooted in their own souls. When (and it does happen) "in the course of human events" these people also have permission and power, title and position, the results can truly change both individual people and the world around them. We all know some of these people. We admire them, respect them, follow them as our leaders.

 

That may sound like a large, a long, and an intimidating process. In reality, it is only doing what we want to do anyway. Don't we all want to be independent? Don't we all want to make our own decisions? Don't we all want to "lead" (there's that word again) our own lives? Don't we all want to be accepted into our group? Don't we all want to see our group do great things? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, of course we do. The drive is imbedded in all of us. Because of that, leadership is possible for all of us. We begin our own leadership by accepting responsibility for who we are and for what we do. "Who is responsible for the person I become?" "I am.” That is the question and that is the answer, which is encoded in the seed of leadership. You can plant that seed in your soul at any time. The final answer to Bill Cosby's "Now What?!" question are these three words: Plant The Seed.

 

Rule #5 is a constant reminder that One Person Can, and Does, and Will make a Difference. I need only ask you to take a brief search of your own life for you to identify individual people whose leadership you chose to follow. Each of these individual people is, for you, a leader who made a difference. Your experience is not rare. It is common, and is oh so important. To emphasize the point, I would like to read you a small story, taken from a novel by the Brazilian novelist, Paulo Coelho. It goes like this:

 

A scientist who studied monkeys on an island in Indonesia was able to teach a certain one to wash bananas' before eating them.

 

Cleansed of sand and dirt, the food was more flavorful. The scientist - who did this only because he was studying the learning capacity of monkeys - did not imagine what would eventually happen. So he was surprised to see that the other monkeys on the island began to imitate the first one.

 

And then, one day, when a certain number of monkeys had learned to wash their bananas, the monkeys on all of the other islands in the archipelago began to do the same thing. What was most surprising, though, was that the other monkeys learned to do so without having had any contact with the island where the experiment had been conducted.

 

He stopped. "Do you understand?”

 

“No,” I answered.

 

There are several similar scientific studies. The most common explanation is that when a certain number of people evolve, the entire human race begins to evolve. We don't know how many people are needed - but we know that's how it works. [By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, pp. 146-47.]

 

In your chemistry class, this number is called a "critical mass." You know what that is. It is the minimum amount of the materials you must have in order for a chemical change to take place. As long as you have less than the critical mass of material, nothing happens. As soon as you have the critical mass or more of the material, all of it changes. It works in the chemistry lab. We all know that. The leadership question is whether it also works for human development. What is the critical mass of humanity that it will take for all of the human race to evolve to its next level? No one yet knows the answer to that question. We all know there is a new age coming. We all know that we will need new leaders to help us get there, and to teach us how to live once we do. Those of us who are your parents' age or older also know that when these new leaders emerge, they will be younger than we are. Our spirits are hungry for them now. One person can, and does, and will make a difference. Perhaps, you…

 

Rule #6 - Finally, there is leadership rule #6. There are those who say that of all the rules, Rule #6 is the most important. There are even those who say there aren't any rules 1-5, there is only Rule #6. So here it is, Rule #6 for Leadership: Laugh a little; Forgive a lot; and Don't Take Yourself so Doggone Seriously.

 

With that said, and with thanks, I will follow Rule #6 myself, and will smile, and will be done, and will sit down.

 

Congratulations to you all! Now What? - Take Your Turn, Be the Leader, Follow the Leader; Apply Good Brakes; Put Your Thoughts into Action; Accept Responsibility; Know that One Person Can Make a Difference; And…Follow Rule #6.

 

Thank you, and Fare Well.