Image by Paul Lowry via Flickr

Leaders, how determined are you to accomplish the goals that you ask others to embrace? Are you willing to go it alone, just you and your dream until you are able to lead others down the same path?

Often leaders start out alone, a leader of no one aside from herself. The leader lives and breathes the singular kernel of an ideal, a belief, or a necessity that must be accomplished, no matter the odds. The odds might be life or death, as was the case with Harriet Tubman, a fine example of a historical woman leader. Only her escape to freedom would bring her an opportunity to fulfill her dreams.

In 1849 … the slaves were to be sold, though previously set free by an old will. Harriet resolved not to be sold, and so, with no knowledge of the North … she walked away one night alone (Sanborn, 1863).

The odds for you as a leader may not be life or death, but it could mean your livelihood, or even our credibility. How do you ensure success of your venture or goal?

I think it comes down to two essential questions.

1. What are the critical problems essential to your enterprise or endeavor? Is it life or death, either literally or figuratively to your goals and success?
2. How can you go it alone until others are able to share in the necessity of completing this goal?

Dream it, live it, get others to follow it until others are willing to help you nurture and sustain your dream?

Image via Wikipedia

One of the many leadership lessons that Harriet Tubman exemplified was enabling self-respect within the slaves she helped free. She realized that it was not sufficient to simply free slaves. This would have left them no better off, and perhaps worse off than they were before they were freed.

This leadership lesson was best demonstrated after she helped free slaves while on a mission along the Combahee River as the leader of a Union Army expedition to:

“… take up the torpedoes placed by the rebels in the river, to destroy railroads and bridges, and to cut off supplies from the rebel troops.”

The expedition included Colonel Montgomery, who was an auxilliary leader of the mission, though officially appointed to lead the mission and several hundred black soldiers.

The Commonwealth, a Boston newspaper, noted this in 1863 about Harriet Tubman’s leadership during the raid:

“It is significant as the only military engagement in American history wherein a woman black or white, “led the raid and under whose inspiration it was originated and conducted”.

Their mission was entirely successful, the Commonwealth reported:

“Col. Montgomery and his gallant band of 300 black soldiers, under the guidance of a black woman, dashed into the enemy’s country, struck a bold and effective blow, destroying millions of dollars worth of commissary stores, cotton and lordly dwellings, and striking terror into the heart of rebeldom, brought off near 800 slaves and thousands of dollars worth of property, without losing a man or receiving a scratch. It was a glorious consummation.”

Almost all the able bodied slaves joined the ‘colored regiments’ upon being liberated from their plantations. But as any leader can tell you, sometimes the most difficult challenges of leadership arise after the momentary exhilaration of a victory. In this case, Harriet Tubman next challenged herself to find work for those who didn’t join the regiments and to tend to the field hospital where other rescued slaves were nursed back to health.

In Harriet Tubman’s own words she pointed out her dedication to engendering self-reliance among the rescued slaves:

“I am trying to find places for those able to work, and provide for them as best I can … while at the same time they learn to respect themselves by earning their own living.1

This is a challenge for today’s leaders as well – to reduce dependency of team members on their leaders while helping team members to gain the confidence to operate on their own initiative. The reward for the team member and the leader, as Harriet Tubman recognized, is team members’ self-respect, which will lead to increased independence.  In Harriet Tubman’s case, in addition to finding work for the recently liberated slaves, she also became an entrepreneur to generate income and work opportunities for the slaves.

What are some signs that your team members can benefit from more self-reliance? Here are a few tell-tale signs:

1. Are your team members are asking you for permission for actions you feel you have already empowered them to take?
2. Could your team members do more if they were provided with more training?
3. Are your team members reluctant to take risks, even if they have the skill or knowledge to complete the task?

If you answered yes to any of the above, or recognize other signs that your team is telling you they need more confidence, now is the time to enable them to take steps to become more self- reliant.

What do you think? Please do leave a comment if you have had successes – or failures in attempting to increase the self-reliance of your team.

References:

1. Harriet Tubman, The Life and the Life Stories by Jean Humez, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2003, p. 284.

2. HarrietTubman.com

That’s essentially what happened to Harriet Tubman over one hundred eighty years ago as a young child. Of course, she wasn’t asked to write a computer program, but Harriet was ordered by a woman to sweep and dust her house. Unfortunately for Harriet, it was the first time she had been in a home that wasn’t a slave cabin. She knew how to sweep but dusting? She had not a clue.

The mistress of the house offered Harriet no training, just an assignment – clean her house! Harriet dusted and dusted, yet each time the dust returned as if she hadn’t begun to dust.

“The dust … again, and chairs and tables were soon covered with a white coating … when her Mistress came in to see how the work progressed.”

Disappointed with the results of Harriet’s efforts, the Mistress first used savage words and later a whip on Harriet five times. Fortunately, the Mistress’ sister happened to be in the house at the time and wisely intervened.

“Why do you whip the child, Susan for not doing what she has never been taught to do?”

The sister then proceeded to successfully instruct Harriet on the proper methods for dusting a house, using a few secrets that the inexperienced child had not figured out.

As a leader, you can only expect employees to demonstrate the skills that they have been given the opportunity to develop. Sometimes, as Harriet did, an employee will bear their lack of knowledge in silence, to avoid giving voice to the fact that she does not know how to complete an assigned task. And so, like a child on a merry-go-round, the employee will repeat the same ineffective methods, going nowhere despite great effort.

The key is to assess the employee’s skill and likelihood of figuring out how to complete a task prior to the assignment, to give the employee the chance to succeed early.

By the way, can you guess what the secret step was that the Mistress’ sister used to rid the house of dust? She instructed Harriet to open the windows and let the dust settle after the first attempt, only to be followed up with one additional dusting.

Here are some questions to ponder about training employees:

• What was the greater downfall of the mistress of the house – the lack of training or the physical abuse?
• Can harshly punishing an employee ever be effective?
• Do you have any employees who are not producing the correct results?
• What are the training opportunities that the employee can become involved in?
• How will you measure the results?

Source: Harriet, the Moses of Her People, S. H. Bradford, 1886, G. R. Lockwood & Son, New York, NY, p. 18-19

Cover via Amazon

Mary Lou Williams, in her lifetime, not only reached the pinnacle of her profession, she redefined what the pinnacle could be. As her biographer, Linda Dahl wrote, Mary Lou Williams was a

tenacious dreamer of dreams, a spinner of gold from flax, a most impractical person who lived her dream against great odds.

From the cruelty of a childhood mired in poverty, her life filled with accent notes of gender discrimination as a female musician and composer, Mary Lou persisted in her dreams when dreams were all she had to nurture herself.

At the end she was able to reflect upon the challenges she overcame and the goals she accomplished. She asked this question:

I did it, didn’t I? Through muck and mud.

As this year wends to its close and we begin to think of the accomplishments to which we can give birth next year, the question we must ask ourselves, as leaders and as people writing our own legacy is, Are we doing it?

Reference: Morning Glory, A Biography of Mary Lou Williams by Linda Dahl, California Press, 1999, pp. 378 – 379.

Image by John*Ell via Flickr

Have you heard of Mary Lou Williams? Pianist, composer, world renowned band leader, record company owner?

Well if you haven’t heard of her, it’s understandable, 2010 is the centennial of Mary Lou William’s birth as Mary Elfrieda Scruggs in Atlanta, Georgia. She quickly emerged as a talented pianist, starting as a six-year old performer to raise money for her family. Over a nearly six decade career, she mastered the realms of jazz, blues, gospel, swing and stride. She even wrote and performed in a genre of religious jazz, composing hyms and masses including the Black Christ of the Andes.

As her career and skills developed, she became an arranger for Duke Ellington, Earl “Fatha” Hines (who my mother loved), and Louis Armstrong, among many others. Impressive, right, but how about this – she was the teacher of such Jazz giants as Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.

She recorded hundred of songs, and wrote more than a hundred compositions.

She is an inspiration for the obstacles, she overcame, just as Madam C. J. Walker, Harriet Tubman, and Ida B. Wells. Mary Lou Williams told a friend,

“no one would record me. So I decided to record myself.”

She thus started her own record company, an uncommon business for an African American at the time and perhaps, unprecedented for an African American woman of that era.

NPR has a sample mp3 recording you can play to get a sense of her vast repertoire.

One of my most exciting moments as a teenager was going to my first Jackson Five concert. After listening to their albums and copies I mad on a cheap cassette tape recorder (decades before iPods and Sony Walkmans were created), the excitement of seeing them live was a dream come true.

And so it was today, as I entered the library research room at the Indiana Historical Society. I was handed folder after folder of delicate documents, some written by the hand of Madam C. J. Walker, and her business manager, W. Ransom, among others.

Many of the documents were 95 to 100 years old.

My strongest realization that Madam Walker would still be a highly successful businesswoman if she ran her business today. She pioneered and demonstrated a number of qualities that success companies today still practice. I’ll blog about them in upcoming posts but take my word, she was a very innovative and decisive businesswoman.