The Chatterdome
I need a place to think about politics that’s away from the chatterdome that is the social internet of sharing things. I’ve grown weary of the intolerance from both sides in our our divided country. And divided it is making it very lonely for anyone caught in the middle as an independent. As the election wound down, and to my surprise, an unthinkable human being was elected to be the American president. As I turned to Facebook and the discussion that surrounded that event, it was a very unsatisfying way to engage. People who responded to my questions about basic human decency and accountability responded with “If you don’t like it, get involved” or even worse, silence. It puzzled me how in one breath someone would advise “getting involved” and in the next disengage from the conversation (that they started). I don’t think this is facebooks fault but it does highlight a limitation of the platform. As time moves on I’ve had more of these types of interactions with folks I don’t understand. I’ve come to realize that the Chatterdome (my word for the news driven social internet of human interaction) is largely knee jerk reactions to a stimulus that lacks meaning and substance. I’ve recently started throttling my access to the social internet of sharing things aka the Chatterdome as I’ve dubbed it here. I’ll write more about that later. I call it Chatterdome because because of the sheer volume that news and comments and responses and memes and videos can generate and regenerate as it echos around the Chatterdome. Even more interesting is that the volume seemingly goes up no matter what.
A Quiet Place
So thats how I ended up here, back on my creaky old Wordpress blog (that actually isn’t that creaky but don’t ask me to write a theme or plugin for it :-) ). Sitting here in the dark alone with my thoughts of a quote that stand out to me seems like a good place to talk about leadership as I have experienced it in my career and in my life. There are different contexts for leadership but as I have experienced it the qualities for success, failure and fake leadership seem to transcend them.
Do The Best You Can With What You Have
In my experience both working in several careers and reading management theory books the best leaders do two things very well. They communicate clearly by listening well and they work with what they have. Every system puts constraints on its users. Leaders are just users of the system that they inherit. Good leaders asses the lay of the land, figure out what the strengths and weaknesses or pros and cons or assets and liabilities are. They use this understanding to guide both their vision and strategy. Poor leaders highlight what was done before they got there. They seem unable to step up and say ‘It’s my fault’ when the shit hits the fan - even if they personally were not responsible for what went wrong. They ‘take one for the team’ while the team is busy cleaning up the shit that hit the fan. They guide the team to learn the what and how things got that way and then they empower the team to move forward. 
