Do You Have Junk in Your Trunk?

(This post is written for alumni of LEAD 365, although all are welcome to read it.)

Do you have junk in your trunk? And no, this isn’t a post about getting ready for swimsuit season. (By the way, my philosophy of getting ready for swimsuit season is to buy a suit and put it on. Ta da! You’re ready.) Today I’m talking about junk in your DoKnowBe Tree trunk, the part of the leadership framework that we likely talk about the least in LEAD 365. (To get caught up on the DoKnowBe Tree, you can start here.) The trunk of the DoKnowBe Tree represents what we KNOW, our skills and knowledge. But there is a greater purpose to this knowledge than learning for learning’s sake. We’re going to unpack this a bit today.

Think about what the trunk of an actual tree does. It provides structural support to the tree, but mostly it works to move water and nutrients from the roots to the canopy and to move energy from the leaves down to the rest of the tree. The trunk is a conduit, constantly moving good things up and down the tree. In the same way, we hope that the good things you learn don’t stay in your trunk, but instead influence your canopy (what you DO), or shape who you are (who you BE). I suspect we all know people who know all the right things to do, but don’t actually do them, or who say all the right things, but those things aren’t reflected in their character. Leaders like this often are difficult to follow.

The KNOW part of the DoKnowBe Tree is the easiest to develop. It’s easy to read a book or go to a conference or be a participant in LEAD 365 and learn all that great content. What’s hard is applying it: letting it move up the trunk to the things you DO or down the trunk into who you BE. We at Leading by DESIGN feel very strongly that if everything we taught you in our year together has stayed in your trunk as knowledge and not changed who you are or how you behave, then we have failed you. This is why we are such believers in coaching. Coaching can help you make a plan to do the hard things of leadership that start out as knowledge. Coaching helps get rid of junk in the trunk.

This week, maybe take some time to think about the learnings from LEAD 365 that stuck with you the most. Have they moved from your trunk? Have they changed who you are and how you behave? If not, you just might have some junk in your trunk, and it might be time to get moving.

Lead on friends,
Meredith

Image by gailf548. Used under CC By 2.0 license.