Hello. I'm Leah Carey and I am a consultant and facilitator at Insight Experience. I've consulted and coached executives on leadership development for over 30 years. I'm particularly interested in any concept that increases leader self-awareness, because I believe this awareness is critical to leadership effectiveness. John le Carré, British author of espionage novels and former British spy, would know that a broader view of the world is less dangerous. This is true for novelists, spies, and leaders of all types. One of the goals for this program is to provide you with a balcony perspective.
When we talk about leadership, we often talk about the actions of leaders. Just as important is your mindset or perspective. I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about what it is to have a balcony perspective. As a leader, getting on the balcony is a metaphor made popular by two professors at the Kennedy School of Government, Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky, in their book Leadership on the Line. They suggested that leaders must get up off the dance floor, so to speak, and onto the balcony to gain a different and broader perspective on the businesses they lead.
Let's think about leading and managing as being on a dance floor. Picture yourself on a dance floor: Maybe it's ballroom dancing, maybe it's a wedding. It's loud and busy. What do you see? You see your partner, other dancers, and what's happening around you up close. You see tiny details, and you have some peripheral vision. You can often anticipate the bumps that are coming. The dance floor is where the action happens.
Now, when you get on the balcony, what do you see? Dancers are moving around. You see everything that's happening with them and around them—what's going well and what's not, who's dancing and who's not. You see the patterns that emerge. The patterns are critical knowledge that can only be gained from this perspective. How will you see it all if you're down in it? What might you miss?
If you think the dance floor is your daily operations, then what might be the balcony for you? How will you create that space to see more broadly as a leader? Here are some balcony-type activities. It's a good list ranging from spending time on your own reflecting to collaborating with and learning from others, whether they be customers, stakeholders, or peers. Anything that broadens your perspective on your business that you do intentionally is a balcony activity.
To be clear, Heifetz and Linsky were not proposing that you become a balcony-only leader. They believe that you need to be both in the day to day and on the balcony, moving between the two with intention and awareness, taking what you learn from one perspective to inform the other. The suggestions here can help spur your own thinking about how to build balcony time into your already very busy leadership life. Take yourself out of the fray to understand what's really going on. Make this a practice of yours: Deliberately set aside time from the day-to-day routines, and don't get stuck in one perspective or the other. You can't affect action up on the balcony. To have an impact, you must return to the dance floor.
One last thought about the balcony: A colleague of mine was an Olympic sailor. She grew up in New Zealand, where sailing was just something everyone did. As a young girl starting her sailing career on a lake, she got in the boat with some other kids but just couldn't make sense of it. Everything they taught her on land didn't reflect the reality of the wind and waves on the sailboat. It was frustrating. But remember, she became an Olympic sailor.
What made the difference for her was that her sailing coach had her climb up to the ridge above the lake to look at the action from there. From that view, she could see how the wind was impacting the boats, how the boats rounded the buoys, and who was in the lead. She totally got it. Back in the boat, she could keep both the broad perspective of the elements and the narrow perspective of her race in her mind at all times. To be a great sailor, she needed both perspectives.
This is something to be aware of as you execute strategy in your organization. How will you change your current practice of leadership to shift consciously between the balcony and the dance floor? If you already do this, how will you even more intentionally use what you discover in each view to inform the other?