Stretching is Good for You, Especially if you’re a Legacy Leader

Jay Newman, PhD, Founding Partner Culture By Choice

In most athletic endeavors, stretching is a good idea. Stretching keeps our muscles limber and flexible and this helps prevent injury. Some athletes forego stretching and often pay the price for that oversight. The lack of suppleness and flexibility can result in torn tendons, ligaments, and muscles. These injuries are frequently more difficult to recover from than are broken bones.

Our business endeavors have an analogous experience. If we do not stretch our thinking, talent, and growth frameworks, we also run the risk of suffering a professional injury. Similar to tendon, ligament, and muscle injuries, these professional injuries can be difficult to recover from. As is the case with athletes, the best course of action is preventative stretching. Before there is a chance for a catastrophic injury, the Legacy Leaders stretch themselves to make sure their thinking, talent, and growth frameworks can withstand the stress and rigors of the business world.

In athletics, you learn to stretch muscle groups and the tendons and ligaments associated with each of those groups. In the world of business, leaders must learn to stretch their thinking about, what is done, how things are done, and who should be doing those things. Being inflexible in these areas can create limitations for your business. We’ve seen too many businesses lose wonderful opportunities because they lacked the flexibility needed to take full advantage of those opportunities.

Legacy Leaders must also stretch their talent. In this we mean not only their personal talents but the talents of everyone in the organization. And, sometimes that means engaging talent from outside of the organization. Limiting the business to only the talent the leader sees on hand is also limiting the business opportunities. As leaders, we often see only what we’ve always seen and we fail to realize talent that is right before our eyes. Legacy Leaders know to ask members of the organization “who has the ability to do what needs to be done?” Some people will suggest colleagues who they know have talents that others are unaware of. Others may volunteer themselves, knowing they have talents and skills that have not been tapped yet. In either of these cases, Legacy Leaders will follow these suggestions with conversations about how comfortable those individuals are with taking on these new responsibilities and they will make sure those people have the support they need to succeed.

Some businesses also make the mistake of failing to stretch their growth and development muscles. Some people naturally want to learn new things but others are comfortable just staying the way they are. If the world around us was unchanging, perhaps it would be okay to forget stretching in this area but the world is changing and it’s changing fast. Failure to stretch our growth and development muscles creates a closed mindset. A closed mindset sets the stage for disaster faster than any other inflexibility. For it is the closed mindset that tricks us into believing that every thing is alright when the next quick move can cause the career ending injury.

So, how do we go about stretching? The first thing we need to realize is that stretching will take us out of our comfort zone. But just like stretching our muscles, tendons, and ligaments, we must stretch carefully. If we try to stretch everything to the maximum too soon, we will cause the very injury we are trying to prevent. Legacy Leaders know that we have to stretch a little bit today and just a little bit more tomorrow. We have to keep increasing how much we stretch every day until we’ve reached the desired level of flexibility. And, then we have to ask the question, “is this far enough? Can we stretch further? What might happen if we do? What might happen if we don’t?”