Some people admire sports figures. Some admire movie stars. I, on the other hand, admire Ken Feinberg.
“Who?” I can almost hear you asking. Feinberg is a guy who takes on huge challenges. He administered the fund to compensate 9/11 victims. He was tapped to be the pay czar for the big financial institutions immediately post-bailout. As of Monday, he’s running the BP oil spill compensation fund.
These are all massive projects, and they’re all projects where you’re guaranteed to be highly disliked by many people (even if you’re admired by others). Agree or not about the politics and the personalities, it takes chutzpah to step up and take that kind of project on.
Of course, I admire others in my day-to-day life who do the same thing, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale. The co-worker who, after yet another weekly meeting, takes the leader (who happens to be her boss) aside and offers suggestions about how to make the meetings better — or to eliminate them altogether. The customer service “escalation” person, who has the job of calling the most unhappy customers of their company to help solve their issues. The brand-new internal learning facilitator who starts with training the executive leaders.
These are also things that take guts. Part of that courage is knowing that you’ll make it work — you’ll figure it out. It’s not confidence, exactly (you realize it COULD go horribly wrong), but maybe optimism. Even if it bombs, it’s still a chance to learn, and it will be better the next time.
I find a lot of this kind of courageous optimism in the VisualsSpeak community. For many audiences, the idea of evoking ideas through images is new. Spending precious time with an immersive image-based toolset? Unfathomable.
But the folks who try out the VisualsSpeak tools press on. They get it. They know that it may seem weird or uncomfortable at first, but within minutes, people will be immersed and engaged. Even the reluctant will be hooked — or at least intrigued. We talk a lot about the “magic in the room” that happens with VisualsSpeak, and part of that magic is the way it just turns people around.
So in addition to the big, globe-changing risk takers like Feinberg, I have to add the VisualsSpeak community to my list of people I admire. Because day in and day out, they’re trying something that may seem hard at first — and they know how great it can be.
This post is tagged: Community, ImageSet, Leadership, Reflections, Teams
