Recently I watched a young man in our organization stand up in a crowd full of our staff and address a problem we were facing with some practical solutions. Many people looked on, some even nodded in a agreement.

However, no one engaged the young man. Not a word was uttered. Days went by without any dialog.

I gathered a group of our leaders and said, “this guy has some great ideas, we ought to engage him. He’s trying to be a change agent and we’re silent.”

A colleague took the lead and stood up and responded to the young man. Suddenly, lots of other staff lined up to add their thoughts and practical solutions to our problem. There was a buzz of excitement around figuring this out.

Many voices from a broad cross-section of the organization began to chime in.

This wasn’t at a conference or series of town-hall meetings. It was on our intranet on a staff forum the whole organization can participate in.

I believe it is essential for your leadership team to be engaging your constituents online. Three things happen when you do this.

1. You show you care – You aren’t just sitting off in your office at the Ivory Tower, you are right in there with the rank and file, feeling the tension of situations at ground level, understanding the current reality and identifying with the cause giving a feeling of, “we’re in this together”. In the scenario I described above, the leadership team was present and everyone could see we cared about solving this problem.

2. You grant permission – I think somehow when leadership begins to comment on blogs or post on internal forums, people feel a greater freedom to participate and share their opinions. The discussion becomes legitimate, not just some back room murmuring.

3. You get good solutions – Online blogs and forums can often serve as sandboxes or incubators for good ideas. We once had a national campaign flow out of someone throwing an idea up on a forum, allowing others to massage it, working out the kinks and bringing it to market in a collaborative way.

What practices have you found effective in engaging your organization online?

During the holiday season back in December, I was flying an Air Canada flight when they made an annoucement that they would be coming through the cabin to collect spare change for the Make a Wish Foundation.

“Noble thing, but kind of a gimmick,” I thought. As the attendent approached I avoided eye contact. I don’t usually carry spare change and besides, I want my giving to be tax-receipted I reasoned.

Without missing a beat, the 8-year-old boy, an unaccompanied minor, sitting beside me reached into his pocket, pulled out $1.25 in coins and put his hand out into the aisle to deposit into the attendent’s envelope.

The attendent was caught off guard. “That’s very kind,” she said to the little boy as she accepted his donation, mostly used to the odd business man throwing 5 or 10 her way. Both she and I had one of those moments were you shake your head and ask yourself, did that just happen!? Wasn’t the kid watching a movie? How does he even have a concept of what charitable giving is all about at his age?

A little boy taught me a lot that day about what it means to be generous, respond to needs and have compassion for the needy. Some days you realize you still have a long way to go in character development.

“You can often get 80% of the way there in two minutes…”

A mentor recently shared this with me and I’ve seen it in action more than once in the last few weeks as groups I’ve been a part of, and observed, choose to get started instead of talking about it.

Simply taking two minutes to write a draft statement, diagram a timeline or sketch a design will often get you 80% of the way there and provide a great starting point.

I have seen so many groups flounder because they lack concrete options to evaluate, discuss or debate. It might only take two minutes to get you most of the way there!

How have you seen this in action?

The old saying goes, “if no one is following you, then you’re not a leader.”

By definition, as a leader, you’re out front, leading the way with others coming along behind. This means that you are often the one that faces the most resistance, encounters obstacles first and expounds the most energy climbing up the mountain because you face the headwinds full force.

Here’s three things I have found helpful in dealing with the headwinds that leaders face.

1. Engage a mentor – A most points in my leadership development, I have had a mentor. A seasoned leader whom will ask me good questions about my development and hold me accountable to leadership and spiritual growth. These men have drawn out the best in me and been good sounding boards as I wrestle through various leadership challenges. In these relationships, I have often driven the agenda and initiated meetings so as to maximize getting wise input from veteran leaders who care enough to invest a few hours every couple of months to help draw out the best in me.

2. Scheduling think time – Scheduling intentional think and planning time into my schedule for pondering the future, reviewing strategic plans and goals refreshes and relaxes me from the daily vigour of being out front in going after big things. For me, making the most of uninterrupted time on airplanes, or scheduling a day once a quarter to get away is key. This alone time to refocus and stoke my vision gives me the extra fuel to face the headwinds that leadership brings.

3. Develop a peloton – In cycling, having a group of people to ride with can reduce drag by as much as 40%! Leadership is no different. Finding a few people to join you out front as you lead others is a tremendous way to offset the headwinds you’ll face. Not only is there camaraderie along the way, but energy is conserved as together you combat the pressures the tribe you are leading faces.

What have you found effective in navigating the headwinds that leadership brings?

A necessary leadership skill is quickly becoming the ability to communicate your ideas with a screen sized post, image or video.

Keeping it to three paragraphs, less than three minutes or 140 characters can be a real challenge, but crucial in engaging your tribe and spreading your ideas.

Can your cause spread 140 characters at a time?

A lot of leaders hang out here, including key members of your tribe.

If you don’t show up, you can bet someone else has captured the attention of people you desperately want to influence. That means someone else’s influence and ideas are getting more airtime than yours. This isn’t necessary bad, but provides a potential high impact opportunity should you choose to seize it.

I had a good chat with my boss* today, where I told him straight up, that I’d read his every blog post and tweet if he showed up. Frankly, others are getting more of my think time than he is.

Note: Those in the blogosphere, generally have room for more people with good ideas. Capture our attention, we’re giving you permission and the opportunity. We’ll even spread them if the ideas are good.

*By the way, I love my boss, we have a great working relationship. He’s thinking about it.

By definition, for collaboration to work, you need to both produce and consume.

If you are only consuming, it is not called collaboration.

Many people want the benefit of shared knowledge repositories and cry out for their creation when they don’t exist or cry out for said repositories when they are unknown to those who could benefit.

The problem is repositories often don’t exist, because of the inertia in thinking that it is somebody else’s job to post what I need to know.

A distributed group trying to coordinate it’s effort will be successful only when it finds a critical mass of people willing to step out and share, question, think out loud and initiate with the rest.

Collaboration works best when the ratio of producers to consumers is moving towards 1.

Three girls, supposed to be studying, their books sprawled across the student center table, each with a laptop open. Ironically, each sat hovered over their laptop, mobile phone in hand, texting or who knows what…

That is the picture I can’t get out of my mind as I spent some time today at our local university campus.

Oh, how I wish it would have been appropriate for me to take out my smartphone and snap a photo.

This is the perfect motivation for your cause, at least if it’s one that wants to reach out to college students, to figure out how to make it your organization they are interacting with on their mobiles instead of studying.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the difference between working “in” the system and working “on” the system. This is an area I want to grow in as I can so easily get caught up in working in the day to day whirlwind of activity without stepping back to think, question and analyze the things I’m doing and the projects I’m leading.

Three ways I try and work “on” the system.

1. Scheduling quarterly reviews for myself. Taking a day a quarter to reflect, re-focus and prioritize is something I’m trying to incorporate into my schedule. Michael Hyatt’s Creating a Personal Life Plan provides some good tracks to run on for this.

2. Creating blueprints. I’m trying to take more time to develop multi-month plans for key projects. Instead of waking up in the morning and reacting to what comes at me or merely having the plan it my head, having a broadstrokes blueprint of what needs to be done by when is helpful in prioritizing working on the right things. This allows me, in a moment of non-reactive sanity, to work out the steps and dependencies of what needs to get done long before it becomes urgent.

My wife and I recently made a six-month fundraising plan for our ministry. It was fun to sit back and think through how we wanted to position our strategy over the next six months and the big components of it. This allows us to proactively plan and adjust rather than always feeling behind.

3. Asking for feedback. “How am I doing?” I recently asked my boss. “Am I on the right track or what things need to be adjusted?” Getting honest feedback from my boss and other colleagues allows me to make mid-course adjustments and proactively work “on” the system, not merely busying myself meeting the demands of those around me.

How do you make sure you are taking time to work “on” the system, not just “in” it?

In a recent discussion with colleagues I commented on the tendency for large organizations to loose their sense of urgency, agility and appetite for radical change compared with the younger days of the organization’s growth.

One colleague wrote back a few days later sharing his experience of going to a MLB playoff game…

I had been to one other game of baseball in the regular season and I was amazed at the difference in the crowd. When a win or loss mattered it changed just almost everything. No one left the stadium till the end. Talk about noise and tension! There is a difference between enjoyment and winning and entertainment and loosing.

If your cause really matters, one of your greatest challenges in leadership is consistently playing like the season is on the line each and every day.

Lives are at stake, people need help and the change you want to bring really matters. Go for it courageously.