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Bicycles and Leadership
July 16, 2009
Being brave means knowing that when you fail, you don’t fail forever.
-Lana del Ray, singer
-Lana del Ray, singer
"Teaching and leading are performance professions. Like riding a bicycle, they involve coordinating mind, body, and heart in sometimes intricate ways to create a successful lesson, meeting, or ride.
"Prospective leaders can study helpful models and descriptions of effective leadership, just as 7-year-olds can learn that they must hold the handlebars, sit on the seat, pedal, and steer. But the performance of leadership involves much more, just as actually trying to ride a bike involves much more. Balancing. Calming fears of crashing. Making sense of one parent's encouraging 'You can do it' and another's 'Watch out for the curb!' Summoning up the courage to finally push off.
"Leading includes a lot of preparation — reading and discussing others' advice and models, planning specific strategies, and anticipating what will happen once you begin. But as with bike riding, you never really know what's going to happen until it happens. You never know whether you can ride a bike until you've wobbled 15 feet in the general direction you'd hoped to wobble.
"Learning to lead is also distinctly different from learning to ride a bike. Eager 7-year-olds must eventually integrate the several parts of their performance task — balance, steering, pedaling, emotion — into a moving system that makes their bikes go. Leaders face the same task, but with one huge difference: The parts they are trying to integrate are already moving, and often with a will of their own. The members of the school faculty, the superintendent, the angry parent, and the upset teacher are not evenly spaced gears on a sprocket driving the wheels. Leading them requires an amazing amount of insight into what people want, mean, think and feel.
"So learning to lead takes a lot of interpersonal learning — coming to understand how your own words, behaviors, and moods shape and are shaped by those people you seek to lead."
In a recent Exchange focus group of early childhood educators, one common concern expressed was the high cost of textbooks. To counter this, Exchange asked, "What if we put our most popular classroom resources on CD at a considerably reduced cost from the print version" ... and the response was a unanimous: "Go for it." So today we are announcing our first textbook on CD — The Art of Leadership: Managing Early Childhood Organizations. Now individuals or training institutions have a choice — they can buy the print version of Art of Leadership for $63 or the CD version for $38.
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Comments (3)
Displaying All 3 CommentsWI Child Care Information Center
Madison, WI, United States
This allegory reminds me of a humorous version of the same illustration. It was included with the author's permission in one of our statewide newsletters for child care providers as an inspirational piece on leadership. Hope you also chuckle!
Top Ten Things I Really Needed to Know That I Learned From Riding a Bicycle
by Rick Krumweide (with apologies to Robert Fulgham and David Letterman)
10. You can take lots of different routes to get to the same place.
9. It's hard to read a map when you're moving.
8. You can ride farther and longer if you don't start too fast at the beginning.
7. There's no substitute for time in the saddle.
6. With the right attitude, and equipment, you can climb any hill.
5. A wider tire may not be as fast as a narrower one, but it doesn't go flat nearly as often.
4. Riding into a head wind with a group is always easier than doing it alone.
3. If you don't lubricate the chain, it will squeak, especially after it rains.
2. Be careful on downhills. It's easy to go too fast, lose control, and crash.
And the number one thing I really needed to know that I learned from riding a bicycle:
1. Don't ride with you mouth open. You never know what you might have to swallow.
United States
To extend the analogy, bicycle racing is a team sport as is leadership. On a racing team, the riders take turns at the front (leading) that allow the other riders to use less energy since they are in the slipstream of the leader. Leadership is best when it is participatory and shared.
Berkeley Heights, NJ, United States
Thanks, I needed this article today.
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