If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that last week and the week before we’ve been discussing the controversy at Yahoo and what we can learn about personal leadership from that process. We found that some of Marissa Mayer’s employee’s may have felt abandoned.
Why should a leader care about communication? Let’s talk about the three-sided coin. Most people recognize that a standard coin has two sides. But if you think about it, that rim around the outside is really a third side. You can balance the whole coin on that rim. Leadership is like that—people often forget about the third side. There’s the first side: Marissa Mayer is the leader of the company and she’s running the ship. Let’s call her heads. Then there’s the second side—tails—which is employee leadership, or how the employees are going to lead their own lives in the context and circumstances with which they’re presented. The rim which joins those two? That’s where the real art of leadership thrives. It’s the connection between the two. What happened at Yahoo was a disconnect. The head and the tail were separated. What connects those two sides of leadership—the leadership of the company for Marissa and leadership of self for all those employees involved–has to do with the values, the purpose, the goals, and the mission that each of these employees gets to live with by working for Yahoo. To find that connection, you need to ask what I think is the most powerful question a leader—Marissa or Yahoo employees–can ever ask…but we’ll talk about that next week. Stay tuned for the finale of this four-part series next Wednesday.
