Leadership on Location – Part 2

I think there are two significant benefits in taking “Leadership on location.” Last week, I wrote about the first, that you open the eyes and minds of your followers to infinite possibilities when you take them to experience things they’ve never experienced before.

Today, I want to talk about the second great benefit.

When I was homeschooling my two sons, Andrew and Ross, I made every effort I could to make the classroom much bigger than our house. Growing up, I had personally benefited from watching my father interact with customers in Chick-fil-A and understood the power of leadership on location.

One of the visits we took was to the famous United States Military Academy at West Point. I had a rough idea of what I hoped my sons would learn during the trip, but you’ll always be surprised but what lessons you walk away with. The moment that caught me off guard in a wonderful way was the breakfast we had with the cadets.

I’ll never forget watching the faces of my 12- and 13-year-old boys, as they witnessed the Sunday morning breakfast. A million of my words about discipline couldn’t have accomplished what minutes spent with the cadets did as they went about something as simple as breakfast. It was ordered and efficient and structured, with a reason for each movement and execution. And that was just breakfast!

On another day, I took my boys to sit in the back of a courtroom. For hours we watched traffic court and then spent time in the judge’s chambers discussing what we had seen. I could write about the reality of consequences and the weight of our actions, but the 3D impact of watching people work through their own in that courtroom was much more powerful. We continued that experience by visiting a police station and watching them unload and process stolen merchandise. My boys had the value of hard work and honesty reinforced in an unexpected way during those experiences.

How can you do something similar with your family or business? I think the most important thing is that whenever you’re teaching others, you should try to put them in an environment that helps communicate principles. If you understand the principles you’re aiming for, it’s easy to make a short list of the places in your neighborhood or community that will touch upon them.

That’s why I love taking Chick-fil-A employees on a Vision and Values tour that stretches across Atlanta from the first Dwarf Grill to a homeless shelter that is very much at the heart of what we do.

And it’s why I always recommend you take leadership on location.

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