Musings at Altitude

I wrote last night about “corporate heart” and my emotion flowed about how those with extreme logic will sometimes espouse that logic at the expense of trust and empowerment.  As I continued to think through what corporate heart really meant, I kept coming back to the corporate heartbeat and realized this morning that every corporate heart has a pacemaker, and that pacemaker provides the consistency, the pace, and the volume of the flow of corporate blood being pumped all over the corporate body.  In some organizations, that pacemaker is the leader and the leader sets the pace and determines the volume of blood and all parts of the organizational body take their direction and pace from that leader.  As I think back on some of the business leaders I’ve read about in my past, Jack Welch and Lou Gerstner were two business leaders that clearly were the pacemakers for their organizations.  In other organizations, the original owners may still control the board and that board may then be the pacemaker for the heart of the organization.

In our organization, however, the pacemaker for our heartbeat is our owners and it’s their culture and their faith that drive the consistency, the pace, and the volume from our corporate heart.  It’s our owners that everyone in this organization synch up to, and it’s that common pursuit of delivering well beyond their expectations that motivates us all.  As we’ve grown bigger, new people with vastly deep experience have come in to offer their logic to our owner driven heartbeat.  As with most very talented and aggressive people, they’ve stepped in as stimulants to the pacemaking rather than synchronizing partners to the pace already established.  Over time, those individuals will either dramatically change the pace of heartbeat or they will come in align with the heartbeat established by those providing the pacing.

One of our elders once told me, “sometimes we know too much, don’t we.”  It’s so hard to quietly listen to hear that heartbeat and then allow that pacemaker to then pull you in to that organizational flow.  It’s also sometimes so very hard to understand how we can add the great experience and aggressiveness of new team members to an already pumping heart and make it stronger without needing to change out or radically redesign the current pacemaker.  We’re programmed from early on to compete and win, to sense and react, to take charge and succeed, and yet that programming can be completely counter to a trust and empowerment heartbeat of any organization.

I’m a heartbeat listening business leader, and I’m so very thankful and respectful of the pacemaker for our corporate heart today.  As I look forward, I hope our quest for maturity is first framed in listening to that heartbeat and then synching with that pacemaker.  As we add others to this incredible growth journey we’re on, I hope they listen for the rythmn of that culture and faith grounded heartbeat, and then as they hear the purity of that beat, they align themselves with that pacemaker and together that heartbeat just becomes stronger.