Walk Slowly Through the Crowd

John Maxwell coined the phrase, “Walk slowly through the crowd.” I first heard John Maxwell say that in an audio subscription I received monthly several years ago. That statement has impacted my leadership greatly.
As a leader I have many things on my mind. Not all of them are important for the moment and may not be future productive. The fact that my mind is full of thoughts is not unique to myself because the human brain is designed to have many thoughts continuously. Because our minds are busy with our thoughts we may tend to miss the people around us. Then consider those times when our schedules are intensely full and our stress level is high that there is an increased possibility of people whom we may not notice. When we are experiencing those days or weeks there is also the increased tendency to be task focused. Our minds are preoccupied with the work at hand, vision for the organization, and dreams to be fulfilled. Or, on the other hand, our minds may be trying to solve a problem in our life or those close to us.

When we are busy that is when we need to slow down. Of course, we cannot slow down our work activity or our productivity during the more demanding times of our leadership. But, we can slow down our step and our mind when passing the people in our days. I am always amazed at what a simple smile can communicate to a person in passing or a warm hello.

I regularly visited the hospital of the small town of which I lived in western Canada. I was a pastor of a church at that time and I called on patients of our congregation as well as others in the community. One day a friend told me that she was speaking to a colleague from the hospital. She mentioned my name in the conversation and her colleague said, “Oh, I know him. He is the man who smiles and greets everyone when he walks through the building. I always am happy when he comes.” When I heard the compliment I was a bit surprised. I thought that what I was doing was normal; not out of the ordinary. Yet from this person’s response it seems it is not normal. I then realized how much people need to be recognized and affirmed.

How does walking slowly through the crowd effect and increase our leadership? Let’s consider a scenario. You are up to your ears with work, you have deadlines to meet and you feel quite stressed. You are now going into a meeting of your board of directors. You walk in the room, sit down and announce, “We have a lot of material to cover so let’s get to work.” What did you miss? Now if you are task oriented you just now begin to think of what papers you are missing or what project presentation you forgot back in your office. But, what you missed is not the hard copy things of the organization. You missed the soft part of the organization. You missed the relationship that people need with you to do a good job.

What if you go back out of the board meeting room, close the door and start over? Now, pause and let your mind begin to embrace the people who will help you with the work. Open the door and say, “Hello everyone, I’m glad we can be together.” Then you preface your work agenda with comments about the value of each person on this team and how you expect to accomplish something great in the meeting.” What have you changed? You have changed your thinking to put value on the people and you have changed the atmosphere in doing so. In this second scenario it is assumed that you still have stress and you still have a heavy workload. That aspect has not changed. What did change is that you are now able to share that workload with those valued people you lead.

I have to remind myself to walk slowly through the crowd. I must remind myself of this even more when I have extra portions of tasks to be done and personal relationships that need extra energy to keep them strong. The bottom line is this; walk slowly through the crowd and the crowd will be more than willing to help you walk through the steps ahead.