By Javier Sanchez

We’re all afraid to rock the boat. We have been taught since children not to make waves. No one wants to deal with the motion sickness. So we play it safe and aim for steady as she goes. That may prevent children from making too much noise in front of the adults, but it doesn’t make for great stewardship. Choosing not to rock the boat exposes a failure in leadership due to inaction. Looking at my own inaction and indecisiveness, I find a record of lowered standards and depressed morale among the very people I am supposed to inspire. I know I am not perfect and sometimes I beat myself up over my lack of consistency and follow-through. Yet we shouldn’t translate our inadequacies into a blanket state of hopelessness to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I trace my principal shortcoming to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. It seems like the old adage is right: The thing you hold on to tightest is the very thing you must let go. I have taken an all-or-nothing approach to life because of what Kant called the categorical imperative. It is his approach to understanding morality from a philosophical perspective. The categorical imperative says that you should treat actions as though – if they were universalized – they could be applied to all. It is a way of saying that for something to be perceived as good, the action can and, in fact, must be duplicated infinitely. I have always taken this to mean that if I take an action – like say, performing checklists at work – then it is only good if it is done exactly and perfectly all of the time – by me and by everyone else. Anything less is a fail.

Let’s add to this all of the other actions that are considered good, like getting to work on time, always checking for labor reports, checking on customers while simultaneously doing the other things that make a good manager good. It just so happens that as a manager, leader and model, the list of things that need to get done is quite long, if not endless. To get caught up in Kant’s maxim, being good requires that I also be perfect. Failure to perform any of these individual duties to the absolute maximum potential means a total failure of the system – a complete breakdown and a total moral failure on my part.

Passive leadership thrives in self-pity. It tells itself that action is useless because it fails to achieve perfect success. We can’t look for perfection. It’s easy to give up on holding standards and maintaining high expectations when you don’t want to rock the boat. What we need is action toward a goal that is farther off than others can see. We need a strong wind to guide us forward. Oftentimes the direction is less important than the thrust.

Passive leadership lets the junk pile up without taking any action. It’s what happens when you let people take advantage of you, break your standards, or allow their selfishness to get in the way of a team effort. It chips away at your soul little by little. Don’t let your failures or feelings of inadequacy change the trajectory of your leadership and potential. You can still actively lead and not be perfect. You can still set high expectations for others while sometimes failing at them yourself. It’s not about winning every point. It’s about winning most of them.

Active leadership means making the tough decisions when others can’t. It doesn’t mean you’re perfect. It just means that you can see beyond the horizon. Most people react to situations; leaders create them. I remember reading once that a ship in harbor is safe; but that’s not what ships are for. Open that sail. The world has seen enough passive leadership.

Javier Sanchez is an El Rito Media columnist, former Española mayor, and restaurant owner. and