The Unexpected Leader

7Your Leadership Blueprint

Have you ever looked at a real blueprint? I imagine that you may conceptually know what a blueprint is and you may even recall that, historically, blueprints were blue. But have you ever actually picked one up or even seen one lately? Things change and advance with time and blueprints are one of them because they aren't actually blue anymore. Before I get into why we're talking about blueprints in the first place, I want you to simmer on this notion for just a moment.

Blueprints were actually blue when they were created in 1842 by John Herschel, a polymath in science-related fields, but that changed in the 1940s, when less expensive printing methods and digital displays became available. Even though they aren't blue anymore, to this day many of us still refer to them as blueprints and would bet that they're actually blue. But the practitioners who actually utilize these documents no longer call them blueprints; they refer to them as drawings, prints, or plans. Nonetheless, it is still common to refer to these plans as blueprints.

I liken the concept of blueprints to help understand our relationship with leadership. A blueprint is a view of a structure or building at the core foundational level. This level is so important because when all of the decorative options get piled on top of the foundation, it has to be able to withstand and endure. When we talk about leadership, think of it as a bottom-up pyramid approach, but what you see at the top of the ...