Incline I

Groups create vacuums - small pockets where stasis sets in, where nothing is happening. Imagine a cocktail party in its early stages, where everyone is standing around, waiting for something to happen.

Or a marketplace before it opens, filled with shoppers but with all the stores boarded up, with nothing to create energy or excitement.
There are no tribes here, only isolated individuals in groups with no motion.

Leaders figure out how to step into those vacuums and create motion. They work hard to generate movement - the sort of movement that can transform a group into a tribe.

A student can sit in a classroom and accept what the teacher is sending out, then do the work and get by. Or she can take initiative and lead. She can provoke and question and ask for more.

A Marketer can offer a product, take orders, and move on. Or he can use interactions with prospects to create something more, to surprise and delight and generate far more than just a customer who got her money's worth.

This posture of leaning in is rare and valuable.
In the spring of 2008,I (Seth Godin) announced a paid summer internship for students. More than 130 well-educated students from all over the world applied.

As an experiment, I set up a private Facebook group for the applicants and invited each one to participate. Sixty of them joined immediately.

No tribe existed yet - just sixty strangers in an online forum.

Within hours, a few had taken the lead, posting topics, starting discussions, leaning in and leading. They called on their peers to contribute and participate.
And the rest? They lurked. They sat and they watched. They were hiding, afraid of something that wasn't likely to happen.

Whom would you hire?

How could the lurkers imagine that doing nothing would increase the chances that they'd be selected? Were they hoping that they'd meet someone interesting or discover something new by just watching?

The experiment was perfect in that there were no externalities, no side discussions, no special cases - just sixty or so people, each demonstrating behaviour that came naturally.

Not all leadership involves getting in the face of the tribe. It takes just as much effort to successfully get out of the way.
Jimmy Wales leads Wikipedia not by inciting, but by enabling others to fill the vacuum.
My leadership of the internship application process involved setting the stage and stepping back, not pushing at every step along the way.

The one path that never works is the most common one: doing nothing at all.

Nothing at all feels safe and it takes very little effort. It involves a lot of rationalizing and a bit of hiding as well

The difference between backing off and doing nothing may appear subtle, but it's not.
A leader who backs off is making a commitment to the power of the tribe, and is alert to the right moment to step back in. Someone who is doing nothing is merely hiding.

Leadership is a choice. It's the choice to not do nothing.

Lean in, back off, but don't do nothing.