Do we expect too much from politicians?

It's election season! 

If you live in Maryland, early voting is open, and you have until July 19th to cast your vote in the primary.

But I didn't write this to talk politics. Yes, you should vote. But in deciding who I want to vote for this year, I realized something.

I was expecting too much.

Over the past few months, I've had the opportunity to listen to and meet several of the candidates running for county council, county executive, and governor.

And to be perfectly honest, I've been really impressed by the visions they laid out.

But I also left a lot of these meet and greets wondering, does this person have the execution chops to actually make their visions become reality?

After all, an idea is just that - an idea. It's only when those ideas become real things that they have any impact.

That very thing is why I do what I do in my work. To create the infrastructure that makes the visions founders have for their business become real.

But then I got to thinking... the very problem that a lot of my clients have is that they're trying to do both things at once. Build the vision AND operate the business.

They're the leader, the grower, and the doer, and there's only so many hours in a day.

My clients come to me because they have too much on their plate and they know that in order to scale their business, they can't do it all alone.

So is it fair for me to expect that elected officials be all the things too? The leader, the visionary, and the implementer?

Or instead, should I look for leaders who have great ideas, but also have the wisdom to know who to surround themselves with to make those ideas happen?

Yes, we should expect a lot from the people that run our government. But I don't think it's fair to expect them to be super heroes. After all, we wouldn't hold ourselves to that standard.

Think about the kind of leader are you for your business. Are you the visionary? The operator? The fixer? The creative? Or are you a little bit of everything?

If you want your business to scale, you can't do all the things. And you can't keep it all in your head. You need people around you who can extract the vision you have in your head, and turn it into real things. Things like systems, process, and structure.

That's exactly what I do for my clients. And if a politician needs their own Brad to implement their vision, who am I to fault them for it?

So get out there and vote. And if you're in the market for a Brad, shoot me an email or schedule a time to chat.