Leadership Lessons from Seeing the Northern Lights through a Camera Lens

This past weekend, the world got one of the best-ever looks at the Aurora Borealis, aka the Northern Lights. Personally, I was in northern Minnesota at the time. I forgot my DSLR camera at home but managed to snap some decent shots with my iPhone.

I took in the beautiful sights with several friends, who were also feverishly taking photos of the sky with their phones.

This is what I experienced last weekend. Many of you probably experienced something similar:

1. You looked up into the sky and saw some faint shapes of the Aurora. It looked mostly grey. Perhaps there was a hint of color.
2. You pulled out your phone, pointed it at the sky, and took a snap.
3. Then, you looked at the picture on your phone and were filled with amazement and awe. You were quickly inspired to show it off to your friends.

I was pretty sure this wasn’t just me. I’m getting older, but my eyesight isn’t that bad yet.

I looked online and confirmed my suspicions. Yes, for sure, the Aurora Borealis looks a lot brighter in photos than it does with the naked eye. There are good scientific reasons why, but it all boils down to cameras being more sensitive to this type of light than your eyes are. If you’d like to read more on that, check out this article here.

Some of you missed out on seeing the Aurora Borealis completely, but you were probably bombarded with your friend’s photos sent over text or social media.

Your friends all said, “I saw the Northern Lights! Check out my sweet photo!” You think they are telling the truth, but that’s not quite right.

I doubt any of us saw social media posts that said something like this: “I looked for the Northern Lights, but basically saw nothing remarkable at all until I blindly took a picture of the sky and was completely surprised by what was on my camera. Here it is, take a look.”

The Leadership Lesson

Now, I will connect the dots to the practice of leadership. Here’s an unfortunate truth: The higher you climb the leadership hierarchy in your organization, the less you can directly see what is really going on. It’s sad, but true. Left to natural communication mechanisms, information will be filtered and watered down on its way up to you. Things may look good but are actually bad. Conversely, you may see one glaring bad thing about your organization, but the entirety of the good goes unseen.

Left to your natural sight, you can’t really see what’s going on. So, you must employ tools to give you the visibility you need. There are lots of such tools that provide insight. One of my favorites is the employee engagement survey. Many organizations, large and small survey their employees regularly with a battery of questions to measure how engaged they are in their work.

All leaders want their employees to love what they do, care about the mission, and give their efforts, intellect, creativity, and passion to the task. Of course, there’s so much in any organization that can erode that, and leaders can’t begin to fix it if they can’t see where and what types of issues exist.

While these surveys are properly anonymized, as leaders, we can often look for patterns that help us diagnose issues. We never punish bad results, but instead, we look for ways to support improvements in team health.

Using a camera to take pictures of the Aurora Borealis isn’t cheating. It’s not fake. It’s not a filter or Photoshop. The Aurora Borealis is really there. Your eyes just don’t work as well as a camera lens. Similarly, use the tools at your disposal to see what’s really going on with your team. Don’t just rely on your direct observation. That’s a very limited view. There’s a whole lot more color to be seen. Go out there and see it!

Read this article on my blog site or listen to it on my podcast???