THE SEAT YOU'RE IN IS NOT A WAITING ROOM

Eighth in a series at the intersection of values-based leadership, identity-centered growth, and the Seattle nonprofits doing the hardest work in our region. 

What if the title you're waiting for isn't the thing standing between you and the work? What if the budget you don't control isn't it either? 

What if the real barrier is a quiet agreement you made with yourself somewhere along the way that leadership starts one seat up from the one you're in? 

Here is an argument that sounds simple and is not. The seat you are sitting in right now already has power in it. Most of us never spend it. 

What People Tell Me After the Keynote 

I give a lot of talks in this city. The conversations I remember are not the ones at the microphone. They happen in the hallway afterward, when somebody waits for the crowd to thin out and then tells me the truth. 

It comes out as some version of the same sentence. "I agree with all of it. But I'm not the one who decides." 

I understand it. I have said it. I have come to believe it is one of the most expensive sentences in American business, because it is almost always half true. You really don't set the budget. You really can't change the policy on your own. Then the half truth gets quietly promoted into a whole one, and the part of your job you do control goes unspent while you wait on the part you don't. 

Twenty-Five Years Without Authority 

Let me tell you where I learned this, because it was not in a leadership seminar. 

I spent twenty-five-plus years in risk management and internal audit at Amazon, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Walmart, and Target. Here is what people outside that world don't understand about it. An internal auditor has almost no authority. I could not hire or fire anyone in the business. I could not fund anything. I could not order a single business unit to change one line of how it operated. 

What I had was a seat in the room, a set of eyes, and a willingness to say what I saw out loud to people who outranked me. 

That turned out to be enough more often than it had any right to be. Not because I was especially persuasive. Because most organizations are full of people who see exactly what I saw and have decided it is not their place to say so. When somebody finally does, it lands like news. 

If you believe your influence depends on your title, I will offer my whole career as the counterexample. 

The Waiting Room Is a Story, Not a Room 

In my work, I use a framework I built called the Unlocking Curve. It maps the stages leaders move through on the way from disengagement to ownership. The first stage is LOCKED: "I'm just trying to get through." 

Locked is not lazy. Locked is usually tired, and often it is the sane response to a season that asked too much of you. But it hardens if nobody names it. It stops being a season and becomes a story about what you are allowed to do. 

The stage that breaks it is not the impressive one at the top of the curve. It is the plain one in the middle, the one I call ENGAGED: "I still get to choose." 

That is the whole turn. Not a promotion. Not permission from above. 

Two People Who Did Not Wait 

Longtime readers have met both of these people in this column already. 

The first is the young woman who emailed me after my booking link tried to charge her four hundred and fifty dollars to ask me a question. She had no standing and every reason to close the tab and go find somebody else. She wrote back anyway, one line. What should my next step be? She had the least authority of anyone in that exchange, and she is the reason my calendar works differently today. She took the door off the hinges from the outside. 

The second is a room of high school students I asked how to grow this work. Sixteen and seventeen years old. They handed me three answers: use your ambassadors, use the technology, collaborate instead of competing. I wrote it down as fast as they said it. That is the kind of growth strategy companies pay consultants for, from people who don't run anything yet. 

Neither of them held a seat that entitled them to speak. They spoke from the seat they had.

Try This From Your Seat 

Here is the practice for this week. No budget, no title, fifteen minutes. 

Write down the change you most want to see in your team or your organization. One sentence. Specific enough that somebody else could tell whether it happened. 

Now split a page into two columns. On the left, everything about that change you do not control. On the right, everything you do. Be rigorous about the right column, because the right column is the one we all shortchange. Who do you invite? What you ask in the meeting. What do you put in writing. What you refuse to let pass without comment. Whose name you say out loud when the room is deciding, and that person isn't there. 

Then take one item off the right column and do it before Friday. Don't propose it. Do it. 

If the right column comes up genuinely empty, you have learned something real, and the answer is not to wait harder. The answer is a different seat, and that is a decision you get to make, not a sentence you are serving. 

The Seat Nobody Told You Was Open 

Here is the turn I make every time in this column, and it is not a detour. 

If you want a seat with real leverage in this region, the shortest path is not up your own org chart. It is onto a nonprofit board. 

After-School All-Stars Puget Sound, Rainier Valley Leadership Academy, UNCF Seattle, and Community Roots Housing all need exactly what a mid-career professional already carries. Finance skills, Audit skills, HR, legal, real estate, technology, and communications. That is not a volunteer shift, and it is not a table at a gala. That is governance, and it is a seat where your judgment moves real resources toward real people. 

I am practicing what I am asking of you. I recently joined the board of Seafair, so I am in a new seat myself, and the learning curve is exactly as steep as I am promising. 

Not sure how to find your seat? Corporate Giving Network's Board Matchmaking program runs a two-hour workshop on nonprofit board service and matches business professionals with nonprofits looking for members: corporategn.com/board-matchmaking. 

I have argued in this space that expertise is the most underrated thing the business community has to give. I will go one step further. It is also the fastest leadership development available to you. You will sit with a budget where every line is a person, and you will learn more in one fiscal year than you will in any classroom, including mine. 

Community over competition, y'all. Those boards are seats too, and nobody is going to come find you for one. Go ask. 

So, stop waiting on the chair you think you need. Look hard at the one you are already sitting in. I suspect it has more room than anyone has told you. 

Create Possibilities, Not Excuses. 

Jesse Rhodes Jr. 

Jesse Rhodes Jr. is a speaker, author of Leadership Unlocked: Harness the Power of Your Ambition, host of The Possibility Room podcast, and strategic advisor specializing in values-based leadership. He teaches at the University of Washington Foster School of Business, serves on the UNCF Seattle Leadership Council, and chairs the board of After-School All-Stars Puget Sound. He is available for keynotes, leadership offsites, and Employee Resource Group (ERG) events. The Possibility Room premieres November 17: watch, comment, and follow at thepossibilityroom.riverside.com. Reach him at info@jesserhodesjr.com.