It’s a great week of slowly rising temperatures here in Chicago, but still not prime time for iced coffee in the morning. Today’s cup is a dark, bold Papau New Guinea, roasted locally of course.

Now before you skewer me for suggesting in the title of this post that there are leadership lessons to be learned from people reporting on what coffee they are having for breakfast and what the weather in Chicago will be like this week, have another sip and read on.

As just a bit of background, I jumped into Twitter like I did into blogging…with one toe and very, very cautiously. Blogging has become a part of my daily dna and a rich part of my professional life, and Twitter has served to remind me of some important lessons that we as leaders tend to lose track of as we move through our careers.

Leadership Lessons & Reminders from Twitter:

-It takes a certain amount of curiosity and yes, even courage for forty-something corporate types to even admit that there might just be something to a social networking tool like Twitter. Many of my contemporaries scoff and mock the tool and anyone participating.

As leaders, we often lose our intellectual curiosity and courage as we move through our careers. We’ve seen it all before and we’re well aware in our own minds that when you take risks and do something a bit edgy, most of the time, bad things happen. We’ve seen fads come and go, and to many of us, this is just one more fad.

To those involved, it is part of the fundamental rewriting of the rules of how people engage and converse. And while the lessons of networking and the exchange of ideas are as old as humanity, the reach and speed here are remarkable and unprecedented.

-Twitter is a meritocracy of ideas and the lack of hierarchy and internal politics ensures a much more open exchange than you get in the traditional workplace. There are some truly rich conversations and great ideas being exchanged here daily. Imagine if we can create systems with our customers and even internally in our own organizations by cutting out the natural stifling of great thoughts due to politics and hierarchy. The opportunities for idea generation and ultimately innovation are endless.

-Talk with smart people and you learn a great deal. I’ve managed to expand my professional network of smart people from around the globe considerably and I learn everyday from reading the posts and gaining feedback from some great professionals that I’ve met here on Twitter. A year’s worth of conferences and networking events would not have allowed me to equal the networking quality or quantity in just a few months of 15 minutes per day.

–In life and in business, there are incredible opportunities to waste time and energy, and the same potential exists in the social networking arena. I choose to tune out the infomercials and ignore those that appear not to be genuine in pursuit of giving ideas to gain insights.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

  • Participate in the events of your times or you will be relegated to the past.
  • Keep moving and keep growing or you will rust in place.
  • With new tools come new rules and if you are involved in the business of creating value for customers and leading others in the process, you must understand the new tools and rules. Your customers and your employees are engaged in a whole new universe of conversations that you might just be missing.
  • Passive participation is the same as non-participation.
  • Don’t mock what you don’t know.
  • Don’t waste your time with the time wasters.

Oh, and by the way. How is it that you are planning on leading teams of globally dispersed, multi-generational professionals when you don’t even understand how entire groups communicate, collaborate and socialize?