One of the attributes – or competencies – of the highly effective leader is initiative.  This manifests as the ability to spot a problem or an opportunity ahead of time and to take action to address it.  Initiative requires a measure of thinking ability (spotting the problem or opportunity) as well as the dynamism to take action.

I was reminded of this recently when reading Sir Richard Branson’s autobiography Losing My Virginity, which contains many examples of this competency.  Branson started his record business as a mail order business, for example, when he realised that students were spending a good deal of money on records and they didn’t like spending them at dreary and uncool retailers like WH Smith.  When the business was almost ruined, in 1971, by a strike by Post Office workers, Branson did not wait and hope but set about opening the company’s first record shop, cutting a deal with the owner of a shoe shop to set up shop on the first floor.

Sometimes, seizing the initiative was itself what brought Branson close to ruin.  This was true when, by accident, he discovered that he could increase his profit margins by buying records for export and selling them within the UK.  Branson was arrested and taken to prison.  His release on bail took place when his mother put up her home as security and Branson learnt an early lesson.  As he put it in his autobiography:  “I couldn’t believe it:  I had always thought that only criminals were arrested:  it hadn’t occurred to me that I had become one.  I had been stealing money from Customs and Excise”.

Branson’s early initiative also reflected his empathy for others.  At the age of just 17, he set up the Student Advisory Centre after helping a friend of his to have an abortion.  He realised that there were many issues faced by students and wanted to provide support.  Much later, the same empathy for others moved him to offer help to get blankets and supplies to foreign workers who had left Kuwait following its invasion by Saddam Hussein.  Shortly after, he was able to leverage his contacts to make it possible to fly women and children out of Baghdad who were amongst the British nationals detained in Baghdad as part of Hussein’s “human shield”.

From a business perspective, my favourite example of initiative from Branson’s autobiography occurred when, in the depths of recession in 1992, the banks refused to lend Virgin the $10 million needed to install small video screens in the back of the seats of Virgin Airways’ small fleet of aircraft.  With a little lateral thinking, Branson contacted Phil Conduit, CEO of Boeing and Jean Pierson at Airbus to ask if they could supply new aircraft with the seat-back videos already fitted at no additional cost.  Both agreed.  Branson then made some enquiries and found that it was easier to get $4 billion credit to buy eighteen new aircraft than it was to get $10 million credit to add the seat-back videos to their existing fleet of planes.

I wonder, where are you seizing the initiative?  And what are the opportunities that are yours for the taking, if only you could spot them and act on them?