People may not remember your name, your face, or where you are from. Most people will hardly remember most things you have said to them. But, as Maya Angelou wrote, “they will never forget how you made them feel.”Part of being human, being a human being, is our need to be connected, not just for the necessities of life we depend on others for, but for the emotional connections to our surroundings and our experiences which is what life is about. Your feelings are the foundation of your every thought, every action you take, and everything significant and meaningful that you accomplish.
We all begin life helpless and unable to speak or make sense of the world beyond the care of those who tend to us. You smiled and cooed when you felt love, cried when you were cold, wet, tired, hungry, or afraid – and connected with those who provide your safety, sustenance, and comfort. Your survival, it turns out, was not solely a function of having your physical needs met but your emotional needs as well. Studies show that without touch, meaning physical contact with another human, babies cannot thrive and will die. How we feel is a matter of life and death. It is why solitary confinement is such a cruel and effective form of punishment. And why being banished from your friends and family may be a fate worse than death.
Life soon becomes a series of rewards or punishments based on how you behave and the choices you make.
At some point, we must all earn to take control of our emotions and conform to behaviors necessary to taking care of our own needs, and those behaviors that inure the acceptance or even the adoration of others. Humans are social animals.
Life soon becomes a series of rewards or punishments based on how you behave and the choices you make. You cannot necessarily control how you feel, but you learn to manage how you respond to your feelings and exercise this control to socialize with others effectively. Some people are easier to get along with than others, some struggle to get along with others at all, and some learn to manipulate others to their own benefit and interests, while others use their social skills to serve the needs and interests of others, living what the classic philosophers often described as a virtuous life
Living a virtuous life is not about pleasing people or gaining their approval or acceptance. It is about making choices as to what is right or wrong. It is being conscientious or driven to behave in accordance with your conscience rather than the status quo. Living such a life often involves making unpopular choices that might even make you an outcast from your family or community. So how do you reconcile the absolute need for human connection and choosing to live a virtuous life?
Part of the answer is that as much as humans seek connection, we also seek joy. Pleasure and happiness seem to be part of our primal instincts, drawing us away from fear, danger, and death. But joy is more than simple pleasure or the absence of pain. Joy is the experience of genuine satisfaction, the experience of knowing that you are doing something good and accomplishing something worthwhile. The sense of overwhelming joy you experience in the moments of those accomplishments can be more powerful than even your need for connection.
Living a virtuous life is not about pleasing people or gaining their approval or acceptance.
While there have always been certain people who choose to isolate themselves or prefer to live as hermits, this kind of antisocial behavior is not normal, it tends to be sociopathic. Even more extreme are the psychopaths to prey on the social needs of others to afflict harm for their selfish pleasures.
Some people live monastic lives, choosing a spiritual connection over carnal ones. Unlike sociopaths and psychopaths, these people find purpose in discipline and reward in what they feel (or believe) they are accomplishing. They find what most describe as peace and joy. By depriving themselves of simple comforts, pleasures, and distractions and focusing on a deep, unshakable sense of purpose, they find enormous contentment through their belief that they are doing something that serves a greater good – or higher purpose. Again, moments of overwhelming joy can be more powerful than human connection.
The difference between the monk and those who seek to break conventions and challenge the status quo is that cloaked in religion —where you a community of like-minded people embraces you, where the zealots who choose to be outcasts might find themselves genuinely alone. Both require the same inner strength, but those who set out alone to change the world for the better need the courage of their convictions to accept the isolation they are likely to be forced to endure.
The common thread between those who seek isolation and those forced into it is their beliefs and deep conviction in their personal sense of purpose. Both display what we define as having emotional intelligence: the ability to defer short-term gratification in pursuit of something greater at a later point in time.
The term “emotional intelligence” speaks to the fact that you cannot fully separate your feelings from your decisions. Doing so is not possible, nor would it be beneficial. Even those highly trained to eliminate hesitation by separating their emotions from what would otherwise be a difficult task are merely replacing emotions that are counterproductive in the moment (such as fear or empathy) and replacing them with feelings of duty and purpose. It is how special operations forces or trained to do their jobs. Their sense of purpose and duty is what informs their courage and conscientiousness. Otherwise, rather than highly disciplined special forces, they would be unpredictable and unmanageable gangs of murderous psychopaths: it is what distinguishes heroes from villains.
It is the same reason that emotional intelligence is foundational to competent leadership. Effective leaders not only manage their own feelings but also have a highly developed awareness of how they make others feel. Attracting willing followers, as opposed to conscripting captive servants, requires either the ability to be inspirational or manipulative. Both may work equally well in the short run, but leadership by manipulation (or coercion) invariably loses traction. Manipulation requires emotional intelligence. You need an awareness of how your behavior impacts the behaviors of others. The difference is that inspirational leaders see themselves serving those they lead instead of being served by them. That is the popularized notion of “servant leadership” that my good leaders ascribe to. The problem is a common misperception; exceptional leaders don’t serve their followers. They serve a worthy and indelible cause – and lead others to join them to serve the cause – not their leader.
That is why manipulation always fails. People fully embrace and even embody a cause when they feel it necessary to do so, that they truly have no choice. It may appear that when coerced, people have no choice but to do whatever is being demanded of them, while in fact, people always do. You can never force someone to do anything they cannot or will not do. Even when threatened with death, people can choose to die rather than do what they are told they must.
That is the second layer of foundation you find in exceptional leaders. They have an unshakable sense of what they must do. Even when following the orders of others, they have an abiding belief in what is necessary and what must be made to be possible. This kind of conviction defies the need to be liked or even loved. Your purpose rises above your own needs and serves whatever great and worthy purpose guides you.
Exceptional leaders know that earning respect is far more important and valuable than seeking to be liked. General George Patton once said that nobody ever followed him into battle because they liked him. It was because they trusted him. You can only trust those who you respect. The need to be liked or the fear of being disliked is a fatal leadership fault. Great leaders tend to be revered, not for appeasing their constituents but for leading them to accomplish significantly worthwhile things. They demonstrate to others what is necessary and how to make them possible and then spark the inspiration of their followers to make what is possible necessary to accomplish.
Exceptional leaders know that earning respect is far more important and valuable than seeking to be liked.
Neither logic nor intelligence alone will cause people to make things necessary. People do things that are challenging to them only when they can, and they feel they have to. You will never do anything that cannot be done, or you are unwilling to do. Reasoning with someone might change how they feel, but you cannot change what other people believe. You cannot force anyone to change what they believe about anything, regardless of your facts or proof, any more than you can force someone to love you. People own their beliefs and what they feel and, at best, might be willing and able to control both. The ability to get people to change how they feel and adopt new beliefs is the hallmark of great leadership. That is the third foundation layer of competent leadership.
Being a good leader means being competent at leadership. Competence means accomplishing what is meaningful and significant. Without significant and meaningful accomplishments, you cannot be competent at anything. You might have the requisite competencies: the knowledge, skill, talent, or credentials needed to accomplish your aims, but unless you actually accomplish your aims, you cannot be considered competent.
Competence is not a fixed point but a state of constant growth, adaptation, and improvement. Knowledge, skills, and credentials might be static or even stagnant, but competence is dynamic. You might be competent today and entirely incompetent tomorrow because you are content and complacent. That is why organizations thrive for a while, become successful, even world-class, and then crash into extinction, sometimes overnight.
People are the same way. Being the best at what you do today does not guarantee you will be the best tomorrow or even suitable for the duties you must perform. The late Dr. Lee Thayer argued that the only measure of performance is performance. You cannot look backward to what you accomplished in the past. The measure of your worth always lies only in your potential. He also argued that the principal job of a leader is to develop that potential in others. That is the fourth foundation of exceptional leadership.
Like feelings and beliefs, individual performance is a choice. You might be born with certain abilities or limitations, but what you do with them is up to you. The saying in basketball is that you cannot teach height. Being exceedingly tall is clearly an advantage, but alone it will not make you a great player. Many notable players compensated for being vertically challenged by developing the potential of their skills, smarts, and other talents. Plenty of kids have the physical attributes of a great player but lack the discipline or grit needed to compete at a high level. You can no more easily teach someone to be conscientious than you can teach them to be tall.
Those who have led great teams and organizations to be sustainably successful have a knack for spotting talent and attracting and developing it. Developing talent requires more than improving skills or enhancing knowledge. To be competent at developing talent requires that you guide people to become competent themselves by being an exemplar of what competence looks like. Competence has a latency. It exists beyond the impact of your performance in the accomplishments you leave behind. That is how competent organizations attract competent people. When leaders demand exceptional performance from the entirety of their organization by recognizing and developing potential, refusing to accept excuses and mediocrity, and instilling a worthy indelible purpose – they eliminate the dysfunction that is typical of so many organizations today.
This vast level of incompetence in the world today should make it a field day for organizations committed to being high-performance and fully competent.
It is hard to go about your day-to-day life and escape dysfunction. It’s everywhere. You find it in defective or poorly designed products, shoddy work, inattentive service, inadequately trained and unsupervised workers, and customer-facing people with lousy attitudes. You don’t just see it; you feel it!
This vast level of incompetence in the world today should make it a field day for organizations committed to being high-performance and fully competent. The difference that separates those who are competent from those that just aspire to be – is ultimately a matter of leadership.
Walt Disney noted, “You can design, create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.” As a leader, understanding how you make people feel and how to inspire people to perform defines organizations that establish themselves as high-performance organizations that do what they do better than anyone else, constantly adapt and improve – and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage. As the late Rear Admiral Grace Hopper suggested, you cannot manage people. You manage things and lead people. To become a better leader, you must learn how to feel like a leader – and understand that how people feel about you will ultimately determine how successful you become.
