You Can Spot An Exceptional Leader By How They Leave

Leadership isn’t what you do – it’s what’s in your bones: it is who you are when you are needed. We have leaders because we need them. It isn’t an award given to recognize merit and accomplishment; it is the current that flows within you that drives that accomplishment and makes you meritorious. Leadership is not a given or a choice. It is what you find within yourself and cultivate to produce the qualities needed to make it possible for others to accomplish what truly matters most.

This quality is known as agency – the state of being independent and having control over your actions and consequences. It is how leaders influence the world around them by living a deliberate life of purpose and influence. The paradox of agency is that it can appear to be desirable power from the outside, but from the inside, it is a burden of great responsibility. Agency is a privilege that exists when you are aware of the responsibility attached to the power you have as a leader. Exercising raw power or manipulating others for your good is not leadership.

To elevate into positions that demand leadership responsibilities, you find this delicate tension between cause and impact. Tension is a necessary component of leadership. Learning to lead is a function of understanding the pushes and pulls that keep that tension where it needs to be.

You can imagine it as a string between you and a person you are leading. If there is too little tension – the string develops slack – and you lose control. Too much tension and the string becomes so taught that it breaks. You can actually do this as an exercise. Give someone a piece of string to hold between their thumb and forefinger. Have them close their eyes (or wear a blindfold) and silently guide them around obstacles. When you maintain proper tension, your communication is practically effortless, but you lose all control when the string goes slack. If you pull too hard, you pull the string free from their hand. It is what agency feels like.

The balance of control, independence, and responsibility is what defines you as a leader. To become exceptional, you must expand the influence of all three qualities. And to do so, you must constantly grow as a person.

The burden of agency is also a gateway to great joy. The moments of joy you experience in life result from the sense of satisfaction you gain through what you accomplish. The more meaningful and significant your accomplishments, the more joy you experience in life. There is no greater joy than living a life of accomplishment.

One of the most important accomplishments for any leader is handing the reigns to whoever is next in line. Whether your departure is just from your role in your organization, or a matter of departing this earth, your leadership has an expiration date.

Because there is no certainty as to when that date is, the only way to be sure you can fulfill your duty to competent succession is always to have someone prepared to take over for you – and do a better job than you do. You may have a plan to retire on a particular date, but there is no knowing what might intercede, causing you to exit sooner than planned. It could be a matter of choice and opportunity – or something you have no control over. Life often happens while we are busy making other plans.

It is not a matter of grooming a successor. It is humbly grappling with your own deficits and facing mortality.

There may be no substitute for experience when it comes to the wisdom to do your job, but there is also no denying that there will always be someone who can do whatever you do better than you can – and perhaps better than you ever could. There is no shame in this. If anything, it demonstrates the wisdom gained by your agency.

Prior to your exit, having a successor in place can keep you sharp and keep you growing to keep one step ahead. If knowing that someone is vying for your job makes you uncomfortable, you are doing it right. It is this discomfort that will keep you growing.

For most business leaders letting go can be one of the hardest things you do. It’s partly knowing when but always knowing how.

People without agency dream of the day they can be set free from the burdens of their working career. An entire industry caters to exciting people’s imaginations lured into the dream of retirement and freedom. People dream of freedom from alarm clocks, commutes, oppressive bosses – of being indentured to having to work to keep a roof over your head. Carefully planned and executed, people find themselves able to retire comfortably and perhaps pursue the dreams they had set aside. Sadly, many people never experience the joys of retirement that they had long imagined, and a remarkable number of people actually die within a year of their retirement. It’s not that surprising. Their bodies are older, and they find that retirement has left them with nothing more to accomplish and little purpose in life.

Leaders have no reason to retire.

Your life is much like what others imagine retirement to mean. You do what you want to – because your purpose is to accomplish what matters. Your days aren’t just purposefully full; they are designed by a sense of duty you a worthy indelible purpose. You live in contribution to something more than your needs and wants and enjoy a deep sense of satisfaction from helping others develop their potential to experience joy in their accomplishments.

Leaders don’t retire; they move on to the next opportunity.

You are not seeking freedom – you are looking to extend and preserve the freedom you already have. If you cannot navigate your way to something meaningful, you will either reluctantly leave your station in life, make it possible never to have to.

Exceptional leaders are different. They are acutely aware that their responsibility has always been about creating a better future. They don’t hesitate to move on because they have confidence that they can and will continue to create a future of meaningful purpose and accomplishments. It is not a matter of skills that fuel this determination, but the habits of thinking that make you an exceptional leader in the first place.

Agency doesn’t attach itself to your station in life. It exists on a cellular level. If you take care of yourself, your agency will not only grow with you; it will outlive you. Your legacy is your agency latency. Great leaders leave behind a world that was better because of them, and more importantly, people who are better human beings because of the agency you cultivated in them.

When you find your WIP – your worthy indelible purpose, you find no reason to fear the future, no matter what it may hold. Instead, you embrace life with curiosity. You find moments of overwhelming joy in even the seemingly smallest of accomplishments because they are like a single raindrop on a still pond, casting ripples that bump into other ripples and together make the entire body of water come alive.