If you go to Amazon.com and type \u201cleadership\u201d into the search bar, you will find that there are over 80,000 books available on the subject. Dr. Lee Thayer, who himself has about a dozen good books on the topic of leadership, points out that if any one of the books could instruct a person to become a competent leader, there would be no need for the any others.<\/p>\n
Given how widely it is written about, how many university courses teach leadership and the scope of the industry around \u2018leadership development\u2019 ( which is where I earn my living) \u2013 it seems that leadership is not all that easy to master. It may not even be all that easy to understand and successfully apply. Yet there is an enormous need for leadership in the world: people who can capably lead great nations, thriving communities, formidable armies, innovative businesses, noble institutions and all kinds of organizations.<\/p>\n
While leaders come in all sizes, shapes and colors, they can be young or old, rich or poor, highly educated or having never spent a day in school \u2014 the thing that defines and measures a leader is what they accomplish. A title might denote some very specific responsibilities, or simply position of status, but what makes a person a leader, and determines whether they are successful or not comes down to a matter of power. A leader\u2019s effectiveness is measured by how much power they have and how they use it.<\/p>\n
\u201cLeadership is the power to deliberately influence the future by engaging the imagination of others to work together towards a shared vision of what that future might be.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
To effectively accomplish this, a leader must be competent. This means cultivating competent performance in themselves and in others in order to accomplish what matters most.<\/p>\n
The duality is that you must face the future with all of its unknowns \u2013 while also facing reality\u2011which is a function of what we know and must be known. The problem is, how do you square certainty of reality with the uncertainty of the future?<\/p>\n
The more influence you seek to have, the greater the uncertainty you necessarily encounter. Facing the future means always confronting some level of uncertainty. Have you ever noticed that it is more likely the things you are most certain about carry the greatest degree of unmitigated risk?\u00a0The risk increases partly because along with certainty comes familiarity and complacency. It is also because you may be tempted to risk more than you can afford to lose. When you actually bet the farm<\/em>, the reality is that you might lose the farm.<\/p>\n
\u201cCertainty Can Create the Illusion of Safety\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
You might confuse a state of certainty with a safety, even if you are just attempting to convince yourself that you are right. You might also seek comfort in certainty as a means of finding consistency in how your thinking informs your actions. But you must be curious to effectively question anything \u2013 and by interrogating your own reality you uncover the things you might have otherwise missed \u2013 including the hidden risks.<\/p>\n
You cannot escape or hide from reality; it will always find you. But you may be able to outrun danger. Often the most powerful beasts are not the fastest. It is also possible to outmaneuver something faster than you. The fastest creatures are not always the most agile. The trick is simply knowing who you are and being the best at whatever you are \u2013 and not aiming to be what you are not.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe ostrich may be best known for burying its head in the sand to avoid danger, but in fact that is a myth.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It is only when it cannot run from danger that it flops to the ground and remains still with its head and neck flat on the ground in front, blending into the soil in order to camouflage itself. More often it will escape at speeds that can exceed 45 miles per hour \u2013 and can deliver ferocious kicks capable of killing lions.<\/p>\n
Why would such a fiercely capable competitor ever bury its head in the sand? And yet there are many people who seem to want to do just that: consistently avoiding or even denying reality, living Einstein\u2019s famous description of insanity: doing the same thing over again, hoping for a different result.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne way to gain a false sense of certainty is to simply seek consistency.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
We hope that by repeating our actions or our words that they will gain power influence. However, the old saying, \u201cpractice make perfect\u201d is also a myth. It is more true that practice tends to make things permanent. What and how you practice determines whether you are in fact improving \u2013 or perhaps devolving as a consequence of your actions. W. Edward Deming may have said it best when he suggested \u201cit is not good enough to simply do your best, you must first know what to do and then do your best.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a leader one of the things you had best do well is communicate persuasively. This is an trait that all great leaders have in common. Learning to be an effective communicator means being certain that you are understood. We are generally taught that consistency in your messaging and your delivery creates clarity and eliminates confusion.<\/p>\n
My father first taught me what I needed most to learn about words and persuasion. He would often say, \u201cyou tell them what you are going to say, then say it, and then tell them what you said.\u201d You might think that consistency improves your ability to be understood. But studies show otherwise.<\/p>\n
\u201cClarity of meaning is something that exists on the receiving end of communication.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
People must be capable of understanding what you communicate \u2013 and then can freely choose to apply whatever meaning they want. Dr. Lee Thayer would say \u201cthe reader is the author of the text.\u201d Have you ever tried speaking clearly and slowly to someone that only speaks another language? Now imagine doing so over the phone without the benefit of your ability to pantomime your objective.<\/p>\n
Personality traits play into this as well. All people develop distinctive styles of communicating \u2013 usually by the age of seven \u2013 and in many cases even younger. Research shows that these styles cause people to interpret what they hear differently. The same message delivered to different people may yield entirely different understandings.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is not how you message is delivered that matters, it is how it is received.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It is nearly impossible to go through life without being misunderstood \u2013 especially if you have something important to say. Attempting to create an homogenous consistency to how you communicate is only apt to assure that you will be misunderstood by many if not most people you must communicate with.<\/p>\n
Ralph Waldo Emerson warns us that \u201ca foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.\u201d He goes on to suggest that while inconsistency may seem to cause you to be misunderstood by others, it that so bad? \u201cPythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”<\/p>\n
Mark Twain once quipped that \u201cWhat gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.\u201d\u00a0You might want to think of always pitching for certainty as foolish consistency.<\/p>\n
There clearly times when relative certainty must fuel absolute decisiveness \u2013 such as when the situation requires immediate execution or violent action in response to a threat or tremendous opportunity. The comedic writer and performer, turned educator, John Cleese points out that you stop being indecisive and get certain when doing things like taking a running jump over a stream.\u00a0Moving forward with uncertainty often requires greater courage than operating with certainty. And to avoid errors formed of pure stupidity, we temper our uncertainty with whatever preparation we are capable of \u2013 and the possibility of abandoning our action when the risks clearly outweigh the benefits.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut just as to be great often means being misunderstood, being exceptional as a leader means being uncertain.\u201d<\/p>\n
Is it possible to face any formidable challenge with absolute certainty of the outcome? Or is it uncertainty that makes any challenge a worthy one? The Romans didn\u2019t throw people to the lions with their hands and feet bound, prepared on a platter;\u00a0they offered some, albeit slight glimmer of possibility that the lion would be the one finished off. We don\u2019t always need a fair fight \u2013 but, non-the-less, we expect it to be some kind of a fight.<\/p>\n
How to Square the Duality of Leadership\u00a0<\/strong><\/h3>\n
As already argued, effectively square up the future requires that we also square up reality.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s clear that we can only lead the future. The past is unchangeable, and the present was set in the past. But leading the future also means challenging or disrupting the status quo. This typically means changing our perception of reality. The great stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote, \u201ceverything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see if a perspective, not the truth.\u201d\u00a0It is not that there are no empirical truths, just that reality if always a function of perception. For something to be real to you, it means that you must believe or perceive it to be real. Reality is your reality \u2013 and my reality can be quite different from yours.<\/p>\n
There are two distinct kinds of reality: physical reality and imagined reality. <\/strong><\/p>\n
Physical reality is the foundation of science<\/strong>. It is subject to inspection and proof. Imagined reality is the product of human intelligence \u2013 and in many ways has the potential of being more powerful than any natural phenomena.<\/p>\n
Physical reality is comprised of the tangible things that can be proven by being measured. These are the things we can perceive with our six senses. In the absence of light there is darkness. Things are hot or cold \u2013 or at least warmer or cooler relative to the other. Things are hard or soft, things are sweet or bitter and any dog knows that every human being smells a different than any other. That said, perception is also subjective. Dr. Wayne Dyer cleverly titled one of his most widely read books, \u201cYou will see it when you believe it,\u201d suggesting that even the physical realities of the world are a function of the meaning your mind makes of what your senses relay to your brain.<\/p>\n
Imagined realities are the product of human design; they have no measurable mass or energy. The concept is well described in \u201cSapiens\u201d written by the Israeli scholar and historian Yuval Noah Harari. The concept of a nation is a perfect example. The geographic boundaries, it\u2019s constitution, it\u2019s laws and customs and its currency are all a creation of human imagination \u2013 and a function of agreement and enforcement. Coins can be counted \u2013 they are physical realities, but their value is strictly a function of agreement. Laws only exist because they can be enforced \u2013 and the same is true of a countries boundaries.<\/p>\n
Imagined realities are nothing but concepts. But they can have enormous power when they are made real by agreement and the agreement reaches a level of strength such that people are willing to enforce these agreements. Without the means of enforcement, the agreements would be empty and worthless.<\/p>\n
Businesses \u2013 from family farms to multi-national conglomerates are all imagined realities, existing by the same force of agreement and enforcement \u2013 in most cases baked into the laws of the nations that are also the products of imagined reality.<\/p>\n
All religions can be viewed the same way. They rely on belief in whatever the construct of a god they were formed around, and derive their power from agreement and enforcement. You can whole-heartedly believe that God is an absolute reality \u2013 with as much veracity as any mountain and the power of the oceans \u2013 yet all of that cannot be measured,\u00a0proven or disproven by science. But there is no denying the fact that there is enormous power.<\/p>\n
The power of belief is not imagined. <\/strong><\/p>\n
It is the power of belief that yields the agreements that cause the enforcement and makes all imagined realities powerful. So powerful, in fact, that imagined realities are more powerful than those of nature. Man has the power to destroy mountains that have taken millions of years to form. We can dam rivers and defy natural boundaries by building bridges and tunnels. We have defied gravity by engineering and building machines that fly. Mankind has the power to destroy all life on our planet, and in truth, has the capacity to destroy the planet its entirety \u2013 using the weapons that have been developed in defense and enforcement of the geopolitical imagined realities that have been defined by \u2013 and now define life on planet Earth.<\/p>\n
And the power of belief has the same power to create good. Modern medicine has extended life, remedied vast human suffering, elevated the level of joy people can experience in the marvels we can accomplish and have found ways to reverse the damage our own carelessness has caused.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf leadership is about facing reality \u2013\u00a0it requires that you understand the power of reality to shape our future.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
That power is creativity.<\/p>\n
Yogi Bearer said, \u201cthe future ain\u2019t what it used to be.\u201d There is a nugget of brilliant guidance beyond the humor.\u00a0It is what Einstein argued when he stated that \u201cimagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.\u201d<\/p>\n
And when Abraham Lincoln suggested \u201cthe best way to predict the future is to create it,\u201d he was also pointing to an obvious truth. The intersection of the future and reality is creativity.<\/p>\n
In the late 1990s the United States War College, observing the collapse of the former Soviet Union, adopted the understanding that we live in a world now operating in conditions that challenged the command-and-control operating model that had guided political and military models since the time ( approximately 5th century BC) when Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War.<\/p>\n
They observed that the modern world was now defined by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity \u2013 or VUCA.\u00a0Translating this to the broader world at large, research scholars at Harvard Business School point out that the command and control leadership is dependent on reactive tendencies that are ineffective in a VUCA world, and that it is creative leadership tendencies that are required to be successful. This is the power of creativity.<\/p>\n
\u00a0And this leads us to two of the great paradoxes of leadership<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Reality is the awareness of the unescapable fact that very few things are absolutely certain, regardless of how likely they may seem and being prepared for what you cannot necessarily predict. Reality is also grappling with the high-likelihood of certain other things happening; things that you must be prepared for whether you like it or not. It is hard enough to prepare for the things that you might expect, but how can you prepare yourself for the things that you cannot possibly expect? This is one of the great paradoxes of great leadership. How do you maintain a heightened level of curiosity?<\/p>\n
\u201cThe answer in part is to learn to get comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Comfort dampens and even numbs your curiosity. While it might seem possible to wonder how to remain comfortable where you are or get more comfortable, if you really examine what is happening you will come to realize that those thoughts are a product of discomfort seeping in. You are either fearful that you will lose the level of comfort you enjoy \u2013 or that you are beginning to grow dissatisfied with the level of comfort you are enjoying \u2013 perhaps because you believe that others are more comfortable than you. It\u2019s not that you cannot attain comfort, nor am I suggesting that comfort is not a good thing. I am merely pointing out that curiosity is a product of being uncomfortable. You have to get comfortable with that \u2013 another paradox to grapple with.<\/p>\n
What do you want to be when you grow up?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Dr. Lee Thayer poses this question regularly to people of all ages and walks of life. Questions are a leaders most powerful tool, and there is perhaps no better question to wake up your curiosity and engage your imagination. As a leader there is perhaps no more important question to ask yourself.<\/p>\n
Leadership can be defined in many ways \u2013 from simple to complex and from concrete to abstract. This is because leadership is many things \u2013 and is always situational. It doesn\u2019t exist in isolation: it requires the context of relationships. Peter F. Drucker wryly observed that all one needs to a leader is a single willing follower. (If it were only that simple.)<\/p>\n
Other definitions have filled literally thousands of books, the syllabuses of hundreds of classes, perhaps providing valuable insight, yet without any clear evidence that any of these constructs are effective at yielding effective leaders. It seems that an understanding what leadership is has little to do with what makes it effective. It is how you imagine leadership to be \u2013 or more specifically, the kind of leader you imagine yourself to be. What kind of leader do you need to be? And what kind of person do you need to be in order to become that leader?<\/p>\n
There is one thing that I confess I want to be certain about. Leadership can be learned, but it cannot be taught. You have to decide what kind of leader you want to be and need to be. You need to challenge whatever you currently believe in order to discover what you need to believe.<\/p>\n
The British statistician George E. P. Box is often given attribution for the quote, \u201cAll models are wrongs, but some are useful.\u201d That is the beauty of creativity. Nothing is ever perfect \u2013 but with insatiable curiosity you will find the questions that move you ever closer to discovering who you need to be in order to do the things that will enable you to accomplish what matters most.<\/p>\n
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