Get out a pen and paper. Let’s make something together.
I want you to think about a leader you’ve had who was really great. A teacher. A coach. A mentor. Maybe even a boss. It has to be a leader, and it needs to be someone you knew and admired. Write that person’s name down.
Now think back to experiences you had with that person. What do you remember hearing that person say to you or to others around you? Take 30 seconds or so to jot that down in this same space on the page and then come back here.
This person you’ve remembered. What kinds of things did you see her/him do? Do you remember anything in particular? It doesn’t have to be a superhero act; it could be just the way that person did things day-in and day-out. In any case, we’re looking for actions that stood out to you because somewhere in there you said to yourself, “That’s someone I want to be like.” Or, “That’s someone I like being with.”
Maybe you didn’t say that to yourself because you didn’t need to. You just felt it. So take a second to describe how this person made you feel. Write it all down, the words, actions and feelings this leader created.
What words do you see in front of you about how that person made you feel? I wonder how many of them are words that seem more human than business-y. Like, valued and understood vs. efficient and on-target.
For some of us, we may not have that memory from someone we know, but from someone we’ve seen from a distance. In either case, there’s an almost unspoken attraction…an intuitive willingness to attach yourself to that person and follow…a desire to know them and be known by them.
Now turn this upside down. In a different space or a different page, write down the name of a terrible leader you’ve had. Let’s go through all the same things — what they did, what they said, and how they made you feel. It’s okay to call him/her out in this exercise, because we’re not going to be like them, okay? We can learn from avoiding bad examples, too.
So what did we make here?
I think you made something special. I think you made something that no business book can do. You created a picture of leadership that is empathetic, aspirational, and potentially more meaningful to you because it comes from you. You started creating something from which you can design your leadership. Something that is authentic because it acknowledges the bad and the good. The potential pitfalls and the real human needs leadership can serve.
Leadership is not how many business book/self-help/pop psych authors define it. They often define leadership as a principle — like love, justice or reasonableness. For instance, with a term like love, we can easily say that some behaviors fit our definition of it and others don’t. We say, “yes, that thing looks like love,” or “no, that’s not it.” When we treat the idea of leadership similarly — as inherently good — we end up doing the same thing, making judgments about when someone is “being a leader” and when they’re not. There are times I was a good leader and other times my shit got real sideways. But I was always leading.
As I see it, leadership is much more like a canvas we fill with our shared experiences when we lead and when we follow. That experience is just like the two examples you made; it can go well and it can be soul-suckingly bad.
But the more we talk about leadership like we talk about love, the more that canvas is already filled with gaudy images we will struggle to create around. Or at best, we will approach it like a paint-by-number, trying to fill in shapes already made by someone we’ve never met.
My mission is to get leadership back to a canvas we can design from.
I believe it can be more natural and more helpful when it comes from — and moves toward — a place that is more human. It can be more intentional and empathetic — like your first example.
