“Leadership should be born out of the understanding of the needs of those who would be affected by it.” Marian Anderson — singer, civil rights advocate, Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient.
“I want to work for a mediocre middle manager.” — no one ever.
I define leadership differently than a lot of people.
Leadership is the sum of your behavior, as it is experienced by others.
This definition emphasizes:
- leadership is first of all a reflection of the leader.
- that reflection is summative because it includes everything and continually adds to how we interpret the leadership we receive.
- The continual behavior has a bearing on others, creating an overall experience.
I approach it this way because I want to move leadership from a lofty ideal (static) and ground it as an experience (dynamic) in which our actions and words as a leader have a profound effect on other humans. I think the context of that dynamic is where all the important work happens and therefore is important to explore. The more we understand the context of a thing, the more we give ourselves a chance to learn it, enjoy it, and succeed at it.
What do I mean?
Imagine I watched a show for foodies on how to make a homemade pasta dish. So I host a dinner party and make a butternut squash agnolotti in a brown butter sage sauce. It’s delicious. How could anyone not love it?
But only three people actually do love it. One person awkwardly passed — just had the salad. Two people left their food half uneaten.
I have some choices at this point. I can give a “360" to the guests to find out why they liked it or didn’t, and I may find out that between allergies and the bacon in the filling, food restrictions/preferences dominated the experience. Because my intent was good, I assume the problem is that I don’t know enough dishes or dishes that are generic enough for everyone. I can go take a class and read more cookbooks so I can add more to my repertoire. Maybe fish is the answer. Or chicken. Yep, I should add a chicken dish because chicken is easy and universal.
The main issue here is that I’ve only learned to make a dish in the context of that dish. I am missing the entire context of my guests and my craft. I missed the actual needs and desires of the people I’m serving, and the bad-assery of how salt, fat, acid and heat can create anything. So I didn’t see there was an opportunity to make a small adjustment to the pasta next time by simply replacing my fat and salt.
TLDR: I knew how to make pasta. But I didn’t know how to cook. I didn’t know my people. And none of the instruction helped me move toward meaningful learning.
Medium is full of “five steps to this,” and “three ways to get better at that.” It doesn’t work.
When we just try to acquire new “content” without learning “context,” we miss out on the learning that comes from understanding our mistakes. When we don’t understand our mistakes, we are prone to blame situations or others. Our reflection and growth are stunted. We start to dislike cooking. The folks getting promoted are just making fancy dishes that are impressive but inedible. And now no one is eating.
The leaders I work with are often already at this spot. They’re like, dude, just teach me how to make a good dish so I can fix this. Or, they’re discouraged because they thought they would love to lead, but six months in they hate it. Others stop aspiring to leadership because see it as the inevitable path to being a shitty cook.
If this is all true, we need to do a couple things.
First, let’s look in the mirror and be really honest about whether we just know a few dishes or whether we know how to cook.
If you’re tempted to say a little of both, that’s fine…but we need to realize that we’ve probably missed some learning opportunities in there and need to rehabilitate a bit.
Secondly, we need to understand the needs of the people affected by your leadership and a way to actually go about that.
Anyone can do this from any role they’re in. You can do the same design exercise from this article with the people around you, exploring the things we’ve heard leaders say and do, and how they made us feel.
Among peers it’s a powerful exercise to work through because you’re building a shared understanding of good and bad leadership behavior. Among those you’re leading, it’s important to understand what isn’t being said — the unspoken feelings about leaders drawn from real experiences and memories.
Whether a leader has realized it or not, that unspoken thing actually dominates the dynamic between leaders and followers. You’re already in it and stepped into it on day one.
Growing in leadership begins with understanding that context. From there a leader can design a leadership that is still your own and is “out of the understanding of the needs of those who would be affected by it.”
