Where leadership happens
Les McKeown argues we need to redefine our meaning of leadership
Let’s start with the real secret of leadership: it happens all the time, almost anywhere you look, and it’s frankly not that difficult.
Disappointed? Perhaps you were expecting something a little more … well, challenging? That’s not surprising, because for the last, oh, three millennia we’ve been pretty much preoccupied as a society with the idea of heroic leadership. You know, the Neanderthal who slays the sabre-toothed tiger, Odysseus, Napoleon, the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke, Captain Sully, Bobby Moore — all that good stuff.
Which is fine. It makes for good reading and an endless source of uplifting quotes (great for use in motivational posters and filling all that white space left over on your team-building PowerPoint slide).
The problem is that we’ve become so accustomed to leadership being defined as heroic by journalists (or historians) looking for a good story, we have lost the ability to see true leadership for what it really is: an almost always un-glorious, headline-free, mundane activity that takes place every minute of every day in uncountable different (albeit prosaic) ways.
Compare and contrast
Here’s an example of what I mean. On the day I wrote this, the first five ‘leadership’ stories I encountered during my usual, fairly random, media consumption were as follows:
· A profile of a 46-year-old ‘whizz-kid’ CEO from a hip, funky, brand-name organisation who has redefined the concept of leadership in his company based on, wait for it, his favourite sports coaching heroes.
· A politician running a not-very-tight race for office is praised for showing leadership by taking a stand on a policy that directly contradicts her party’s line.
· An entire continent is castigated for a lack of leadership as the Mo Ibrahim Foundation (launched in October 2006 to support good governance and great leadership in Africa) announced that, for the fourth time in seven years, they would not be awarding their prize to any African leader.
· The CIO of a Fortune 500 company tells a leadership conference that he ‘wakes up every morning filled with excitement about what [my] team of more than 1,200 employees aims to do for the day and with a drive to apply [my] knowledge to [my] best potential’.
· An academic who has taken a sabbatical to study the challenges of leadership in modern society reports that he has identified them to be ‘Technology and Information’, ‘Resilience’, ‘Well-Being’, ‘Disruptive Innovation’ and something he calls ‘Environmental Scanning’.
All well and good, so far as they go — but notice how all of these stories follow the same narrative arc: the assumption that leadership must somehow be, however vaguely, connected to wisdom, or bravery, or celebrity, or scale, or great achievement — something, anything, that adds an heroic tinge. It’s hard to feel that any of these well-reported stories have any real relevance to how most of us spend our time, day to day, in the real world.
Now let me share with you the first five actual acts of leadership I encountered on the same day. Notice these aren’t potted stories with a moral or a point, or halo-inducing profiles, or tales of derring-do, they’re just honest-to-goodness, real-world acts of leadership:
· Our team here at my business growth consultancy had to head out at 8.30am for a client meeting. My wife rose before dawn to get her gym visit in early, so our shared car would be available for my team to use on time.
· On an afternoon conference call, a colleague volunteered to drop 10 of his slides from a presentation we would be presenting the next day that was overcomplicated and running long.
· During a coaching call, a client made a commitment to me that for one week she would not interrupt others during her team’s discussions and would allow her colleagues to fully finish their thoughts before expressing her own opinion.
· During a meeting at a local coffee shop, I watched as a barista stopped cleaning table tops and jumped in to assist a colleague when the line became lengthy.
· The woman who dog-sits my pooches when I’m travelling emailed to remind me she’d be picking the dogs up at 9am the next morning, and asked if I needed her to grab some dog food from the store, as she’d noticed during her last visit that it was running low.
Notice a difference between the media-reported stories and the real-world acts of leadership? Storytelling requires a narrative arc, and reporting on leadership is no different — there needs to be a hero, or a villain, or a winner, or a loser (or a video of a cute cat, at the very least). Fair enough, magazines and newspapers need to sell copies, websites need visitors, and none of them will garner much interest with stories like ‘Woman Returns Car to Husband at 8.15am’. Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against heroic leadership. In fact, because of my job (I coach senior executives) I’m in a privileged position and get to see more of it than most people. I’m a sucker for heroic acts of leadership, and watching people do incredible things under stress or navigate themselves and others through difficult situations regularly reduces me to a blubbering mess.
But that doesn’t mean we should take the ‘hero-as-leader’ template as our only, or even our main, model of leadership. Real-world leadership is very, very different from all that the media would have us believe. Real-world leadership is most typically understated — often to the point of going unseen by most people.
Extract from Do Lead: Share your vision. Inspire others. Achieve the impossible. by Les McKeown. Copyright © 2014 by Les McKeown. Published by The Do Book Co.
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For details on Les McKeown’s 2016 workshops in Boston, New York and LA, head to Predictable Success.
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