Why The World Needs More Effective Leaders (And How to Be One)
Or, Narcissistic Sociopaths Make Terrible People Who Do Things That Matter
You probably suppose that the world’s leaders today are, above all, effective. After all, they seem to be something like fiendishly clever geniuses…at least when it comes to enriching themselves, hoarding power, and creating dynasties where there should be democracies.
But does that make them effective? Let’’s think about it for a moment.
Effectiveness is about effects. So what effects do we really want from leaders? For them to amass power and fortune — or for people’s lives to expand into their fullest potential? When you see it that way, the simple fact is this: leaders today have been spectacularly ineffective at something truer, greater, and deeper than power, fortune, and dynasty: enhancing human lives. Middle classes are imploding while the global political order and financial system breaks down leaving the young adrift on a stormy sea. Thus, watching their human potential spiral down the drain, people are turning for vengeance and protection to demagogues.
You wouldn’t call a car that only went backwards, a heater that blew cold air, or a phone that blew up in your face…effective. But that’s pretty much what leaders today are, do, and…champion. And too often, you and I don’t just let them get away with it — we celebrate them for it.
Thus, today’s leaders, contrary to popular belief, aren’t effective. They’re precisely the opposite: ineffectual, inadequate, pretty useless. At the real challenge of leadership, they have failed abysmally. They have been the most ineffective leaders in a century.
If you think about with me, a great reason for the striking ineffectiveness of leaders today is probably theories of leadership from yesterday (Which I’ll abbreviate to YTL in this essay). They contend that leadership is a game of domination, power, and conquest to be won. And that doesn’t just excuse power-seeking and wealth-hoarding and dynasty-making at the expense of real human prosperity — it justifies, excuses, and downright demands it.
Therefore, if we’re going to reimagine leadership, we’ve got to think about what makes truly effective leaders. Leaders who are effective not just at amassing wealth, power, and fortune, but at the great, central, and true task of leadership: enhancing human lives — not merely taking prosperity from others and claiming it as their own.
So here are what I believe the five key characteristics of effective leaders tomorrow will be, contrasted with yesterday’s.
From taking credit to earning credibility. The simplest reason that leaders have failed to enhance human lives is that it’s not really part of leadership at all. Yesterday’s approaches to leadership begin often with the idea that a leader is someone who can seize power by taking credit. For accomplishments, ideas, victories.
But note what’s happened here: the substance of leadership has been replaced with…fiction. Leaders spend less time on creating accomplishments, ideas, victories — than on battling to take credit for everyone else’s. That’s why there are so few real accomplishments, ideas, victories around today. Hence, a generation of leaders perpetually bickering and stabbing one another in the back over who gets attention, kudos, airtime, donations, lobbyists…while society goes into steep decline. Thus, an obsession with the optics, the soundbites, the talking points, the takedown.
The truth is that leaders can’t play the game of taking credit anymore. Winning it doesn’t have much of a point when there are no accomplishments left that the people respect. Even if they do win the game, that will only seal their reputations as members of an establishment that people applaud to see crumble. Hence, the world is too transparent and too demanding. Enraged people are watching leaders’ every utterances and steps for the slightest misdeed, looking to punish them for taking credit where it isn’t due. And the converse is also true: they are looking to reward leaders who don’t play this cynical game, and instead actually promise to improve their lives.
Hence, the first characteristic of an effective leader is earning credibility. People don’t trust leaders anymore, and rightly so. Credibility is going to have to be earned back from them.
Impact, not just influence. What does it take to earn credibility? Actually enhancing people’s lives. That means focusing on impact, not just influence.
Let me explain. Yesterday’s Theories of Leadership put influence over impact. The goal leaders should seek, they often taught, was clout, the ability to pressure, threaten, intimidate, bully, bluster, bluff. There have been countless books written on it: persuasion, manipulation, control, and the like, and how leadership is merely the exercise of these. But the point of all these YTLs was the same: making it so a leader could get their way.
So what? All that really does is ensure society develops leaders who a) become terrible people b) spend most of their time horse-trading c) are obsessed with optics, spin, hype, not reality. The systemic seeking of influence creates incentives for societies to develop webs of lobbyists, spin doctors, hype artists, gerrymanderers…not to focus on its real problems. Hence, influence-seeking is a cause of decline — not a solution to it.
Tomorrow’s leaders, if they want to earn back the credibility they’ve lost from an enraged and desperate people, are going to have put impact first. Their net effect on real human lives. We are discussing leaders being effective, right? So what are the effects we really seek? Leaders who have influence — or leaders who can enhance lives? If it’s the latter, then leaders are going to transform people’s well-being: their social, emotional, material, financial, physical lives. That is essentially what impact is: going beyond the shell game of economic growth — which is usually just a vehicle for influence seeking — to truly bettering people in human terms.
From success to elevation. To transform people’s well-being is no simple task. Leaders are going to have to learn a new vocabulary, develop new measurements, reports, objectives, procedures. I’ll get to that. First, let’s talk about their point.
All of those are going to have to have one simple objective. To elevate the sum total of human potential in a society. Let me put it to you simply. My potential is simply the highest possible well being that I can attain. Thus, if leaders are going to earn back lost credibility by focusing on well-being, they’re going to have to elevate it. They’re going to have to raise the highest possible living standards in the organizations that they are leading.
That is a third key way in which leadership must be reimagined. Yesterday’s Theories of Leadership aren’t about elevation. They’re not about raising living standards in an organization — whether those organizations are societies, companies, or networks. Fundamentally, they’re about what I’ll simply call self-referential success. Did you accomplish that task, get that promotion, occupy that corner office…get the deal done? They are about success in narrow material, organizational, and political terms. All that we suppose is what leaders do.
It’s self-referential in this sense: you are presumed to be a leader when a system anoints you as one. You’ve joined the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders, some corporations Emerging Leadership Program, and so on. That’s success as defined by the broken systems themselves. How meaningful can it be? The truth is that it often isn’t: the people called “leaders” in those terms are simply those who have succeeded at organizational objectives, like amping revenue and raising money. But so what? That has no bearing on true leadership. Hence: if they’ve failed at enhancing human lives…how are you going to develop into a true leader if you accept their definition? Self-referential definitions of success are meaningless — and thus self-destructive — when it comes to developing leaders who can do things that matter.
So if we’re to develop true leaders that enhance and explode the boundaries of stagnating human lives, then self-referential success is insufficient — and probably not even necessary. Creating legions of people are succesful at gaming broken systems, whether they are corporations, governments, or financial markets, isn’t the same thing as creating a generation of people who raise society’s living standards — no matter how desperately we pretend it is. So to reinvent leadership, we are going to have to go from prioritizing, lionizing, and rewarding success, to celebrating, championing, and creating elevation.
Let me put that to you slightly more philosophically. We don’t really “succeed” at elevating people’s lives. They do. We know we are leading them when they succeed…at the things that truly matter. Success, especially in self-referential terms, is like a hall of mirrors: you can get lost in it, and call it mission accomplished — but the true challenge is leading people out.
From payoff to purpose. So where will these noble and wondrous mechanisms for elevating human lives come from? Just like spaceships, quantum computers, and androids, we’re going to have to build them.
Let me explain.
Yesterday’s Theories of Leadership were about payoffs. They were concerned fundamentally not with what a leader delivers to people in real human terms, but with what a leader wins from a system. The corporation, economy, society has rewarded you with a fat paycheck, bonus, jackpot — wow, you must be a leader, right? Wrong.
Leadership isn’t about payoffs. It’s about purpose. The point of all these payoffs. What do they add up to?
To develop mechanisms for elevating people’s lives, we have to answer precisely that question. We have to measure, monitor, assess their quality of life. Think about it this way. Societies have huge surveys that are undertaken every year to calculate GDP (yes, there’s no giant computer in the sky — GDP is just a survey). But they don’t have one for people’s quality of life. Why not?
Developing those kinds of institutional innovations is the job of tomorrow’s leaders. In other words, they must make purpose real. That doesn’t just mean taking deliver of a 24-karat gold plated mission statements. It means developing the metrics, statistics, numbers, measures, insights, to answer the question: are we elevating people’s lives? How are we elevating people’s lives? This is our purpose — are we living up to it?
That’s a quantum leap beyond payoffs-centric theories of leadership. They assume that if you’ve won the bonus, then you must have delivered the goods. Wrong. Maybe you did sign the deal, treaty, contract — but did that actually amount to gains in real human potential? Did any of that horse-trading, influence-peddling, deal-making actually accomplish anything that elevated anyone’s life? Those are the questions tomorrow’s leaders are goint to have to asks — because they’re waht make leaders truly effective.
When we ask for effective leaders, we often forget the point. Having sunk so deep into decline, and been bombarded for the last few decades with thoroughly overcomplicated and totally useless pop leadership theories. So let’s bring it back to reality.
Effective leaders aren’t just machiavellian narcissistic sociopaths who bully and heckle and manipulate broken systems into getting their own way, at everyone else’s expense. They are people who can cause the effects that a world falling down wants, needs, and demands. Those effects aren’t just leaders hoarding power, amassing fortunes, and creating dynasties. Those effects are human lives that resound with possibility, brim over with happiness, and overflow with grace.
Umair
London
March 2016
