How Leadership Broke (And How to Fix It)

Three Principles for People Who Want to Matter

You don’t have to look very far to see it. The economy, democracy, society, and the planet are breaking. And yet. Leaders are mostly passing the buck and pointing fingers – when they acknowledge reality at all, that is. Hence, what’s really broken is leadership.

So how did we get here – and how do we fix it?

Intention Over Action

Everyone’s least favorite corporate buzzword: “actionable”. It’s odious, right? And yet leadership became something like its cult. Act now! Is this actionable? What action items are on the agenda? Are you actioning the actionable action items?!

Nowhere in this dance are we stopping to ask: what’s the point? Who are these actions for, exactly? To what purpose is action? The unsaid answer, too often is: no one. The actions are just being performed because, like a kabuki, that’s the script.

It’s a simple yet profound human truth that intention determines the worth of action. A positive action with a negative intention is just passive aggression. No real trust or relationship can be built this way – let alone genuine insight. And hence leaders can’t solve big problems without meaningful intentions.

Actions alone will never be enough. They will crumble like sand when no one means them in the first place. The opposite is also true. Great intentions are what spur people to collective action, and without such intentions, the inspiration that is fuel for real breakthroughs never combusts. People must be inspired, moved, called by mighty intentions to act.

So we’ve got to put intention back into leadership. Really inspire and move people to do great and worthy things. Enough with the cult of action. All it is really doing is making us like dogs chasing our own tails while the world begin falling apart.

Quality Over Quantity

If you ask a leader why they’re acting, they’ll usually point to some objective, and that objective is usually a number. Yet as Einstein said long ago: not everything that can be measured matters, and vice versa.

Why does the world feel barren of quality? Go ahead, look around. 500 channels, and. nothing on. Endless Internet, and it’s mostly toxic abuse. Big box stores from here to Mars, and not a thing of inspiration or beauty in a single one. Brain crushing work around the clock from you and me to produce all that.

We’re failing the most basic task of leadership: allocating human effort, time, creativity, ingenuity, to truly life changing breakthroughs. A bigger jumbo meal isn’t changing anyone’s life – and yet another delivery service for them is at this stage in human history both a tragedy and travesty of human potential. Why are we building those instead of solving the world’s great and pressing problems? Quantity thinking over quality thinking.

The reason we are mired in the lowest common denominator, the trivial, the forgettable, the meaningless, is that leadership pursues quantity single mindedly. Because quality can’t be easily quantified, it’s simply ignored.

So the second thing we’ve got to do is put quality back in leadership. Not as in “leaders of quality”, as in “life changing breakthroughs whose consequences can’t be reduced solely to numbers”. Think chemotherapy or the Mona Lisa. You can quantify their effects, if you want to be reductive. But to truly understand them, you’ve probably got to go further than the arid numbers.

Intuition Over Computation

Because it focuses on actions and numbers, leadership’s become a robotic job: grow this bottom line, objective, result, like cancer. Hence, a generation of leaders that the world rolls their eyes at, from David Cameron to Donald Trump.

Forget the reason, point, purpose, truth. Maybe there isn’t one. Just expand, accumulate, win, dominate. Get a bigger number at any cost.

It’s a foolish way to live – but it’s an even more foolish way to run a world.

A purpose emerges intuitively, not computationally. It is your inner voice that says: you must do this in life, and mean it. Why? Because otherwise you will never really be fulfilled. There’s no need to overthink it: your fulfillment depends on creating a little bit of a better world, even in a tinier way. That is why your intuition is always guiding you towards things of real worth, and away from things that cause harm.

But there’s a catch. Your intuition isn’t your mind. It’s bigger. What it tells you often doesn’t make sense. Why shouldn’t you take all you can, and give the least you need to? That’s mind thinking. Go that way, and you’ll never do anything in this life that really matters. To do things that matter we must transcend our egoistic reasons, precisely so that we can create truer, greater ones.

So we can’t treat leadership like computation. Weigh the risk of this action leading to that objective, and act accordingly. That’s a formula. A program. It’s a robot in a sentence. What it isn’t is leadership.

To lead we must go further. Learn to listen to the wordless voice within us. I call it our inner ocean, Krishnamurti called it our observer, you can call it your spirit if you’re a person of faith.

This is the true self, unconditionally capable. It’s the me in you and the you in me. Where else could a greater purpose come from?

So the third and final way to fix this era’s profoundly broken paradigm of leadership is to place intuition over computation. Refined and cultivated, your intuition emerges from your true self, pure being, the me in you which is the you in me. And in that way, what is truer, purer, and higher than logic emerges in pure stillness. The tiny spark that sets the universe on fire, which you and I call love.

Umair

Philadelphia

September 2016