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After over a decade of writing On Leadership here in Arkansas Business, I am feeling that while there are always examples of leadership (both good and atrocious) to write about, it is time to make space for other voices.
Those who know me well know that it is not because I have nothing more to say — but because I hope I have said the things that I think matter most. I may show up occasionally if there is something specific that the editors and I agree is valuable for readers, but this being my last planned column, I want to sum up a few things I have learned in a career in leadership and executive coaching.
Leaders are accountable for both their outcomes, and their methods. Since leadership is the mastery of organizing people and resources to accomplish goals and even create a new future, it becomes incumbent on us, especially in a democracy, to require accountability for leadership to envision and create a future of our design. But of course, that requires consensus on the outcomes we wish to create, which can be slippery and contentious.
Leaders of any entity, to be successful, must be able to lead and enroll (not coerce) those who disagree with the direction. To simply ignore a constituency of board members and senior leaders, or even frontline rabble rousers who are not sanguine about a leader’s direction, is to invite disaster for any change initiative.
Leadership is both a way of acting and a way of being. To be a leader is to have an outcome or destination toward a future you have envisioned, shared and enrolled your organization in achieving. But how you lead the change is at least as important to achieving the outcome.
No future vision, regardless of how desirable it is, will be achieved without the consistent and purposeful leadership needed to elbow current reality out of the way. A leader who cannot access and leverage the power of emotional and spiritual domains will find it a struggle to bring major projects over the line. The best idea will not get into production if it does not have both the rational and emotional support of the organization and the teams who are accountable to bring the change to life. In fact, a negative emotional reaction to a change initiative will kill even the most rational and valuable change project, often leaving it in an unrecoverable shambles.
We need a more discerning form of followership. The public, especially in 21st century America, easily confuse content with methodology, and assume lofty goals. History is full of skilled leadership in pursuit of destructive outcomes ranging from famine to world war. To deny the skilled leadership of bad actors throughout history is to ignore the risk of such challenges today. In fact, almost anyone can potentially attract and keep the world’s attention for a short time, owing to both mainstream media and the internet.
We tread a dangerous path when we confuse the value of a leader’s desired and stated outcomes with their skill at using media available to stay in the spotlight. In a time when it is possible to become famous for being famous, we need very solid chops for determining which leaders we are willing to follow.
It may be controversial to praise the leadership style of anyone whose philosophy and goals run counter to our own. But often, bad actors wield very powerful leadership capacities in clever ways to empower what they believe are appropriate and even righteous ends. We have a moral and business obligation to examine not only a leader’s skills, but their values and stated goals as well.
An organization that consistently relies on well-defined values that have teeth and are grounded at the center of how the organization makes decisions has an infrastructure on which a strong leadership culture can be built. A cult of personality relies on the whim of the leader for ever-changing direction.
Strong leadership is a commercial advantage. All of the above is aspirational, of course. I can almost hear readers react to the emphasis on a part of the business that is not profit-making or efficiency-focused. If your business is highly automated and has limited exposure to human beings to do the work of the business, then you may be able to ignore the principles above and do quite well.
But in the end, most businesses are a collection of people. So the more a business can benefit from the best those people can provide, the more likely it is to accomplish more ambitious goals, higher levels of productivity and even profitability — not because the boss has decreed it, but because the system exists to create and sustain it.
As a final thought, I will leave you with what I think is the most important distinction about leadership at this time in our history. In earlier industrial periods, leadership was largely considered as a focus on maturing task capabilities — planning, measurement, refining processes and a focus on efficiencies of scale. As technology impacted how organizations could run and communicate, the emphasis shifted to emotional intelligence and relational depth.
If we have learned anything about leadership from this process, it is that a solid leader requires both task and relational depth to create and sustain new desired and planned outcomes. Few of us are truly ambidextrous. In the same light, few leaders are equally competent in both relational and task capacities. But an aspiring leader who is extremely compromised in either of those domains will be seriously hampered, putting their goals and their standing as a leader at serious risk.
I will leave you with a lightly revised version of a quote on leadership from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a French author, wartime pilot and poet and author of “The Little Prince.” His famous quote reads:
“If you wish to build a ship, do not drum up the men to gather wood, divide work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
In a time when communications move at light speed and workforces have access to most of the same information that leadership has at hand, a capacity with both vision and execution is critical to leadership and is ignored at the organization’s peril. So, with deep respect for Saint-Exupéry’s original intent, I offer this update to his quote for the 21st century:
“If you wish to build a ship, before you drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders, start by teaching them to long for the vast and endless sea.”
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