I heard some of you didn’t have time to read this post about leadership so I wrote a quick summary for you.
1. We glorify visible and easily understood leadership styles ahead of the less visible and difficult to understand styles.
2. The way we define leadership rewards leaders who prefer competition ahead of those who exemplify cooperation.
3. The collective understanding of what makes a leader biases us toward largely physical features – height, voice, presence – and this in turn means we dismiss potential leaders who do not possess these characteristics.
So that’s what happened in this post. You might be thinking, reader – that’s great, Tim, and thanks for the summary, but what does this mean for my weekend?
Reader, my response is – nothing. Go enjoy your weekend! You’ve earned it…
I do want to remind you, though, that just a couple of years ago half the country felt it had no better option than to vote for a guy who was most well known until then for yelling “YOU’RE FIRED” at his employees on national television. A lot of people back then, regardless of who they voted for a decade later, thought this was a fine example of the kind of confidence and assertion required in any great leader, and I suspect a lot of people today, regardless of who they voted for two years ago, still think this is what a leader should do on a daily basis.
But that’s not important, reader, neither here nor there, so go enjoy the weekend. Yup, well deserved, the weekend…
I do ask, though, for one last thing, which is to remember that when society makes a bad decision, it doesn't matter if a certain subset of the society would have made a better decision. It doesn't matter because in the end a society bears only the fruits of what it collectively sows. In the context of finding leaders, a seed is planted anytime we collectively decide what is or is not good leadership. We have a chance to plant a seed, for example, when we watch a head chef dump a plate of food before berating the cook. We have a chance to plant a seed when a helmet football coach blames a player for performing poorly. We have a chance to plant a seed when your manager disseminates what your teammate told him or her in confidence.
In these moments, our reactions can make all the difference. If we dumbly nod along, acknowledging these moments as good leadership, then we simply replant the same fields from which we've just harvested the newest crop of poor leadership. If we take a moment instead to ask difficult questions of our leaders, however, and maybe challenge our own perceptions of what truly defines great leadership, then maybe things can start to change.
