Twenty-five years ago this week I started my leadership advisory practice. I was twenty-seven years old with no formal training. Curiosity, naivety, and unfounded confidence were my greatest assets. “You’re a little light on experience” an early client commented, “but I like your energy.” He kept me around for a year. So did others. I’m not entirely sure why, but I’m glad they did.
Eventually I got a degree in organizational leadership. Of course, book smarts don’t count for much in this field. The majority of my education has come from standing shoulder-to-shoulder with clients, looking out over their challenges and together finding paths forward. Doing that a few thousand times clarifies things. Patterns emerge, signals become clear, and beliefs take hold.
Below are ten beliefs about organizational leadership, born from battle scars, that inform my practice today…
Mediocrity is easily institutionalized. Excellence is not. Institutionalized mediocrity is effortless; all it needs is the absence of clear standards and high bars. It seeps into an organization and drags behavior down to a low mean. Institutionalized excellence by contrast takes everything you have: daily commitment, daily effort, and daily renewal. And it requires scaling that expectation. The far end of the bell curve is thinly populated for good reason.
Best practices are fool’s gold. The process of discovering best practices is the real gold. Crisp models, frameworks, formulas, recipes, roadmaps, and playbooks from “experts” are good for making consultants money. They’re bad at sustainably impacting a client’s business. More often than not, someone else’s best practices lull clients into thinking they have a solution to a problem they don’t fully understand yet. More often than not, someone else’s best practices leave a wake of failed projects and cynicism.
A group of strong leaders ≠ a strong top team. Star players sitting around a table aren’t a team. Teams must be intentionally built over time. They need to align on reality and a reason for being. They need to understand and own the full enterprise. They need to build an operating rhythm and collective norms. They need to strengthen their muscles for productive disagreement. And they need to get out in the organization and visibly lead change together. None of this happens naturally without focused effort.
Full transparency is a delusion. For myriad reasons full transparency doesn’t exist in organizations. And that’s OK. The best that leaders can do is slowly get better at opening up. It takes role modeling from the top and comes in degrees. With each improvement people go a little further. Total psychological safety is never possible. However, all organizations have room to improve and doing so has a materially positive impact.
Momentum is more important than speed. Businesses are complex organisms. They don’t change overnight. Trying to transform them too quickly backfires. Leaders need a bias for action, but must be careful not to rush or force issues. Set up experiments. Test. Learn. Repeat. Build capabilities. Bring people along. Transformations fail because castles are hastily built in the sky without the organizational foundation to support them.
Bad behavior is always knocking at the door. An unfortunate truth of organizational life is that antisocial behavior can be financially expedient in the short team. Our quarterly-return, keep-the-stock-price-high culture exacerbates the risk. If you’re in leadership long enough this truth will test you. It’s wise to get crystal clear on your boundaries and build a culture that’s clear on its boundaries with known repercussions for crossing them. Once the antisocial camel’s nose is under the tent it’s hard to keep the body out.
Giving a damn is a differentiator. The waiter who gives a damn brightens customers. The teacher who gives a damn opens minds. The doctor who gives a damn treats the whole person. The CEO who gives a damn builds a culture that inspires. Giving a damn is distinctly human. For all the wonderful things technology and machines do, the one thing they can’t do is give a damn. Get clear on what you give a damn about and follow it.
Love is an underrated leadership tool. “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” —James Baldwin. In an era of scientific and technological progress our moral imaginations have atrophied. Love connects us and reminds us of our humanity. It re-fires our motivation to find new and powerful paths for doing the right thing. Love is not weak. Love is not soft. It is, as Mahatma Gandhi said, “the prerogative of the brave.”
The best businesses are living works of art. They are immensely creative endeavors. They arise from inspiration and don’t follow formulas. They develop a clear point of view and get off the fence. They take a stand and risk. They deliver something compelling, inventive, and bold. They connect with people, sustain them, and allow them to dream. They leave society better. When a business gets boxed into a narrow frame of being little more than a profit seeking machine to maximize financial returns it sucks people’s souls and loses its way.
Organizational life is absurd. Find the humor. Any time you get a bunch of people together to do anything, some degree of absurdity ensues. That absurdity delivers highs and lows. You’ll feel ease and adversity; confidence and doubt; acceptance and rejection; joy and sadness; and hope and resignation; With luck, you’ll feel more of the good than the bad. But being human you’ll feel all of it. An irony of organizational life is that the tougher it is for you to roll with punches the more of them you’ll get. Don’t take yourself too seriously and remember to laugh.
Thank you to all of my clients who have trusted me on the path so far. It’s been fun and rewarding work. I look forward to partnering with existing and new clients in the years ahead!
Much love, Doug
Beautifully harvested from years of living and guiding. Meaning and process over quick results and conventional dogma.
I can resonate with a quite a few of your stepping stones and I agree with your client: love your energy! There's a genuine adventure spirit which I find it much helpful in this field of work :)
Thank you for offering the one "full transparency".
Here is my stepping stone I offer back: I work with senior leadership teams and it seems that they have serious business to do, complex problems to solve, genuine human challenges to address... but when we get to the point where we can relax into them, bring on the lightheartedness that can be accessed past the fear and resentments that may be piled up, then we can really play.
So here's what I take from your post, reflecting on my own work: playfulness, lightheartedness, humour, love and exploration.