Three Minute Wisdom Knowledge is not enough. True leadership is informed by wisdom. The ideas presented here are intended to arouse your curiosity, provoke your thinking and encourage insightful action to help you achieve the things that matter.
Learning to be a leader is like walking backwards.
This may seem contrary to how we normally think of leadership – it should be more like walking forward: we see the road ahead, we choose our destination, we chart a course and plan for the obstacles in our path. We can apply ourselves with skill and perseverance toward a clear goal. It’s a fair game.
But growth on the leadership journey is not like that. More often than not, we don’t see what’s coming, we get blindsided, we fall down a lot. At these times, extra effort and running faster only make things worse. Perhaps most frustrating of all, we don’t get a clear view of what we were up against until after we’ve gone through it. And in the end, we often wind up somewhere different than where we thought we were going. It’s not fair, really.
If you think back over your own career, you’ll recognize that this is how all deep learning takes place. I am not talking about the incremental refinement of skills we already have. It’s true, of course, that we need to continually improve on the things we already know how to do. But true growth as a leader happens when we stretch beyond what we already know to a higher level of competence. And that is what feels like walking backwards.
Leadership is a Constant Challenge Like life, leadership is a path that requires us to continually master new skills to meet new challenges. The skills you learn at one level help you handle that level of challenge. But to compete at the next level will always require a new and different set of skills, and sometimes takes “unlearning” some old skills you have come to rely on.
For example, as an individual contributor, you were valued for your ability to organize and execute your assigned tasks. When you were promoted to supervisor, your old skills of organizing and planning were still important, but you had to learn new skills that were very different. Your higher-leverage value as a supervisor was not to organize people’s work, but to develop them so they could organize their own work. And then to coordinate the work of the many self-organizing people who reported to you. As you advanced on your leadership journey, your ever-increasing levels of responsibility matched ever-daunting levels of leadership you were expected to master – like planning strategy, managing diversity, or influencing people over whom you had no authority.
That’s what feels like walking backwards – just when you got really good at those lower level skills, you found out the job requirements had shifted beneath your feet and you had to be good at something very different. And what’s more, you had to do it in public, where your every move was seen by everyone. That’s not a fair game at all.
It is liberating to realize that leadership growth is like walking backwards. If we think we are never allowed to make mistakes, we ensure that we will stay stuck. Learning new skills is uncomfortable. By definition, we don’t know how to do the new skills yet because they are, well, new. If we think we have to be experts all the time, we guarantee we will only stay good at what we already know. Reminding ourselves that learning requires falling and failing at times makes it easier to embrace the inevitable discomfort that comes with deep learning.
Committing to a path of continuous leadership learning is ultimately rewarding and productive, but it means navigating periods of discomfort. These three ideas can help.
Welcome the Discomfort Your first impulse might be to shy away from situations that cause you discomfort. Start by recognizing when you encounter a new situation that makes you feel uncomfortable. What is your particular style of stress-response? Where do you feel anxiety in your body? Do you become angry or do you withdraw? By becoming familiar with your personal triggers for discomfort, you can identify it early and disrupt your auto-pilot mode of reacting. See if you can stop yourself from engaging in your normal pattern of responding to the stress of discomfort. Embrace the discomfort as an ally, not an enemy, even though you don’t know immediately what to do about it.
By turning toward the discomfort the moment you recognize it, you open up space for creativity and innovation. Remember that you are always doing two things as a leader – getting results today and preparing to get results tomorrow. Balancing the short-term with the long-term is not a zero-sum trade-off of doing one at the expense of the other, there is always a healthy tension between both that the leader must navigate. Entering the discomfort of walking backwards is your leadership investment in getting results tomorrow.
See What is Emerging at the Edges When walking backwards, we first see things as they enter our peripheral vision. And that’s where opportunities present themselves during leadership growth too. Gaining new insights requires a spaciousness that is not available when we are closed down, striding forward with eyes fixed straight-ahead, certain in the truth of our ideas. Leadership growth requires more curiosity than certitude.
Allow yourself (and your staff) to innovate by looking for what is emerging on the periphery. Some new ideas may seem kooky, but some may lead to solutions you would never have considered if you hadn’t started down that path. Encourage prototyping over perfectionism. Experiment with new ideas in small-scale pilots and see what good ideas rise to the top.
Model Vulnerability No one likes to be seen as incompetent, so we don’t like making mistakes. We would rather work harder at something we know has worked in the past than try something new and risk failure.
Remember that whatever choices you make as a leader, you are modeling behaviors for everyone around you. People look to the leader for cues on how to act. If you model risk-aversion, that’s what you’ll get from your staff. If you model informed risk-taking, your people will know that is what is expected of them as well. It takes a leader who is comfortable with vulnerability to do this, and walking backwards is perfect for making you feel vulnerable.
Fred Astaire was a great dancer. But it has been noted that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, but backwards and in high heels. In dancing, it is the man that traditionally “leads.” Still it was Rogers who managed to win an Oscar, something Astaire never did. I guess leadership is like the movies: they aren’t fair either.
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