“Management” is about protecting and projecting order and predictability. It is about conforming. It is about survival.
It is the attempt to limit the downside.
“Leadership,” well, that’s the act of unleashing the upside.
Maybe it’s too easy to succumb to the charm, or his infamous reality distortion field, but this clip of Steve Jobs presenting plans for a new Apple office campus to the Cupertino, Calif. city council is just wonderful.
Most striking is the disarming humility, candor and utterly “human-scale” personality of the leader of the world’s most valuable technology company. This is a great communicator — and rare business and organizational leader — at work.
What’s also striking is what’s missing — the all too common mask many CEOs wear, the one that demands (or pleads for) deference, creates an air of inaccessability, and fails to connect as a human being with other human beings from whom they need commitment, trust and understanding.
What we know about Mr. Jobs is that he loves to create great products and do great things. Evidently, this desire consumes far more of his intellectual energy than the need most mortals have for large quantities of smoke to be blown at their posteriors.
You are very smart. You are very good at thinking, as a matter of fact. You are filled with knowledge gained in classrooms and from experience. You know what works and what doesn’t.
You manage with your head — your brain. You solve problems. You design and implement processes and systems. You research markets and customer attitudes and behaviors. You understand and work within generally accepted accounting principles. You can work the right buzzwords into conversations, and meetings.
When something goes wrong, you are very good at analyzing it, and understanding what happened, and how. You love numbers; they are comforting, and clear.
You are very smart.
But people solve problems with more than just their brains, don’t they? Are they moved by the spreadsheet only? Do they come to work each morning looking to bring their blood, sweat and tears to a process or a system?
They want to believe. They want to bleed for the right mission, the right product, the right person. They want to win, to taste the fruit of an investment of their talents, their knowledge and their experience. They want to stretch, trust, and be trusted. They want to feel, and to love, and to commit.
These things don’t fit on your spreadsheet. They are not a system or a process, nor is summoning them a system or a process. They are messy and unpredictable, discomforting and hazy.
They are faith, and faith doesn’t live in your brain. It lives in your heart. While it takes brains to solve problems every day, don’t forget people and organizations achieve mastery with their heart as well. It’s a genuine competitive advantage.
“Big brain, tiny heart” is the most common mistake organizations — and leaders — make. “Tiny brain, big heart” is the second most common.
You manage with your brain, and you lead with your heart. You have to do both — deliberately and intentionally — to be great. Simply doing one, or the other, alone makes you and your organization mediocre.
Bill Murray and Stephen Tobolowsky
“Groundhog Day” is the greatest movie about leadership ever made. Its lesson? We build mastery in our lives one moment at a time.
A great life, and great leadership, is really just a collection of smaller, individual moments of mastery. Bill Murray’s character unlocks this secret about three-quarters of the way through the film, and no longer sees the day he’s condemned to repeat as an endless hell, but as an opportunity to master his life — to build one small victory at a time, one encounter at a time.
It is a wonderful metaphor for our daily lives. We are condemned to repeat everything, every day unless we change. Unless we change, or achieve mastery, we are each living the same hellish day over and over again, with the same results, the same undesirable outcomes. Yet, each day, in as many conscious moments as possible, we’re given opportunities to rise above and set aside our ineffective beliefs and behaviors, and strive to live and lead against a standard — not perfection, but an ideal — of what it means to be as effective a person as humanly possible.
Every action, every thought, every decision -- even every little word that escapes our lips -- is an opportunity to exist in a single moment of mastery, to elevate ourselves and others.
Then, one day, with hard work and perseverance, we find that we’re able to string these moments together — like one bead after another — in a work of leadership and behavioral art. And we become free.
This is the journey of a leader, regardless of our definition of leadership, or the set of leadership principles you and I have chosen to follow.
It’s so much more comfortable, most of the time, to live in the fantasy of who we think we are, how we see ourselves and how we think others see us. “My people love me. My people think I’m a great leader.”
The higher up the leadership pyramid you go, you create a fantasy for everybody else. “The boss said we should do this, the boss says it’s a great idea.” The boss’s fantasies become everyone else’s fantasies. The boss says, “we’re a great customer service organization.” And no one challenges the boss’s fantasy because, well, he’s the boss.
All organizations think they’re great at customer service. They got the posters and the talk down pat.
What is the point of these motivational posters? “Commitment. All it takes is all you’ve got.” Nice sentiment. Take it down. No one believes it anyway. The posters are instead like good luck charms; if we hang them there long enough, maybe they’ll become true!
You have to embrace the truth no matter what, no matter how painful, no matter how uncomfortable it is to assault your own biases, your own fantasies, your own ego.