Catching Smoke
Some thoughts on leadership
Slip Slidin’ Away
Leadership is one of those slippery words that gets bandied about all over the place but doesn’t actually bring much clarity to the conversation. It means different things to different people, as evidenced by the fact that everyone and their dog seems to have their own definition of what it means.
It is such a nebulous concept that it can be co-opted by anyone to support their point of view, or be chucked into a conversation to confuse the debate and deflect attention from what really matters.
This is not helped by the fact that there are shedloads of research, papers, books, and podcasts on the matter. It has spawned a huge industry of education, consulting and coaching on leadership and of leaders, which has signally failed to produce more or better leaders, at a time when we desperately need both.
One of the problems is that we fail to separate the act of leadership from the individual. We focus on the individual traits of ‘leaders’ rather than looking at the systems that the individuals are operating in or the context where leadership takes place. So we end up obsessing over the personal qualities of the ‘leader’, which are poor indicators of their ability to provide effective leadership.
Another problem is that we conflate status and formal power with leadership. Just because someone is in a ‘leadership position’ (which is really just a label assigned to a place in the hierarchy) does not mean they are capable of providing leadership. We can all recall people who fit this bill and understand the problems they cause, which varies from stasis to chaos but are never good.
We also conflate leadership with management. We call managers ‘leaders’ when they aren’t, nor do they need to be. Some managers will provide leadership in some situations but many won’t nor will they be required to do so. To understand this, we need to be clear about what the difference between management and leading is.
One definition (as I have said, there are more to choose from than you can wave a stick at) that I like is “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things”, although we should note that this only addresses the distinction between the two. The manager executes a defined process, managing and marshalling resources to produce the desired outcome. The leader decides what the desired outcome is and creates process to achieve it.
Of course, it’s not such a neat separation between the two, there is clearly overlap. It’s matter of degree. Managers will mostly just be managing. They don’t need to provide leadership most of the time. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, a range of skills and capabilities are required for a business to be successful.
I take the view that everyone can ‘lead’, in that they can perform acts of leadership at some point in some situations. Maybe it’s not absolutely everyone but it’s most people. That’s the leadership that organisations need to unlock but which they mostly ignore or actively suppress in pursuit of ‘efficiency’.
Some leadership, huh?
No Sense
This focus on Leadership was inspired by a post by Navarun Bhattacharya (someone well worth following for his thoughtful and insightful posts), which in turn was about a talk by Gary Hamel called ’The League of Leaders’.
Hamel begins with the point I made above, that ‘Leadership’ has lost its meaning and become confused with management and hierarchical position. Hence the expectation that managers are leaders. In fact, leaders are something quite distinct, he says, they are someone who ‘catalyzes proactive change by inspiring and mobilizing others to do more than anyone thought possible.’
On this basis, leaders can be anyone, they become through doing. He goes on to say that they can only be seen in hindsight, once the change has happened. That rather rings true, doesn’t it? We all know leadership when we experience it, when something happens because an individual (or individuals) took action or behaved in a certain way, or most likely did both.
So leadership is really something we experience, whether we are the leader or the followers. That’s why we struggle to abstract it and put it into words, that’s why it refuses to be contained and be put in a nice neat box. Defining leadership is like trying to catch smoke with your hands, you can never really grasp it, some of it always escapes. Just as you think you have it, it changes shapes and drifts away.
Nevertheless, Hamel identifies four traits that leaders share:
🔹 Vision — a future they feel destined to create.
🔹 Daring — the courage to take personal risks.
🔹 Tenacity — a do-or-die persistence.
🔹 Resilience — the ability to rise after failure.
I don’t have any issues with these traits but obviously we are falling into the trap of identifying leadership with the traits of the individual, which hasn’t really got us very far, has it? So I would rather say that people who carry out acts of leadership will have these qualities, in that moment and that situation.
The problem with tying them to an individual who we deem a ‘leader’ is that they are supposed to embody these traits all the time. That’s just not how it works. People are not constantly visionary, daring, tenacious and resilient. Some people might only have one moment in their life where they do something extraordinary, an act of leadership, where these traits appear and align.
It could be a modest vision, they just see something to change that may be small but they know would be better. The daring might be to just push over the line of what is normal/acceptable/comfortable. They could just be quietly persistent, keeping at it without taking excessive risks. Their resilience might just apply to that thing, that moment, where they have the inner conviction to keep going despite the setbacks.
What we need to do is design organisations for those moments, to provide the opportunity for everyone to come to the fore when they are needed and the circumstances allow them to shine.
Of course, this won’t sell many books or much consultancy so Hamel has to speak in more grandiose terms. It is all couched in the language of the heroic leader, a subtext to practically all the literature on leadership, a concept that is deeply ingrained into our collective psyche. But we should remember that heroes don’t always wear capes, which is also rather what Hamel is arguing.
Hamel then issues a challenge:
“If someone truly visionary, daring, tenacious, and resilient (as described above) joined your company, how long would they last?”
His answer: “not long, unless we redesign the system”.
Here he has hit the nail firmly on the head. We’ve all seen people who display these qualities and who provide the sort of leadership Hamel extols be crushed and rejected by the system. I’m guessing quite a few of you have, indeed, been through that very experience. I certainly did when I went from the playground of the first half of my career into the prison of the second half.
The reality is that organisations actually suffocate these traits by design. They reward conformity, compliance and playing safe. They value consistency over step-change, they want rationality rather than conceptual leaps. Cold, hard logic (for which read ‘the numbers’) is prized, passion is rejected.
Hamel’s conclusion is correct, we need to change the system to enable the type of leadership that we need to emerge, from everyone who can provide it.
Fix You
Hamel has some solutions, ways in which the system can be changed to give ‘the space for leadership to breathe’, as Navarun poetically puts it. These include;
smaller, empowered units.
promotions based on impact, not rank.
peer-chosen leaders.
space for internal entrepreneurship
flatter structures, and,
hiring builders, not stewards.
This is learning lessons from the likes of Haier, VINCI and Intuit. Organisations who have radically changed their structures and how they operate. They have typically created multiple self-organising teams, networked together through technology, who are able to autonomously experiment and iterate to create new products and services.
There are many other ways of reorganising structures and ways of working, including things like DAOs (Distributed Autonomous Organisations), co-operatives, federations and the like.
And, of course, the Pirates of the Golden Age. What Hamel has presented is exactly what the pirates did. It was how this small group of renegades beat the navies of the imperial powers, despite being massively outnumbered and outgunned. They operated as individual crews, joining together into large flotillas for specific missions but otherwise independent.
The crew all voted on who got to be Captain and Quartermaster and could vote them down if they didn’t perform. People built their reputation and their roles based on their deeds, which meant that everyone was treated equally. Women and former slaves and other minorities had real freedom and often took leadership positions. Anyone in the crew could carry out an act of leadership, too. Apart from the Captain and Quartermaster, every one was treated equally. Organisations don’t get much flatter than that.
This is the ‘in’ to making change happen. It’s hard to change the system and you probably don’t have the power, status and resources to do it. You might be able to change part of the organisation and if you can, you should. However, we can all be a bit more pirate. We can form a crew at any level of the organisation, we don’t need permission. We can make change happen around us, we can adopt the pirate approach and enthuse our colleagues (because, let’s be honest, everyone wants to be a pirate, don’t they?). We can start to break rules and replace them with better ones. We can use our agency and exercise our freedom.
These are acts of leadership that anyone can do.
The pirate approach embodies all four of Hamel’s traits but as a crew, not as an individual. Collectively, we can create the vision, find the courage, encourage each other to keep going and pick each other back up after the inevitable set-backs.
Because what Hamel doesn’t point out is that leadership is not just an act, it’s a collective one. That was what the leading management thinker Peter Senge understood with his definition (yes, another one!) that “Leadership is the capacity of a human community to shape its future.”
So let’s go act.