However, this book alone won’t make you a leader. I have a friend who is a fitness fanatic. He buys all the magazines, is a member of a well-equipped gym and has an exercise bicycle in his bedroom. Yet the only exercise he gets is when he lifts the piles of health and fitness magazines from bedside table to bookcase. He tells me he really will do some exercise – but he just does not have time right now. And he always seems to have something more important to do. He wants the health and well-being that exercise will bring him, but without doing the work.
Bearing this in mind, if you are ready, I invite you to step out on the first stage of the leader’s journey.
Why do you want to develop as a leader? What do you want to achieve? A leader is going somewhere. Why move if you are happy with what you have?
We move for only two reasons: either we are unhappy where we are and want to be somewhere else, or we sense something better and are drawn towards it. However good our life, we get used to it and then we want more; our imagination always soars beyond our present state. The energy to start comes from our conviction within, coupled with a push from the outside. This call to adventure and the urge to play with the unknown has given us our art, music, science and commerce.
Leadership comes from our natural striving to constantly reinvent ourselves. You do not need external permission to be a leader. Nor do you need any qualifications or position of authority. Leadership does not depend on what you do already. Many people in positions of authority are not leaders; they may have the title but not the substance. Others have the substance, but no title. Leadership comes from the reality of what you do and how you think, not from your title or nominal responsibilities. Leadership blooms when the soil and climate is right, but the seed comes from within. So the only permission you need to begin is your own. The moment you say to yourself, ‘I can be a leader,’ you have already rolled up the map, put on your boots, got up from your easy chair and taken the first step on the journey.
Irish folklore tells the story of a group of tourists enjoying a walk in the countryside. They had a map, but even so, by early afternoon, they found themselves lost. The sky clouded over, the wind whipped the leaves around their feet and the first spots of warm rain began to fall on their faces. They decided to make for Roundmarsh, which, according to the map, was the nearest town. After an hour, unable to see through the curtain of rain, they decided to ask for directions. Walking on for half a mile, the rain eased off and they met a local man walking his dog in the opposite direction.
‘Excuse me,’ said the tourist leader, ‘we are a little lost. Can you tell us how to get to Roundmarsh?’
The man stared into the distance at nothing in particular and considered the question very seriously.
‘Roundmarsh?’ he muttered. ‘Roundmarsh? Hmm. That’s a problem. If I wanted to get to Roundmarsh, I wouldn’t start from here.’
It is always easier to get to where you are going when you know where you are. In the words of Max de Pree, the retired CEO of Herman Miller, ‘A leader’s task is to define reality.’ The leader puts a stake in the ground and says, ‘Here we are, what is possible?’ Two thousand years ago, a Chinese proverb gave much the same soundbite: ‘Gain power by accepting reality.’ The ancients steal all our best ideas. But accepting reality by knowing where you are is the first step of every journey.
We need to ask three basic questions:
Where are we going?
Why are we going there at all?
How do we want to get there?
Then, as this is a leadership journey, we need to ask more questions:
What resources do we have to help us?
What are our limits and our strengths?
What traps do we need to avoid?
What do we know about leaders?
Who are they and what do they do?
What kind of models do we have for leadership?
Do we have a good map?
Why start the journey anyway? What prompts you? What draws you to being a leader? Unusual circumstances? A personal crisis? Perhaps a person has come into your life and changed your thinking. We all have defining moments in our lives and often a person will act as a leader for you. Sometimes we recognize it at the time, but not always.
I remember a seminar I attended a few years ago with Eloise Ristad, a marvellous teacher who was Professor of Piano at Colorado University. She gave workshops on music and performance anxiety, a big problem for many classical musicians. They are expected to give a flawless performance, ‘speaking’ with their instrument, which needs constant practice to master. The pressure can reduce solo instrumentalists to glassy-eyed paralysis, like a rabbit caught in the glare of a car’s headlights. Musicians are taught to play their instrument at college, but they are given little guidance on how to perform it. Eloise had written a book called A Soprano on her Head1 which I admired very much. She had a unorthodox approach to teaching music, in which she used all sorts of ways to interrupt performers’ stuck patterns. The title of the book came from the way she cured a singer of stage fright. She asked this singer (who was tongue tied in her presence and could hardly croak a note) to stand on her head and then sing. Ridiculous! And yet it worked. You might say it gave her a whole new perspective on singing. It was certainly the beginning of the resumption of her interrupted singing career.
I remember coming back from that workshop thinking, ‘I can write a book too.’ The fact that I had not written anything beyond school essays at that time didn’t seem to matter. A year later the manuscript was finished and it started me on a journey as a writer. The call is when you suddenly recognize you want to change.
One of my friends told me his turning point. He was with a textile firm, in name a manager but in reality a glorified clerk. His boss seemed to know less and work less than he did, and he referred to his in-tray as ‘Hell’ because it seemed to be a bottomless pit of torture and was always full. His out-tray was ‘the ocean’ because it was impossible to empty. Quite appropriately, the depth of Hell was how the boss decided what sort of worker you were. One Wednesday morning, after a longer than usual drive to work through the rush-hour traffic, a client blamed my friend loudly and publicly for something he knew nothing about. ‘That’s it!’ he shouted as he slammed the telephone down. ‘I’m leaving!’ And he did, after tipping the contents of his in-tray on his manager’s desk. He started his own business, where he earns less than he did before, but he is immeasurably happier, joining the ranks of the self-employed who have a tolerant and sometimes indulgent employer. He refers to that Wednesday as ‘the day that all Hell broke loose’.
It can be a chance remark from a friend can set you searching, or a new project at work, a manager who becomes a mentor, moving house, starting a romantic relationship, becoming a parent. In the popular rendition of chaos theory, a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing can conceivably cause a hurricane in Texas, such is the complexity, interconnectedness and unpredictability of the world’s weather system. (If it worked the other way round, that would be the real miracle.) Our social relationships are at least as complex as the weather, so I have no trouble believing that a few words from someone in the right place at the right time can totally change your life.
You are called – to what? Let us look at this enigmatic quality ‘leadership’ more closely. The word deceives us in its simplicity. It does not mean the same for everyone. Ideas about