LEADERSHIP PERFECTED: LEADING FROM THE WHOLE YOU

My wife’s choir was recently rehearsing a sample of Leonard Cohen songs. Between practices, Elizabeth would wander around the house singing these songs, which included Anthem, one of my favourites.  The chorus is like a meditation:

“Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack—a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.”

I make  my  living  advising  CEOs  and  senior  leaders  on  how  to  be  more  effective  in  their leadership style and conduct. If there is one message I would like to instill in these leaders, it is that phrase from Leonard Cohen's song.

Why would I want to say, “Forget your perfect offering”?   Cohen’s particular idea of perfection refers to situations in which we present a well-prepared, rational point of view based on what we have learned from others as the appropriate response to a  specific situation. But when we operate by always having to put forward our "perfect offering,” we can easily become separated from our true nature and come across as too formal, distant, and inauthentic.

I recently found myself  in two conversations over    some  senior executives’ assessment and development plans. These were three-way conversations between the CEO, the senior VP, and me, the coach. The CEO was gently critiquing his direct report, suggesting they were too “robotic” or “clinical” in presentations and interactions with their teams.   Both leaders were encouraging direct reports to be more authentic: “Just be yourself, Jim.” “Your presentation was all there….there were no holes in it at all, but we don’t know who YOU are.”   The comments implied that the presentation was too much there; there was too much perfect presentation and not enough Jim in its expression. The point is that it’s not this idea of perfection that connects, and  influences conduct, but that interaction and delivery comes from the integration of head, heart and guts; they need to be both prepared and not prepared.

In the corporate world, competitive pressures encourage younger aspiring managers to mimic the leadership behavior of others, usually their direct superior, while adhering to the party line. Thus, they become good performers, but they often lack the self-awareness and courage to project their own values, personality traits, and specific points of view into their leadership interactions. They aspire to, and become accomplished at, various external standards of perfection or excellence. These young, bright, ambitious managers have largely been promoted because they have been among the best at “getting results” - results others wanted and expected of them. There has been little or no value placed on how the results happened. The “how” involves bringing their complete selves into the interactions. At some point, young leaders must abandon external ideas and author their own  leadership  viewpoints, accessing  their unique  mix of  gifts and  talents and expressing these in creative responses to business situations.

Maturing as a leader involves responding to an internal calling -- the urge to give away our innate gifts, “our offering” to life situations. Too often and for too long we deny these gifts, don’t trust or value them; therefore we not only refute our personal gifts, but we also block the inner calling to give them away.

 Trusting in your Unique Gifts

“Leadership perfected” needn’t be a concept or standard that is preconceived, well-rehearsed, and risk free. Such an approach excludes any scope for a creative response to new situations. Instead, think of leadership perfected as an ever-evolving response to what is required in the moment. To be truly effective and to resonate with an audience, a leadership response can’t come from a notion of how we think we should act, but must come from the immediacy of oneself in the moment. In this alternative view of perfection, it is more about how well we understand and respond to a situation, rather than how well prepared we are in advance, for our best guess of how the situation will play out. To use a military analogy, the latter approach would be like a general with strategies based on what worked in the last war.

In a corporate world conditioned to performance with results through study and hard work, often like  the boss did  it, equating  effective  leadership  with  spontaneity  and  improvisation  in  the moment could seem counterintuitive.  But the creativity emerging when we respond to situations from the immediacy of ourselves requires a high level of self-awareness, trust, and comfort in who we are and what we perhaps unconsciously know, in order to respond to many diverse situations.  This personal tool kit is our mix of mostly hardwired gifts, talents, and stored skilled knowledge that integrate, refine, and express intuitively.   Great leaders are masters of self- regulation in the moment, because they know themselves well enough to monitor and regulate those gifts spontaneously. This is a very different notion of perfection than scripting out what one should say and do ahead of time, or acting in a certain way, based on external standards and expectations.

Although the concept and language of “making an offering” may not have currency in business language, it is what we do without thinking whenever we’re fully engaged and committed.   As business leaders, when we address a situation both spontaneously and deliberately, by offering the benefits of our gifts as applied to vision and leadership, are we not offering up ourselves? People who are truly creating out of the immediacy of themselves would testify to the vulnerability and uncertainty experienced in such moments.  Ironically, in vulnerability and uncertainty we can be uniquely ourselves, because such moments mark the juncture where we’ve exhausted what we’ve  learned  from  others  and  must  start  expressing  what  is  authentically  and  uniquely ourselves. Words like “intuition,” “faith,” and “creativity” speak to our ability to step out from the known; and this is how we bring something new and spontaneous into the situation. This allows for the crack that lets the light in. It is in such moments that we are truly creative.

Leading in a VUCA World

From the perspective of  creativity, the  crack that lets the  light in  has huge possibilities for interpretation and meaning. Our willingness to be our authentic selves, trust our intuition, and stored skilled knowledge, in the moment, creates space - a "crack” or an opening for inspiration that can be channelled, providing inspiration or insight that the ‘crack’ facilitates, which in turn is facilitated and necessitated by the VUCA world. VUCA, a term currently in vogue with the U.S. military, represents a world full of volatility, unpredictability, complexity, and ambiguity. This reality is certainly reflected in business leadership. In such a world, a perfect offering, as Cohen meant it, is out-dated as soon as it is created.

The “crack” has many meanings -- a powerful symbol of “undoing,” or irregularity, or randomness. It is something that occurs despite our best efforts, our most laid-out plans. We can also think of the crack as something “unscheduled,” and it can be something as mundane as an uninvited guest or as profound as a life-disrupting (and thus, life-changing) event.

In the pre VUCA era, there were many years of relative stability and predictable economic growth. Most of our leaders grew up in a world where certainty was prized and where uncertainty was to be avoided. Leadership provided the answers with assuredness.  No one liked to be surprised. Remember the slogan from the Holiday Inn commercial: “The best surprise is no surprise at all.” In today’s VUCA world, that is no longer the responsible view. A good leader expects surprises, and becomes an expert at anticipating, adjusting to, and accommodating “cracks.”

The “crack” can therefore represent life and circumstances as they actually unfold; something that we do not control.  It is something that disrupts our internal mental model of how the universe works. It is the outlier, the  “Black Swan” -  something  existing  in  the  tail of  our “normal” distribution. It forces us to redefine our conception of “normal” or “perfect.”

The crack lets light in simply because the crack opens us and exposes us to a larger reality existing outside the confines of our “mental model” of order and regularity.  What is “light” but awareness and insight - our “aha!” moments?

Light is not something we can factor in, since the power of light, in this context, is its surprise factor. What we can do, however, is anticipate its inevitability, prepare ourselves for its likelihood, through paying exquisite attention to our situation and then adjust to it, revise our preconceptions, and then self-regulate our behavior and response.   The light and the crack are therefore coexistent, for without the crack, there is no illumination.

The challenge, and therefore the true test of character, lies not in our presumed perfect plans, our apparently perfect life, or our unblemished  career trajectory; but in how we  respond  to  the unscheduled events, the cracks, that interfere with our conceptions of the perfect offering, or the perfect life.  The healer must empathize with the wounded, to become a better healer.  The leader must become lost at times to become a visionary leader.

First, Know Yourself

How do we prepare ourselves as leaders to see and respond to the light that the crack enables? We begin by taking stock of ourselves; knowing what our particular mix of gifts, talents, and flaws are.  We need to take time-out to witness, appreciate, and laugh at our vanity, our interpersonal derailers, as well as understand and celebrate our emotional competence. In essence, we need to “reboot.”  It is only when we can step outside of and observe ourselves as others see us, that we can free ourselves of being foot soldiers to conformity; and ironically, it is only having done that, that we can constructively be ourselves and re-brand and re-offer our unique set of talents. This is the job of the executive coach; to help in this process and journey.

Leadership perfected is now reframed, because it is now offered from the uniqueness of who we are - a self-perception that can appreciate our individuality blended with our shared foolishness, our yearning for perfection with our collective inertia and fear of change. 

Previously, our leadership offering was made only from a place of  artificial and superficial strength, others’ expectations, and, more than likely, from a place of arrogance.  But now, thanks to the light the crack made possible, we can offer our gifts from a place of humility and wholeness, which really is nothing more than our awareness of our commonality, as simultaneously gifted and foolish creatures.

This is where true leadership is born, out of our vulnerability. For as Lao Tzu says,

One who knows his lot to be the lot of all other men

Is a safe man to guide them.

1. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

2.  Witter Bynner, Trans., The Way of Life, According to Lao Tzu, Stanza 31. Capricorn Books, 1962 printing

Author:  Brian Brittain (Brittain Consulting) helps CEOs and their executive teams improve results through having conversations about what matters. Specializing in leadership development, succession planning, organizational design, and stakeholder alignment, KRW Associate Partner Brian Brittain collaborates with CEOs, board members, and senior executives to align senior talent capability with changing business requirements.  The outcome of his work is a much more aligned, capable, and motivated senior leadership talent pool focused on, committed to, and capable of executing an evolving dynamic strategy.