Leadership, Fear, and Courage

Managing is not leading.

Most of what I read about leadership might be best described as ‘how to wield power.’ The underlying question is ‘how do I get people to do what I want them to do?’ The jumble of buzzwords sounds like ‘working to inspire and guide people toward achieving goals through effective strategy, delegation, and fostering a positive culture.’ Or, “How to get people to do what I want them to do.”

A scan through the internet yields lists of ‘leadership skills and traits. Here’s a sample:

· Accountability

· Adaptability

· Confidence

· Creativity

· Empathy

· Focus

· Positivity

· Risk Taking

· Stability

· Team-building

That misses the boat. Leadership is about the paradoxical task of caring for followers while navigating the chaos. I like to describe it this way:

‘Imagine you are driving across the Golden Gate Bridge on the foggiest of foggy San Francisco mornings. It’s so thick that you can only see the reflection of your headlights and the size and shape of droplets in the mist. While the people behind you get to follow your taillights, you feel your way through knowing that their safety depends on you. From behind, leadership looks easy..you just follow the taillights. From the leadership position, the job is to translate situational uncertainty and danger into a path that can be followed.’

In other words, the central energy in leadership is courage.

The central chore of a leader is to navigate the line between fear and integrity. It’s a goldilocks problem. If you are lucky as a leader, there is a lot of room to maneuver. When the risks are small and the reward is small, navigating decision making is not that hard. Follow the rules, hope for the best, and expect the consequences of mistakes to be minimal.

This is the world of managers. The task boils down to getting people to do what you want them to do when the risks are low and the reward is small. Passing strategic direction straight through without question. Hoping to get most of your bonus. Helping the team to get most of theirs.

It’s driving across the bridge on a sunny day.

Leadership gets way more complicated when the stakes are high and the risks are severe. You can best see real leadership when the leader’s personal risks include loss of life, loss of job, loss of career, major financial, loss of status, serious physical injury. You know, the scary stuff.

Low risk, low reward environments are a manager’s paradise. Bullying is enforced high risk with low reward. Investment nirvana is a low risk high reward environment. Heroism is what is called for when the risks are high and the stakes are equally high or higher.

Part of what we are seeing on the national landscape is an unsurprisingly human response to leadership by bullying. Job hugging (hanging on to the job as hard as possible) appears to be motivating our political and business leadership. A relentless focus on EBITDA (gross profit) regardless of human consequence has taken root. It’s as if the private equity industry took over the society.

That’s where courage comes in. Bullying is about following orders blindly. Leadership is about seeing the consequences.

At a managerial level, the consequence of job hugging is a numbing of effective judgment. It’s a slippery slope. One unnecessary compromise leads to the next. The important parts of caring for the drivers following your taillights vanish in a flurry of ‘I’m the only one that matters’ rationalization

Then, it’s a short distance to getting comfortable with layoffs two weeks before the holidays. When fear overcomes integrity, bad behavior emerges. Darwinian ‘me or them’ decision making replaces the primary obligation of leadership: providing taillights.

Real leadership uses power to improve outcomes. It would be nice if it were as easy as that sounds. When the best outcome falls outside of the dictated window is when real leadership emerges. It involves saying no (and encouraging followers to say no) when an order is immoral, illegal, or incorrect.

There is much more to say about the struggle between fear and integrity and how that is the substance of great leadership.