The Paradox of Leadership Power

"What's Up, Doc?" Volume 6, Number 5, May, 2006

Understanding People = Power
The more you rise in repsonsibility in any organization, the more your people skills become paramount. That's because getting things done through people requires an understanding of human styles of thought, emotion, talent and motivation. People are not robots or computers. So, in order to move groups of people to effective action, you simply must understand people. Leadership requires you to understand how individuals think, what makes each person tick. That's what it takes to develop leadership power.

Reading People Requires Emotional Intelligence
The concept of Emotional Intelligence is a little fluid, but it encompasses our ability to understand what makes people tick. The main idea here is that understanding others is an area of intelligence, susceptible to learning, just as any other area of knowledge or growth can be. In my experience and through all my studies in psychology (you can learn more about me here), I know that all human growth, from cradle to grave, happens in the context of positive relationships. We seldom if ever overcome our blind spots in emotional intelligence through reading a book. We learn as we get feedback from people we can trust, who have our best interests at heart, like family members or close friends - maybe even a boss. Even if you feel you've achieved a breakthrough from a book, it probably was prompted by some interaction with another whereby you became aware of a need for growth, and you then sought out some writing to help you make sense of your experiences. Learning is socially mediated.

Emotional Intelligence Requires Self Awareness
To be able to understand the motivational styles and personalities of others, we need first to understand ourselves. Other people are not motivated as we are. They think differently, organize their worlds differently in their minds, and have different patterns of feeling. Before you can even begin to develop a "language" through which to understand others, you'll need to understand yourself more and more. Then you can possibly begin to learn how others differ from you. The weakest leaders I see in my consulting work believe there's not much they don't know about themselves or others, and yet, each of us is far more complex in our programming than the computer you see in front of you. Wilfull ignorance of yourself or others weakens your leadership power, and you'll make lots of mistakes from which you'll never learn. To grow in emotional intelligence, you'll need to form the habit of looking in the mirror to understand your own patterns of thinking and emotion.

Self Awareness Requires Vulnerability
Here's the hard part: the best way to learn about your blind spots - and we all possess blind spots - is to get feedback from people we trust. That means being able to hear what we by definition don't want to hear. This is personal feedback. Now, no one should open himself up to abuse, so it's important to have trusted people who can tell us what they think in a helpful way. But to allow ourselves to be that open, we need first to be vulnerable, to let our defenses down. That rubs many leaders the wrong way, because we tend to think power comes from conviction and an outward posture of strength that renounces vulnerability. Bzzzzt! Wrong. There are times to be resolute, of course, but learning and growth require an openness to the right kind of feedback. Closing yourself to the wisdom others might be able to offer you is the height of foolishness.

Power Therefore Requires the Willingness to Become Occasionally Powerless
So here we have the paradox: growing as a powerful leader requires you to become occasionally powerless, in the sense that you must open yourself to hearing things about yourself you don't want to hear, from people you trust. That process never stops. I encounter many executives who decide that such feedback is necessary early in one's career, but not later. As Hall of Fame baseball manager Earl Weaver said, "It's what you learn after you know it all that counts!" When you stop learning, you stop growing.

Global Economies Require Even Greater Emotional Intelligence
More and more, the business world requires us as leaders to interact with people from different cultures. Well, it can be tough enough to understand individual diffrences in thinking and motivation within our own cultures, but then, when we need to translate what we know onto experiences with those from a different culture, it gets that much harder. Imagine running Apple software on a PC. The basics of computing are the same, and human nature does not change, but we don't all grow up with the same "operating systems." Global economies make it even more critical to develop leadership power through regular pit stops to being powerless. Leading and succeeding in a global environment requires even greater emotional intelligence in leaders.

Intransigence is Your Enemy
As I've mentioned already, deciding you know all you need to know means deciding to place a ceiling on your leadership effectiveness. I encounter many good people with great potential to take the next step as leaders who nevertheless act as if an openness to growth is for "other people." It's a shame, because businesses really grow, innovate and seize opportunities when great leaders create the conditions for others to become the best they possibly can be, and that begins with the leaders themselves.

On a final note, I'm still putting this blog site together, and learning how it should be done. Somewhere in the main architecture of the site template I need to create a link to my business site, where you can find many articles in the archives, with a search box tool to help you navigate. In the meantime, here's a link to the mother ship.