Leadership - not what you think
A not so smart thing to do is to tell a speaker/trainer that you want to fight them on their opinions. And I said exactly that to Noorulain Masood - a Harvard Kennedy School of Government leadership educator and coach. Noor was there to train me on adaptive leadership but she spent 3 hours telling me that everything I knew about leadership was inherently wrong. This blog post is going to be a summary of my main takeaways from the sessions with Noor.
Leadership is not equal to Power
Probably the most common misconception about positions of leadership is that they are positions of power. What do you think about when you think of a leader? There’s probably an image of someone in a suit, or a t-shirt with a company’s logo on it, or charisma and command and power. Usually most people think of leaders as having some sort of power. But what is power? How do you get it? Who is giving it to you?
Here is the point that threw me off the most. “You don’t own power. You don’t have power. The SYSTEM is giving it to you”.
What?
This woman was telling me that my whole life, every time I had been in a position of power, I had actually been, for a lack of better phrase, a slave of the system?! That sounded absurd because all of a sudden, all my “leadership” positions that I was so proud of, didn’t feel much like accomplishments anymore. I did not agree with that at all. I convinced myself that this Harvard lecturer was wrong. Until…
Power is conditional
Because power is something the system gives to you, it is not this glamorous thing you’re getting. It’s something you get in exchange for a service you are providing to the system. As long as you continue to provide that service, the system continues to provide you with power. You get a big desk, you get a fancy title. You get to sit at the head of the table. But the minute you stop providing the service to the system, it removes away the power from you and replaces you with the next best fit.
By now I had begun to understand what she meant. It did make sense. I was the President of my school’s first Model United Nations conference not because I was some great debater or the only one good enough to be in that position but because I was providing a service to my school and to the debating society. Looking back at it, anyone could have done that if they were just willing to put in the work.
But leadership, like Noor explained was free from systemic boundaries. It could mean many things, and did not have a certain “look” to it. All I had to do be a better leader is adapt myself to the situation. Sometimes, it was better to champion the causes and take the more authoritarian role of leadership, but other times, leadership meant taking a step back and letting my team learn and make their mistakes so I could move on to bigger things. And other times, being a good leader meant making quiet moves and connections and letting someone else take the stage because that would be the best way to achieve the goal.
Leadership is listening. Listening to the market on what it needs, listening to the customers, listening to the competition - listening with all of your existence is the first step you need to do. And then act accordingly. Take the 2-second gap between facing a problem and reacting on it to observe and reflect so you can decide objectively and at least tell yourself why you are about to make the decision you are going to make.
