Cheap Leadership, Continued

As a company — any organization, really — grows larger, it seeks to maintain order, control and predictability in the “cheapest” way possible: by building a bureaucracy, a mechanistic system of rules, processes, procedures and policies.

At this point it has essentially bought into a lie — that it’s not possible to have order and clarity by trusting, motivating and inspiring people to organize themselves to solve problems at a high level of mastery to deliver the results the organizations wants and needs.

Or, even if it believes it’s possible, it also usually believes it’s too hard, messy, complex and unpredictable.

In other words, too costly.

We Are Imperfect People

Human nature is flawed. We are not gods, or God, by any stretch of the imagination.

And so we drag our imperfections and our flaws to our work, our relationships, and our organizations. They show up in how we treat each other, and treat ourselves. They show up in the decisions we make. They guide what we value, and what we dismiss. 

I see a lot of leaders struggle to hide or lie to themselves about their imperfections and flaws, afraid that those flaws disqualify them to lead.

Great leaders waste no such energy. Great leaders embrace their imperfections as a fact of life, an inescapable feature of human nature. They understand that being imperfect and being ineffective are not the same thing. 

Great leaders aren’t perfect — they’re effective. They simply don’t allow their own personal flaws to destroy the effectiveness and motivation of others. Leadership, in many ways, is about getting ourselves and others where we need to go in spite of our imperfections. 

More simply, we must work daily to rob our imperfections of the power to make us ineffective.

Our success in life and work — and, ultimately, our happiness — depends on our ability to transcend our flaws, not to reach some unattainable state of perfection, but to get things done well, and move others to get things done well.

Two Vastly Different Missions...

“Management” is about protecting and projecting order and predictability. It is about conforming. It is about survival. 

It is the attempt to limit the downside.

“Leadership,” well, that’s the act of unleashing the upside.

"I'm a simpleton..."

Maybe it’s too easy to succumb to the charm, or his infamous reality distortion field, but this clip of Steve Jobs presenting plans for a new Apple office campus to the Cupertino, Calif. city council is just wonderful.

Most striking is the disarming humility, candor and utterly “human-scale” personality of the leader of the world’s most valuable technology company. This is a great communicator — and rare business and organizational leader — at work.

What’s also striking is what’s missing — the all too common mask many CEOs wear, the one that demands (or pleads for) deference, creates an air of inaccessability, and fails to connect as a human being with other human beings from whom they need commitment, trust and understanding.

What we know about Mr. Jobs is that he loves to create great products and do great things. Evidently, this desire consumes far more of his intellectual energy than the need most mortals have for large quantities of smoke to be blown at their posteriors.

Big Brain, Tiny Heart

You are very smart. You are very good at thinking, as a matter of fact. You are filled with knowledge gained in classrooms and from experience. You know what works and what doesn’t.

You manage with your head — your brain. You solve problems. You design and implement processes and systems. You research markets and customer attitudes and behaviors. You understand and work within generally accepted accounting principles. You can work the right buzzwords into conversations, and meetings.

When something goes wrong, you are very good at analyzing it, and understanding what happened, and how. You love numbers; they are comforting, and clear.

You are very smart.

But people solve problems with more than just their brains, don’t they? Are they moved by the spreadsheet only? Do they come to work each morning looking to bring their blood, sweat and tears to a process or a system?

They want to believe. They want to bleed for the right mission, the right product, the right person. They want to win, to taste the fruit of an investment of their talents, their knowledge and their experience. They want to stretch, trust, and be trusted. They want to feel, and to love, and to commit.

These things don’t fit on your spreadsheet. They are not a system or a process, nor is summoning them a system or a process. They are messy and unpredictable, discomforting and hazy.

They are faith, and faith doesn’t live in your brain. It lives in your heart. While it takes brains to solve problems every day, don’t forget people and organizations achieve mastery with their heart as well. It’s a genuine competitive advantage.

“Big brain, tiny heart” is the most common mistake organizations — and leaders — make. “Tiny brain, big heart” is the second most common.

You manage with your brain, and you lead with your heart. You have to do both — deliberately and intentionally — to be great. Simply doing one, or the other, alone makes you and your organization mediocre.