The Leader's Journey with Lee Thayer

Leadership Is a Role, Not a Person

Here's a rather remarkable fact that may deserve your attention.

Those who have most frequently risen to the top ranks of leadership in past history have done so without a current recipe book to guide them. Neither Genghis Khan nor Tecumseh ever attended a John Maxwell seminar or read a Tom Peters article on the subject of leadership. At the same time, there seems to be little evidence that those who take courses and attend seminars or read books on leadership ever gain much of a reputation for having changed the course of history - in large or small ways.

What's the lesson here? That those who made their mark didn't have the "advantage" of our 10,000 or so books on the subject, but did it anyway? That those who have available the world's accumulated "wisdom" about leadership don't seem to be able to make much of a difference even with all of that hyped advantage?

The lesson may be this: If you're faced with a circumstance that requires a leader, and there is either no one else to do it or perhaps the others seem less qualified, you may be it.

But, consider these two prerequisites. One is that there has to be an opportunity for the kind of leadership you could uniquely provide. The other is that all of the other possible candidates for the role would have to be viewed by potential followers as less desirable than you are. Leadership is a role, not a person.

Being placed in a position of authority does not guarantee anyone's ability to provide leadership. In fact, the ways in which people get to those positions guarantees that a great many of them will fail as heads of whatever they are heads of.They fail for the reason that when their leadership was required, they smiply didn't have what it took to provide the leadership needed.

What's important to remember is that you will not be chosen to be the leader as a result of how much you want to be the leader - or the result of how many leadership books you have read. If there is a need for leadership, and there is no better choice than you, you just might get the role.

Performance and the Inescapable Logic

One of the most reliable of ancient wisdoms is this: Don't challenge the inevitable. If there is an infrastructure logic to something, go with it. Don't go up against it.

Organizations may succeed for many different reasons. But many organizations fail for one reason - they did not adapt to the logic of the situations in which they found themselves. The logic of situations, from the interpersonal to larger economy, is always implicit - hidden, tacit. You have to figure it out without having the code book in your hand. If one of your lieutenants is gung-ho for your mission, and another expresses overt hostility to it, the logics of the two situations are quite different. If you play them the same, you may lose both ways.

Consider poker or bridge. Each game has a certain logic to it. If you can read it better than your opponents, you might win. It is the same for every competitor in every marketplace. The logic of the situation will always win. It pays to be on the side of the forces that are going to win.

Three concepts to ponder:

1. How good you are at what you do is revealed solely by how well you perform under adversity. Make the logic of adversity your ally.
2. What doesn't make you the best at what you do, makes you ordinary. What makes you ordinary can never make you the best. You can't beat that logic. People have been trying to do that for years.
3. There is no necessary correlation between what people say and what people do. That's the logic. You can play it the other way - but, if you do - you will lose.

Barack Obama's Victory

On their website, Jack and Suzy Welch recently posted a short piece about Obama's "Victory" and the lessons top executives could follow to have their own victories.

You might think that someone as seasoned as Jack Welch would be well aware that all outcomes are produced by many factors beyond the person. Any one of us could have made the observation that people in large numbers wanted to change the policital leadership of this country. So they voted against the status quo - as it usually happens after two terms in office. It's likely they would have voted for anyone who promised "Change." If you happen to be standing in the right place at the right time, that would be good advice for executives. So was the "victory" his or theirs?

You might think that the era of the "great man" was over. But egomaniacs and celebrity explainers would like to keep it alive.

You might think that emulating the person who had become the president-elect would be a good idea. It's never worked in the past. But we would like to believe that there's a recipe out there somewhere just waiting to make you rich and famous. You would be wrong.

You might think that the overwhelming evidence suggests we can learn far more from failure than from success, and that the "lessons" distilled by the Welch's would be more useful if they had been derived from the losers.

You might think that Jack Welch became rich and famous by using the lessons that magically arose from Obama's campaign. Hmmm...

But knowing how anyone became "victorious" doesn't enable anyone reading the "lessons" to do it. Are we saying that Obama could have defeated Reagan at the time, in those circumstances, in the context of that zeitgeist?

It is thin broth, indeed, two parts hubris and one part greed. It must be awful to feed on one's celebrity, even when undeserved - as evidenced by the effort to identify with the "victor - indeed to pose as official explainer of success in the cauldron of politics.

The test, of course, is how many people will become wildly successful by taking the lessons to heart. Obama was "victorious." But suppose he fails in office. What would be the lesson in that.