INsight/ The Unreasonable Leaders
Photo by kazuend on Unsplash.
Manila, 21 September 2023 — Are you an unreasonable leader?
Story
It happened in 2015. At the second leadership camp we organized together for high-school leaders, I remember how my fellow leadership coach Judee Quiazon shared that leaders don’t make their decisions based on reason. They are unreasonable because they are driven by something bigger, often called their vision, purpose, or calling. How to unpack the idea that leaders are unreasonable? Let’s look at some examples, starting with three leaders you know about.
Historically, who could have reasonably expected these three leaders to succeed? First, the leader who had been incarcerated for 27 years yet would bring together a highly factious and faltering society to form a rainbow nation. Second, the leader in an ancient, populous, and poor country who would prime its people for an unrivaled sprint toward economic growth. Third, the leader in a newly-established poor and polluted city-state who would make it flourish by relentlessly applying first-world standards. None of their achievements could be regarded as plausible or even possible at the time they started their work.
Now let’s make a jump to leaders in our businesses and organizations today. What would be some examples of unreasonable expectations? What about coaching CEOs and their leadership teams rolling out inclusive leadership that achieves results in days and weeks rather than years? What about Gen Z (and soon Gen Alpha) leaders driving climate action for sustainability and winning over Gen Y, Gen Z, and Boomers to collaborate with them in mutual respect? And what about water professionals across the world becoming water leaders who, on a large and unprecedented scale, drive positive change to achieve SDG6 and other water-related goals? Unreasonable to expect that, right? Yes, until leaders step forward who are not afraid to be unreasonable. And you may have many more examples.
Challenge
Thankfully, we can already see a shift in the right direction. Purpose-driven leadership has been gaining popularity, and talk about discovering your purpose has become ubiquitous. Just about every Gen Z and Gen Y in today’s workplaces seems to be following this trend, wanting to see and feel that the work they do makes a significant contribution to their purpose or vision. Thankfully, their enthusiasm has also prompted many Gen X and Boomers to reassess their life purpose. And the good news is that the positive impact of finding one’s purpose on leadership effectiveness and performance is showing up in more and more research studies, for example in the work of Professor Richard Boyatzis and his team at Case Western Reserve University. But is having a purpose enough?
While research validates that having a personal vision—along with a focus on strengths and values—is important to your leadership, we need to dig deeper to find out how much it really matters to leadership of the unreasonable kind that we referred to earlier. If we accept that leadership is about playing a bigger game, how much bigger will your game be? Is it going to be big enough to make a change that not only matters to you but also to your organization and to the world around you? When you feel that you are on the right track because you have a vision that gives you a sense of challenge and satisfaction, we could still see that as reasonable incremental change. I’d say that this is not enough.
How to distinguish a vision for incremental change from a vision that involves truly exponential and therefore unreasonable leadership? That is the question posed by Benjamin Hardy, an organizational psychologist, and Dan Sullivan, a strategic coach and author. In their book 10x is Easier than 2x, they unpack the difference between pursuing a much bigger vision that leads to disruptive exponential 10x growth and pursuing a more modest vision that requires linear and incremental 2x changes. As they explain, the differences between these two paradigms and their results are profound. In my words, the unreasonable leaders that I described above have firmly embraced the 10x growth model that led them to focus exclusively and relentlessly on a truly big vision, for which they had to let go of countless other priorities. That is what unreasonable leaders do.
Question
In this past week, I have been pondering how to coach more leaders to embrace the 10x model for their growth, which is what our world goodly needs to deal with our current challenges of climate, sustainability, and peace through collaboration. It has become abundantly clear that the conventional approach of pursuing incremental improvements (the 2x model) will not get us there. If that model describes your leadership game, it may be big enough for your personal satisfaction, yet not big enough to make a real difference in our world. To show up as unreasonable leaders who pursue changes that seem impossible, we need to embrace Hardy & Sullivan’s 10x model. And that is not an easy road to travel.
My question for you this week is, therefore, about the size of your vision. Are the positive changes you would like to bring about linear and incremental, or disruptive and exponential? Are you going to be known as a reasonable or unreasonable leader? And if you are making this distinction for the first time, then what is the much bigger game you can decide to play to pursue a truly significant vision that will impact the world around you? As we discussed, we’re talking about being unreasonable, about choosing the road less traveled. In the words of Zig Ziglar, the late American author, salesman, motivational speaker, and quintessential striver for success, there are “no traffic jams on the extra mile.” That less-traveled road is waiting for you.
Years ago, I learned another valuable lesson from Ziglar’s work. Known as an expert at focusing on results, he understood that achieving success at playing a much bigger game depended on the many decisions we are called to make every day in our work and life. To help us make better decisions, he offered a simple and powerful tool in the form of this question: Will this action bring me closer to my vision (goal) or not? A simple and powerful question that can go into the toolbox of unreasonable leaders who have decided to go for the 10x exponential change model. Precisely because that model requires them to let go of many of their lower-level priorities. Coaching leaders to embrace that path of exponential changes and unreasonable expectations is our goal at TransformationFirst.Asia. I hope that you won’t settle for the 2x model.
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