Leadership is a focus on others and the willingness and ability to do for others what they can’t do for themselves. We lead people. We manage the work. Don’t confuse management with leadership. Great operators have to be skilled at both.
The progression goes like this: humility, curiosity, knowledge, understanding and compassion.
Extraordinary leadership is founded on humility. I realize that’s counterintuitive because we mostly think of leaders with big egos, big brains, and high confidence. In a word, many people think of arrogance when they think of leadership. But arrogant leaders aren’t the most effective.
Humility is the realization that there are things we don’t yet know. Things we may not quite understand. Or things we may not understand well enough to make wise decisions.
Humility compels the extraordinary leader to solicit the wisdom, insights, knowledge, and skills of others. This is critical for growth, improvement and high performance. Without it, we’re prone to overestimate what we already know. Smartest person in the room and all that. It’s the enemy of great leadership. It shuts down the collective brain power, experience and wisdom of others. We all lose when that happens.
Proper humility – don’t confuse that with self-deprecation or a lack of confidence (I’d argue that the extraordinary humble leaders are among the most confident because they’re uninterested in showing off or preventing others from thinking they don’t have all the answers) – proper humility provokes deeper curiosity. Curiosity compels us to seek answers to our questions. It urges us to consider new questions, too – hopefully always seeking better questions. The quality of our questions determines the quality of our leadership – and our influence to develop a high-performing team.
Curiosity is satisfied with knowledge. As we share our experiences, insights and wisdom we learn things we may not have known before. A major component of leadership is making decisions. Bosses deploy resources. Deciding where to dispatch resources is the job of every boss. Leaders may or may not be the boss, but they also have to make decisions. We can all agree that better information and more knowledge can dramatically improve our decision-making.
But knowing some new facts or insights can prove useless if we don’t understand. Our humility and curiosity drive us to deepen our knowledge with understanding. It’s one thing to know something to be true – or to be a fact – but that’s not the same thing as understanding it. Understanding answers, “Why?” It gives us purpose and reason.
And the pinnacle of the progression is compassion. Armed with understanding, we can now leverage compassion. Compassion is simply a focus on others.
Wait a minute, what? Isn’t that one definition of leadership?
Exactly.
This is why this progression may not quite be a progression. Maybe it’s more accurately a recipe where, depending on where we are – and the present circumstances – we have to add the proper ingredient at the right time. But remarkable leadership has every ingredient.
Leading people effectively requires compassion, which relies on understanding, which only happens with knowledge, which is the result of our willingness to ask questions because we’re curious to know what we don’t yet know…all of which stems from our humility to know we’re not the smartest person in every room. A leader’s ability to focus on others and do for them what they’re unable to do for themselves hinges on the consistent addition of each ingredient. Leave one out and your leadership cake will fall. Ruined because you left something important out.
Be well. Do good. Grow great!
