H Julie Diamond γράφει για την ηγεσία και τους ρόλους. Αναφέρεται στο ρόλο ως ‘δημόσια περιουσία’ ως ένα ένα αρχέτυπο του οποίου η ισχύς εκτείνεται πέρα από το άτομο που βρίσκεται στο ρόλο.
Πηγή: A User’s Guide to Power
The Fight Club of Leadership
by Julie Diamond
Remember the movie, Big? Tom Hanks plays a twelve year old boy who wishes he were big a wish granting game in an arcade only to wake up the next morning in the body of a 30 year old. He’s still a twelve year old, but living in an adult body.
It makes for great comedy, like the scene above at the company party where he encounters pickled baby ears of corn and caviar (which he spits out, and then wipes his tongue with a napkin). Like all comedy, it works because it captures something we recognize about ourselves. We laugh at his antics, and also at the uncomfortable truth that we often feel that we are just impersonators. The roles we play feel bigger than our capacity to perform them.
This is one of the least talked about parts of leadership: not feeling up to it. Whether we’re leaders or parents, teachers or doctors, when others look to us for answers, it’s a human reflex to project an image of competence and security. We train ourselves to hide the feelings of incompetence and fraudulence. One of the reasons I started this blog was to explore what happens on the inside. What struggles do leaders have? What are the pressures, not just the perks, of leadership?
A new book by Ben Horowitz looks at this, in a surprisingly candid and refreshing way. The Hard Thing about Hard Things, compiling Horowitz’s posts from his blog over the years, captures what Tom Hank’s shows in the movie: the inner doubt and insecurity we feel when we take on a big role.
By far the most difficult skill I learned as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring, and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check.
And Horowitz confirms what I see as well: Hardly any leadership literature talks about it. Jokingly, he calls it the Fight Club of Management:
Over the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of CEOs, all with the same experience. Nonetheless, very few people talk about it and I have never read anything on the topic. It’s like the fight club of management: the first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown.
Why is it a secret? Why do we keep our meltdowns, struggles and doubts to ourselves?
I’ve talked about this a lot (here and here). There are many reasons to share our struggles. Horowitz says that by sharing his struggles, his team got more engaged, and was able to help problem-solve and work through the issues. The opposite of what he had thought.
A role is public property; it’s an archetype whose power extends beyond the individual in the role. It’s meant to be shared, and having limits, discussing them, sharing your concerns allows that public role to be just that, public. People join in; they’re meant to. When we overly identify with the role, and forget the human side to it, we keep others in their complementary roles as well: All-knowing teachers diminish students’ sense of intelligence, overly dominant bosses keep subordinates from engaging fully and taking ownership of their work, and over-protective parents inhibit their children from developing independence and the ability to handle adversity.
And it’s a two-way street. Leaders hide their insecurities, and followers want heroes. We don’t want to know about the private doubts, infallibility, and imperfection. We don’t want to see ourselves up there, some poor schlub bumbling and stumbling. We want heroes.
But heroes are human, too. Look at our superheroes. They have very human alter-egos for whom we also cheer loudly. We’re happy that underneath the latex and muscles there is someone who fumbles in conversation, who wears glasses and pocket protectors and is picked on by the school bullies. Even the Greek gods reflected this paradox. They were venerated for their superhuman abilities and strengths, while at the same time driven by jealousy, vengeance, and insatiable appetites. They were saviors and victims, all without contradiction.
But the most important reason to put the dualism aside is that if we think that leadership is some special trait, some special class of human, then by definition, we think regular people can’t be leaders. And that is not just wrong, but a tremendous loss.