Hi, I’m Ian McClean. I’m the founder of Flow Group and GreenLine Conversations. And this podcast has grown out of the chaos that’s been thrust upon us. During the podcast, I’m going to try and share with you the best of 25 years of helping corporate organizations deal and cope with change. So, as you’re out there, busy making sense of it all, trying to cope, and maybe, in some cases, trying to rebuild your organizations, I’m hoping that some of this can be of some assistance. We’ll keep it deliberately short, because I know you’re busy. Let’s dive in.
The Art of Leadership
I recently attended a screening of a documentary on the life of the famous Irish artist Patrick Scott at Killruddery House, and it got me to thinking about leadership as a craft or as an art in itself. All the leaders I have ever known could be plotted along a continuum that runs from the Technical Expert (finance, technology, etc) at one end – all the way to an Artist at the other.
Unsurprisingly, at either extreme of the continuum, what you get is pretty feckless leadership. One is too tied up in technical specifics, whilst the other is too detached from current reality. Either way, they both suffer the terminal impact of leaders – that of losing the dressing room.
This experience tallies somewhat with a 2017 New York Times experiment which ran an algorithm to discover what occupation (from the 974 listed at the federal US government Labour Department) was most directly opposite to another in terms of skill set. You punch in your profession, and it calculates the job that is most diametrically opposite. By its method, at the extreme other pole of an Artist is a Physicist. With the advance of technology and finance, in particular, in recent decades, the values associated with the Physicists (process, precision, metrics) have been promoted in leadership across the board at the expense of the more esoteric attributes of the Artist (holistic, connective, intuitive). You only have to look at the CEO vacancies and how often it is filled by the CFO or CTO as opposed to the CPO.
So, in spite of the flavours, fads, and short-term biases of the time, who overall and over time makes the best leader? One popular – but misleading – fallacy is that the measure of good leadership is simply results.
However, I have encountered many very talented leaders that have been undone by (as Harold McMillan put it) “events, my dear boy, events”… and equally, some very mediocre leaders who have been the beneficiaries of circumstantial good
fortune. As JD Rockefeller once replied when asked by an interviewer about his recipe for success, “You need three things: Go to bed early. Get up early. And strike oil.”
Many leaders are guilty of misattribution – taking personal credit for their victories in benign conditions whilst blaming external forces for their failures in the storm. Equally, the leaders that adopt a cut-throat, win-at-all-costs approach to achieve results
only ever succeed in creating a toxic, dysfunctional culture that gains on the numbers but loses on the people.
Jack Welch was loved by Wall Street and, at the time, dubbed “Manager of the Century” by Fortune magazine. Sure, he oversaw business growth and created shareholder value at the time, but he promoted an ego-centric, fear-based, survivor culture that, along with his rank-and-yank firing policy, ultimately ran GE into the ground.
Over the years, I’ve witnessed countless mini-Welchs who generated short-term profits with long-term consequences. And in a world of Triple Bottom-Line, that’s no longer cool.
Any leader can get right-place, right time lucky; any leader can game the system for short-term results, but the best leaders I’ve encountered have all been Artists. I’m not talking about art in a dressed-up, self-promotional sense as in Donald Trump’s book titled “The Art of the Deal”, so let me elaborate.
By Artist, I mean that all the best leaders I’ve encountered have in common a desire to create something beautiful. The opposite of what this means is a CEO I met for the first time last week who, in answer to my question, “What are you trying to achieve?” replied that his mission was to “double the company revenue in the next 2 years”. Whilst there is nothing inherently wrong with ambition, when that represents the leader’s whole mission, then it lacks the capacity to inspire others. And inspiring others is the very raison d’etre of leadership. It doesn’t inspire mostly because it lacks beauty. (Not to mention he was dull)
Compare this with JFK’s ambition to put a man on the moon or Steve Jobs’s desire to put 1,000 songs in your pocket with the iPod, and you start to get close to what it means to be a leader as an artist trying to create a thing of beauty.
In the present, I’m working with a pharma-tech CEO bent on upskilling hundreds of thousands in the developing world so they can get jobs and rise out of poverty. People love working for the company not because it pays better or has free food and funky games room but because they connect to the cause. The CEO treats the company as a canvas and invites everyone along to paint.
There has been so much produced lately in self-help literature on techniques for charismatic or authentic leadership that totally misses the point – in the guise of “How to…(this)”; “10 Tips…(that)”. Charisma and authenticity can’t be “techniqued”.
Authenticity and charisma are not something you can act or stage-manage. They are not something you do. They are a consequence of how you are – a consequence of someone’s commitment to a virtuous purpose greater than just shareholder value. This is what is actually at the heart of the magnetism, and it is this magnetism that wins the heart and generates followership – and I don’t mean the Instagram type.
And so, back to the documentary on artist Patrick Scott. One contributor – the poet Seamus Heaney – described the artist’s craft as a thing of beauty. Scott was able to create Beauty through his art and connected it to the 3 primary characteristics of beauty defined by medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas: Radiance, Integrity and Consonance. Heaney applied the Beauty principles to (Scott’s) actual art, but the characteristics are just as applicable to life, nature, relationships and enterprise. The best leaders I have found each have an artistic sensibility about their work, whether leading a team of software engineers, running a hotel, managing a fund or leading a sales team.
Artistic leaders are distinctive in that they think about their work differently from others and view it through a different lens. They ask (although they will have their own language for it, of course) whether their work is fulfilling the Aquinas Beauty principles:
Radiance – does it give joy and invite connection?
Integrity – does it possess all the component parts to make it complete or whole?
Consonance – do all the parts resonate with one another?
Jobs and JFK certainly had it in mind.
Imagine you as a leader asking those 3 questions about the work you do with your customer in mind – at the very minimum, striving towards fulfilling them serves certainly to improve quality and also inspires more discretionary effort and innovation in your people.
The elite Houston architecture firm Stella Maris has gone so far as to declare the 3 beauty qualities as “the ideal to which this practice aspires” and provide examples in their website manifesto of how each might apply in the creation of a military academy.
Finally, to return to the most diametrically opposed careers of artist and physicist, they have far more in common than you might think. Both professions rate “originality” as one of their most valued skills for instance.
South Korean artist Yunchul Kim, who spent time as artist in residence at the CERN nuclear research facility in Geneva, backs this up by observing “Creativity and Imagination are the most important factors for both physicists and artists. They are not standing on opposite sides, but looking at the same world in different ways.”
Perhaps the twentieth-century Daddy of them all, Albert Einstein was onto something with his profession that “Imagination is more important than Knowledge”.
