Leadership in Chaos: 19th edition.
Leaders Digest

Leadership in Chaos: 19th edition.

By 19th November 2024 No Comments

Leadership in Chaos: 19th edition.

autonomy, quests, urgent vs important.

Hi 👋, welcome back to our 19th edition 🙌.

“Character is fate.”

Heraclitus

Culture: autonomy.

In his 2009 book Drive, Daniel Pink argued that human motivation is largely intrinsic, and can be divided into three things; autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy is the feeling of self-direction, mastery the feeling of improvement at things that matter, and purpose, is knowing why we’re doing what we’re doing. All as relevant today as ever. In fact, a recent study shared by Adam Grant, underlined the importance of autonomy. Covering 38 countries and 126,000 people, it found that children with controlling parents have higher rates of depression and anxiety. Children with autonomy-supportive parents are happier.

A thought for leaders: Autonomy matters, and it’s key for a healthy working life. With record low levels of motivation and engagement, autonomy is a critical part of happier, more productive workplaces. That’s not just hybrid working but empowering employees to explore new ideas and initiatives without fear of failure and to feel a sense of ownership. Great leaders avoid micromanagement and create an environment where autonomy equals success. Where employees have enough slack to feel free but enough guidance to avoid feeling abandoned or lost.

Performance: quests.

Making a list of things we have to do is helpful. Daily or weekly “to-do” lists focus the mind. But making a list of aspirations in the next two or three years is different. Whether personal or professional, they tend to be bigger. More meaningful. We generally call them goals. But the term “goals” can feel institutional, operational and mostly, a bit boring. Plus, goals feels like something that may happen. That’s the goal, let’s see what happens. That’s why planning quests, instead of goals, might be a better option. Quests are adventures. They can have ups and downs. They are personally transformative. And let’s be honest, they sound a lot more interesting.

A thought for leaders: Switching from goal mentality to quest mentality might sound silly, but it’s an interesting way to look at framing performance. Employee engagement and motivation continues to be challenging, so how we frame things matters. Particularly for performance. Quests feel like they can be personal, team-bound or even organisational. And they feel like an exciting and transformative way to overcome obstacles, make progress and find some heroes.

Leadership: urgent vs important.

There’s an old advertising joke about confusing urgent with important. A copywriter, an art director and an account man are flying to a client meeting. As they put their bags in the overhead locker, they free a genie, who pops out and thanks them by granting them one wish each. The copywriter wishes to be Hemingway, and pifff he’s gone. The art director Picasso, and piffff he’s gone. Finally, it comes to the account man, who wishes them both back for the important meeting he has in two hours. Blinded by urgency, he missed the important opportunity (to wish for anything). Shane Parrish also wrote about the 98/2 Rule. How we often focus on the 98% visible, exciting things, that contribute only 2% to the results. And how “most success comes from consistently doing the mundane”.

A thought for leaders: It’s easy to confuse urgent or exciting with important. To lose focus on the valuable things that really matter. It’s human nature. But great leaders know that choosing what we attend to and where we spend our time compounds. As Annie Dillard said, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives”. So choose wisely.

Podcast: Ep 34: Finding Meaning in Chaos

This edition also features a podcast from the Vaults Ep 34: Finding Meaning in Chaos. You can listen here.

This episode gives further insight into the abovementioned topics of autonomy and finding purpose.

You can follow Flow Group on Linkedin here.

P.S. This month’s featured work is by Italian-born visual artist and researcher Giuseppe Lo Schiavo. His work is described as “synthetic photography”. It’s an image-making approach that “involves computer-based methods as opposed to traditional camera-based processes”. Not simply text-to-image AI, his concept is more in-depth and complex, driven by the psychology behind how we interpret reality.