Leadership: Making the Familiar Feel Strange, the Hairball and the Little ‘Fires’…

When you think of leadership, what do you think of it?  What words or images represent ‘leadership’ to you?

I often see and hear these terms across all channels: North American, male, tall, white, powerful and hierarchy mentioned relative to leadership.

Many types of leadership inspiration and discourse surround us daily. Leadership articles can be at our fingertips each morning, from Linkedin to the Harvard Business Review. Published articles around leadership increased by 175% within the 30 years from 1970 to 2000. And then, on social media, we can hear daily from the likes of Simon Sinek, Brene Brown, and Adam Grant, espousing new pithy thoughts around leadership.

Yet despite all the varied sources for leadership thought,  I  am continually amazed that we are seeing ever-increasing leadership issues when our society has such a depth of resources and possibilities to look to for reference or opportunities. We are constantly hearing on the news both bad and good examples of leadership flooding our sensory world…a day does not go by on the nightly news that we don’t hear about new or continuing failures of various leaders. In a recent interview with ‘Frieze’, a comment by the iconic German Director Wim Wenders I feel epitomises our leadership myopia: he ‘… dreamt that societies would become better after the pandemic and that we would take better care of each other… but then the opposite was the case [people seem to live more recklessly than before]’ (Frieze, 2023). 

When one thinks of what we have seen in the news, our society was created by one gender, one race and ability for the same gender, race and ability. That is our mould. We are suffused with this perception at all touch points within our lives. In 2020 there was a study done on masculinity in the workplace by Utopia and The Hobbs Consultancy. The study asked about 2200 people if they worked in a masculine culture. A majority said no. But when ranking the top traits of leadership, three of the top five were masculine-based traits.

Sadly, this belief or perception is present in practically every sector....one is promoted or celebrated by criteria that work in a mould-dominated culture, so if one doesn't feel they fit the mould, they don’t feel they have a voice. But how can we change our values around leadership and the tide of leadership failures that have contributed to our society’s economic, climate and social catastrophes? Even amongst the failures, there are some glimmers of hope-  we have seen some amazing leaders who do not follow the status quo.

Yes, some of these leaders are political leaders, like the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, who led with empathy, to Angela Merkel, the former Chancellor of Germany, who championed quiet agency. Others of these leaders are in the private sector, e.g., Lucy vonStrumer, founder of the NGO  Creatives for Climate who personally bootstrapped  Creatives for Climate and has become one of the top voices in marketing and sustainability per Adweek and AdAge or Jo Barnard and Alexie Sommers the chief instigators for Design Declares which is a growing global group of designers, studios and agencies declaring a climate and ecological emergency. And, in the tech sector Dr. Stephanie Hare, author of Technology is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics and BBCWorld Artificial Intelligence: Decoded, illuminates the collective on the dynamic changes unfolding around us.

I see these non-mould leaders as little fires dotting our world. They are looking beyond the subjective quick wins and toward a holistic perspective that is objective and long-term. They are making the ‘strange’ increasingly feel familiar, which supports making the familiar feel ‘strange’ for leadership in our world. What is encouraging for me is that we are seeing increasing numbers of these fires start and connect. 

But, even with these positive gains,  we continue to see many decision-makers embracing and being rewarded for leading traditionally, which is seen as reductive, extractive and not thinking of the long-term implications for future generations, especially in realms that will change our entire world, i.e., AI. We recently saw Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, visiting the UAE to raise upwards of $7Trillion to rapidly ramp up chip development and production for the expansion of AI– imagine if this came to fruition what an Eco Footprint it would have on the earth and human rights and personal privacy for future generations. This display of leadership is simply an evolution of ‘familiar’ leadership.

The ‘familiar’ leadership behaviour puts value into the here-and-now and does not think of the pain it might be causing society now and future generations. We are experiencing a leadership myopia. In his 2020 Rieth lectures,
the former governor of the Bank of England, Marc Carney, made a comment that resonated with me, and I feel it supports the discourse around leadership myopia and makes the familiar behaviours of leadership sound strange or, more accurately, tone-deaf.

‘Financial markets rank Amazon the company one of the wealthiest companies in the world, but the value of the vast region of Amazon is on no ledger until it’s stripped of its foliage and converted to farmland’

This harmful dynamic has been curated by diverse leaders, from global to local leaders, from CEOs to corporate boards. These leaders have led in a manner that has created an obvious mess—I feel like I’m being redundant right now because we hear this all the time, but, more importantly, this mess has pain woven into it.

This dynamic reminds me of the' hairball' concept at the centre of Gordon Mckenzie’s book “Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace”.  The book tells about the journey of a creative within the iconic American greeting card company, Hallmark. The hairball is the ‘establishment’ -” a tangled, impenetrable mass of rules, traditions, and systems, all based on what worked in the past that exercises an inexorable pull into mediocrity”.

Even if the establishment tries to ‘fix’ things, e.g., organisational change, it is simply another layer added to the hairball. And the mess becomes ever larger. Obviously, suppose the collective stays in a reductive, narrow mindset and does not truly embrace new ways of leading and being a leader. In that case, the pain will continue to escalate for the collective.

But how can we change the tide of leadership failure? It does not need to be a grand gesture- it is unique to each individual, it does not need to be loud but can be a form of quiet agency. But if every one of us takes a moment to truly and internally reflect on our leadership– regardless of where we are in our life, e.g., a junior designer or a CEO, the little fires will grow, and we can make an impact. In the words of Gordon McKenzie: 

‘To be fully free to create, we must first find the courage and willingness to let go:

We need to let go of the strategies that have worked for us in the past.

Let go of our biases, the foundation of our illusions...

Let go of our grievances, the root source of our victimhood…

Let go of our so-often-denied fear of being found unlovable.’