I was listening to a podcast interview with author Tim Urban recently, and something he said made me stop the podcast to really digest what he’d said. This implication is profound for all of us, but especially leaders.
Urban described our current moment in history as a time when individuals have tremendous power to affect significant change. The pace of communication, power of technology, and degree of connectedness makes this true now more than ever. We see this when a small group of leaders at a social media company like Facebook makes a decision that quickly impacts millions of people. Because of their reach, the action is amplified.
Yet the challenge is that there is a tremendous amount of conformity to this leadership.
His next statement about leadership grabbed me the most:
“I think, what is leadership? To me, leadership is the ability to move things in a direction that the cultural forces are not already taking things. A lot of times people seem like a leader because they're just kind of hopping on the cultural wave and they happen to be the person who gets to the top of it and now it seems like they're [leading], but actually the wave was already going [there]. Real leadership is when someone actually changes the wave, changes the shape of the wave.
As I considered the statement, I first saw an emphasis on our authority as leaders – the capacity to make decisions that change the shape or direction of our team or our organization.
But as I sat with Urban’s statement, I realized that his comment was more focused on the vulnerability of leadership – our willingness to exercise this leadership authority in the face of uncertainty and risk. It’s not that at this moment in history we lack the authority or capacity to make bold decisions and move courageously in new directions; the levers at our disposal to make meaningful change may never have been easier to grasp.
It’s that we lack the willingness to take that risk.
Taking the lead of a parade in motion on a set course is easy. Falling in line and marching with the crowd – the doing nothing– is easier still. The inherent risks of these two options are distanced, you end up where people took you or where the figurative wind blew. Agency was something you gave up–or never had.
Standing at the helm and deviating from course because of vision, knowledge, instinct, or desire is the real challenge, and the real opportunity.
For me, the temptation with an idea like this is to relegate it to mere theory. But I’ve learned that the actionable value is in asking how to integrate this into reality. We need to ask the questions that translate to personal experience:
Everyone is a leader to someone, and the degree of our impact varies. By asking these questions we can understand the “wave” and decide what we will do to impact the shape and direction, moving from passive rider to powerful leader. It takes courage, practice, and resilience, but it is absolutely a journey worth taking.
