Hi Reader
(3-minute read)
keep encouraging everyone else to reframe and rethink things from different angles. So this past week I started noticing how often leaders mistake defensiveness for conviction. How we gravitate toward black & white answers because grey areas feel unsafe. How most leadership advice keeps adding more techniques when what's actually needed is permission to subtract.
None of this is all that ground-breaking.
But when you bring it front-of-mind and watch it play out in real time, across different conversations, it’s hard to ignore.
So today here’s three short pieces about what happens when you trade certainty for curiosity. Fair warning: I’ve no tidy conclusions here. Just observations to make you think.
Black, White And Shades of Grey
Ever noticed how business or sports leaders can gravitate toward the loudest, most certain voices in the room?
And big them up like they just invented fire?
It seems to me that more and more the person who speaks in absolutes gets heard. The person who speaks in nuances gets ignored.
I support it makes some kind of sense evolutionarily. Our brains want clear answers. Fight or flight. Yes or no. This strategy or that one. Black and white thinking helped our ancestors survive.
I see leadership as being all grey though. The decisions that matter most live in ambiguity that won't resolve cleanly.
Yet we keep rewarding the leaders who eliminate nuance. Who speak with unearned certainty. Who present three “logical” options as if only one could possibly work.
I caught myself doing this last week. A client from the world of football asked my perspective on a difficult situation. Instead of sitting with the complexity, I gave him a clean answer in seconds. It sounded good, definitely logical and it felt helpful in the moment. But walking away, I realised I'd just handed him my blind spots disguised as clarity.
The thing about people with any kind of power or position of power, and I'm including myself here, is we use it even when we claim we don't want to. And giving someone a definitive answer when you don't have one? I see that squarely as using power to eliminate discomfort. Yours, not theirs.
So, maybe the best leadership guidance isn't about providing answers at all? Maybe it's about making people comfortable staying in the grey long enough to see what others overlook. To create an answer that’s a cocktail of logic and imagination and lived experience.
The world keeps asking for decisive leaders. There are loads of those so what if we actually need more curious ones instead?
Self-Belief & Defence Mechanisms
There's this idea that good leaders need unshakeable conviction. Belief they can prevail even when odds are stacked against them. Sounds sensible, to be fair. But what if conviction is what we actually value, or if it's just easier to defend?
Watch how decisions get made in most organisations. Someone proposes a few options. The room discusses and debates. Then, almost always, they choose the one that's easiest to justify if it fails. Rarely the one most likely to succeed. Time and again we see the decision taken as being the one with the best defence narrative baked in.
I heard of one GM in the hotel industry recently who killed a bold & risky customer experience idea because, as she put it, "I can't explain this to the board if it doesn't work." Of course I’m sharing this as it backs my thesis but the safer option wasn't better. It was just more defensible. It seems like we’ve built a world where leaders in sport and business would rather fail conventionally than succeed unconventionally.
So what actually is 'conviction'? Is it belief you can win? Or is it belief you can justify your choice regardless of outcome?
Most leaders I encounter have conviction about their ability to defend decisions. When I think about it, very few have conviction about their ability to be wrong and adapt.
I’m more certain than ever that the gap matters more than we admit.
Stop It.
I heard the following from a head-coach on a podcast last week….."We spend too much time teaching leaders what to do. Not enough teaching them what to stop."
Sit with that for a while. It think it’s clear that most leadership development is additive.
Search on any social media channel and you’ll read/hear…”Here's a new framework.” “Here's a new technique.” or “Here's what great leaders do that you don't.”. It’s force feeding in a world built on consumption.
But half the leaders I work with don't need more to do. They need permission to do less. To stop attending meetings that don't need them. Stop solving problems their team could solve. Stop defending decisions that aren't working just because they made them.
The hardest leadership skill isn't learning what to add. It's learning what to subtract. Most leaders know this…..but subtracting feels like quitting. And, wrongly, adding (mostly) feels like progress.
Haven’t we got that backwards?
Watch this 1-minute 'Leadership Habit' Short...
Why is it that being 'the best' might make you a worse leader??
A Master's Voice....
In your world, how often do you use pull-thinking instead of push-thinking as a means of persuasion?
Another Newsletter you might find useful....
|
It Got Me Thinking...
By Dan Mickle | Mental Performance Coach
It Got Me Thinking is a must-read newsletter that explores the mental side of performance, offering insights and strategies to strengthen mindset, build resilience, and unlock potential in sports, competition, and everyday life. |
|
|
Thank you for being part of the Leaders Coach community.
The work on how to lead better is something you have to do alone.
But you don't have to do it on your own.
Onward and Upward,
Paul Clarke
|
