(Some) Elements In The Mindsets Of Leaders Who Flourish
There are numerous books, articles, and workshops for improving your leadership or management skills. I wrote this list of elements I have seen in the mindsets of leaders who flourish because I did not see them widely represented in the available materials.
I. Managing The Destination Over The Journey
Good management is about relentlessly clarifying what the endpoint of a project is and giving appropriate support as necessary to reach it, while at the same time leaving the question of how to reach the endpoint up to the person responsible for it.
II. Measuring Success Without Yardsticks
One of the most common stress points bedeviling leaders comes from not having external yardsticks. If you’re a Millennial or Gen Z, then you were probably schooled in an environment that emphasized measurement, hierarchy, ranking, and evaluation. You always knew where you stood. When you’re managing people, you quickly realize that there is no way to measure the success or failure of your decisions or your own progress as a leader. What to do? You have to make something up for yourself and your people. Invent the yardstick. Indeed, making shit up is one of the most important skills to cultivate.
III. Inventing New Frontiers For Your Team
Another arena in which necessity is the mother of invention is the mother of flourishing leadership is creating new dimensions for your people. Developing the capabilities of others often requires that you invent new frontiers where they can stretch, grow, and develop. Well-organized and highly-systematized organizations almost by default are in the habit of closing off new frontiers; the better to keep everyone focused on their core responsibilities. You can detour around these glass walls by inventing new responsibilities and projects that afford your people the opportunity for self-improvement and development. Every problem someone surfaces is a chance for you to invent a new growth opportunity for one of your people.
IV. Balancing Supporting Your People With Advocating For What Your Team Does
You may feel two competing impulses in managing an individual person. As that person expresses their desires, goals, and dreams, you will likely feel compelled to help in achieving them. On the other hand, if those desires pull that person away from your team, then you might also feel compelled to persuade them to stay. It is important to cultivate balance. You need to give voice to both compulsions. Provide individualized support to help your team member as they pursue their goals, but do not shortchange the benefits that can be obtained within your team. Balance will hopefully lead to synthesis: by inventing new frontiers for growth within your team and robustly making the case for what your team is doing, the team member will feel compelled to stay. (NB: most youthful managers are imbalanced in the direction of not really making the case for what their team is doing and why someone should stay.)
V. Weaving Each Experience Into Self-Narratives
We all have a set of the usual motivations that will influence our satisfaction and well-being in a job: earning a particular wage, working specific hours, the good or bad company of our colleagues, enjoying our individual duties. Many managers are attuned to whether these motivations are in balance and contributing to a positive experience or not. But many managers are less focused on cultivating each of their team member’s stories about themselves, which has a tremendous influence on our work satisfaction. Each of us, whether we could consciously relate it or not, has a story we tell ourselves about our own lives. These stories give us reasons to love ourselves. They help us to identify what community we are part of. Our internal stories help us make important life decisions by furnishing us with a narrative arc and identifying where each of us is trying to get to in our lives. These stories are not immutable but are constantly being revised, and that’s the key for a flourishing leader. A flourishing leader helps their people to interpret their own stories. A leader should try to understand what story each of their people is already telling themselves, and then the leader should seek to weave new experiences into that story in a way that calls everyone to more growth and virtue. This story, in turn, should ideally be connected to a bigger story about the work your group is doing.
VI. Holding A Growth Mindset
Experts have written far more detail about this than I would ever be able to summarize, but I will say that a growth mindset is one keystone element in the mindset of a flourishing leader. Simply put, a growth mindset means taking each person as an unfinished project full of potential to change and develop. An employee who says, “I am not good at X,” is in a fixed mindset. They are betraying an assumption that they are not good at X and will never be good at it -- their abilities are fixed. A growth mindset response is to say that “you are not good at X yet.” A leader with a growth mindset will treat each person as capable of improving themselves.
VII. Seeking Change
What is the one characteristic that, if you had it, would almost guarantee flourishing? I would contend that the ability to change, which itself rests on flexibility, open mindedness, and the ability to learn, is the characteristic that would most likely guarantee flourishing. And yet, just about everything in your organization is secretly trying to prevent change. For example, would you think that your company culture works against change? Probably not, but what is company culture other than the codification of the same set of decisions being made again and again? Most organizations are -- rightly, I would argue -- focused on systematization, routinization, and templating to save time and simplify processes so that they can increase scale. These impulses are all the opposite of change. Cultivating change is hard. Flourishing leaders look for opportunities to improve their flexibility, open mindedness, and ability to learn.