Leadership evolves through a series of inflection points, both external and internal. It can become a disheartening and lonely place when major decisions are needed under unprecedented complexity and even greater ambiguity – where new uncertainties, unnerving risks and bottom-line consequences are heightened, and where every crisis seems to involve stakeholders above and below who think they know more than you do. While few leaders admit it, credible research tells us the volatility and disruption that accompany mission success in these turbulent, paradoxical times now outruns the capabilities of most leaders. If you expect a long, steady, glowing ascent as your executive career evolves, sooner or later that kind of thinking will undermine your passion for leading, deflate your drive and eventually derail you.
Even the most effective and admired leaders ran into soul-crushing roadblocks and hit ceilings at different times in their careers. Since taking the reins from Steve Jobs in 2011, Tim Cook has grown Apple’s revenue by more than $380 billion Cdn annually and has increased its market cap more than ten times to $4.7 trillion Cdn – making it the third most valuable company in the world. Yet his leadership is under increasingly severe scrutiny. Apple is being criticized by industry analysts for its competitive sluggishness in the AI universe. Its top AI executive was recently poached by Meta and investors, long content with share growth, are getting restless. Apple’s once-unbeatable stock has cratered downward while the Nasdaq is attaining record growth. Has he also plateaued?
Too few leaders today have in place a clear, pragmatic and executable plan to grow themselves with the same deliberate insight and zeal they used to design, build or alter the future direction of their organizations. While they pay attention to the needs of the enterprise, they don’t necessarily do that with conviction or energy when it comes to their own development. Preoccupied with external demands but less focused on their own growth, they encounter new levels of unfamiliarity and disorientation as the job becomes bigger, faster and more demanding. Mastering the emergent challenges and competencies of leadership requires more than behavioural changes – it demands redefining oneself as a different kind of leader.
Almost 90% of companies experience growth stalls. Leaders do likewise. It can happen to any chief executive regardless of her intelligence, experience or skill sets. Paradoxically, such plateaus are often a consequence of their earlier success in growing the enterprise – rather than focusing on what needs to change, they double down on what got them to where they are now. Why change the playbook when you’ve been so successful? There’s a life cycle to leadership and, the more successful executives become, the more they overestimate their capabilities. As Warren Bennis, an acknowledged guru on the subject, once accurately observed, “Most of us wear the concrete shoes of our past successes and eventually pay the price.”
More than ever before, leaders are facing a different kind of reality – while recognizing the business world around them has changed dramatically, they’re now feeling less effective and questioning whether they’re still up to the challenge. Turnover at the top has increased dramatically in the post-pandemic era. More CEOs stepped down last year than in any year since 2000. The bar has been raised as owners and boards are asking whether they have the right leadership competencies and mindset in place to address the uncertainties and increasing stakeholder demands. The current business media says almost 70% of leaders in Canada are “seriously considering” quitting for personal reasons, including the realization they’re “just not up to the task” of delivering higher performance outcomes.
A leadership stall happens when the executive team splinters, when there’s little consensus about what really matters, when they feud during conversations about strategy, avoid productive conflict or shut down and passively resist new ideas. It’s exacerbated when egos balloon out of proportion to their roles, when they don’t do what they say but try to do what they think you would do under the circumstances. The seasoned members of your team are having more trouble getting the same job done. Accustomed to delivering heroic results, they must now work themselves past the memory of their prior successes. When a problem, failure or crisis arises, it’s invariably traced back to conversations that didn’t happen. Or didn’t happen at the right time, in the right way, or by engaging the right people.
The signals amidst all the new noise can be different for each leader. Perhaps you can no longer compellingly articulate your organization’s mission, or attract and develop the kind of talent needed to compete for the future, or are seeing your trust and engagement quotients diminishing in the eyes of followers, or are failing at building the leadership pipeline needed to sustain continuing growth after you step down. Overcoming a stall requires that you move from talking and telling to listening and asking, from convincing others with your technical savvy to involving them in bigger-picture conversations, from dictating “what” to coaching “how.” It means you have to stop making the tough calls on every problem, as you’ve always done, and only make them on those that might constitute a catastrophe. It requires that you transition from solving every hiccup to asking others to step in, ask the right questions and lead. It demands that you stop tweaking and fine-tuning the status quo and start risking and innovating anew.
E.F. Schumacher, the renegade of Buddhist economics, once opined that “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” This is the essence of reinvention – the courage required to admit you’re at an inflection point in your leadership, that you’ve become more risk averse and are now somewhat out of your depth in terms of what is needed to reinvigorate your leadership. It involves a transition from being the chief problem solver to nurturing more problem solvers, from leaning in to standing back, from using executive directions to relying more on subtle influence skills, and from dictating how goals can be achieved to coaching others on how to accomplish them.
Reinvention requires the capacity to articulate an intelligible narrative that resonates within the enterprise and drives higher levels of commitment and productivity. Every major discontinuity should be a role modeling opportunity to affirm or reaffirm the vision you’ve framed to guide the organization forward. The ability to pivot quickly, profoundly and effectively might be the most important core competency of leadership today. The surest sign of stalling is when the decisions you see people making conflict with the priorities you thought everyone understood. The most embarrassing signal is when other leaders in your organization go blank when you put them on the spot to repeat your narrative. Is your purpose statement on target, memorable and spreadable? Does it engage people or do they respond with apathy and disinterest?
Reinvention is the realization you need to go back to school. Learning never ends. It isn’t easy to be honest about our shortcomings. It requires courage to confront what holds us back. As Sir William Wallace said over 1200 years ago, people don’t follow title, they follow courage. Leadership is a mindset and a responsibility, not a title. Having technical competence is expected as table stakes. You should know what expertise you’re ultimately required to deliver. Having wisdom more so than just intelligence, having good judgment rather than just business savvy, being able to listen rather than command, being able to inspire rather than direct and demand – these are the traits that accompany leadership renewal and earn you a willing and committed followership.