Don't stop at the horse

Moving past leadership porn to find your own thing

I remember going out dancing with some friends in the early 90s, in the olden days before the internet was worldwide and before social media. Back when a facebook was a printed book of people’s high school portraits that you got in your freshman year at college.

One of my friends looked out at everyone dancing and said, “Remember the days before MTV when nobody knew how to dance? Now everyone dances the same way. They dance better, but they all dance the same.”

I realized he was right. Where there used to a be a wide range of skills on a dance floor, now there was a certain conformity, limbs moving in a circumscribed, approved way that people had learned from watching endless music videos on MTV. There was an accepted way to dance. And most young people imitated that, keeping the ideal in their minds until their body conformed as much as talent would allow.

I heard once that Picasso had to learn how to draw a horse before he painted like Picasso. There are skills and craft that are important, whether you are writing, making a film, researching a scientific breakthrough, or leading a company.

But if you’re working like everyone else, if your goal is conformity to an ideal built by someone else, you’re stopping at the horse.

We are told what leaders should be. Media shows us rapacious white people or grizzled wise old editors, fictional models that bear little resemblance to any reality I know. Some business advice is consistent over time. Other suggestions are as ephemeral and contradictory as any other fashion. My LinkedIn feed is choked with articles and posts about one aspect or another of good or bad leadership. I get it – I write some of those.

I’m an executive coach. I’ve taken the classes, I know the assessments, I’ve read the books and studies on various modalities, theories and approaches. I can draw a horse. I can teach someone else how to draw a horse. But I don’t want to stop there.

Another friend who was a theater director and movie critic once said that the hardest actors to direct were those who were self-conscious. He would cast a less talented actor who could move freely over a more talented one who was self-conscious. One of the characteristics of flow, that state of maximum creativity and competence, is that you stop thinking about your self. Flow is the antithesis of self- consciousness.

Where in these various portrayals of what leaders should be is there space for our individual, idiosyncratic expressions of the movements of our mind, our spirit? How many of us are so self-conscious about all the ways we don’t match up with the imagined ideal that we remain hunched over in a sort of defensive crouch, never stretching to our full height and capability?

What happens if you learn without an ideal, without conforming to some cultural blueprint?

Bear with me because sex is the only example I can think of.

I’ve talked with friends about the challenges of their children accessing porn on the internet, especially when the technically adept young teens can bypass their parents’ parental controls. It’s easy to see the problems with young people learning about their bodies and sexuality from pornography. But it made me think about the fact that my friends and I learned about sex by having sex.

Of course, porn has always existed, but it wasn’t as ubiquitous before the internet, so we had to learn about sex by talking about it, or actually doing it. Clearly, there are risks to that – like the teenaged girl who told me, as a teen, that you couldn’t get pregnant the first time you had sex. But, for me, there was a joy and freedom in not having any idea what we were supposed to look like naked, or how we were supposed to move or feel. A friend of mine who is my age, and a physician, is saddened that young women in their early teens show up in her office with their pubic hair removed. They have already learned there is something wrong with the natural way their bodies mature and they need to remedy that to be desirable. We both shudder to think what else they’ve learned about sex and sexuality.

Is there a sort of leadership porn? An insistent message that other people are leading and working without the human messes of anger or illness or coming back from maternity leave and having your breasts leak through your shirt.

I learned to dance without MTV, and to have sex without any porn, just the occasional Playboy centerfold. Which meant that I saw some very idiosyncratic dancers, but I think there was also space there to be less self-conscious, more open to listening to the authentic prompts of your body without reference to some outside “ideal”.

I’ve had other executive coaches ask me what my favorite assessments are, what my process is. I can use those, but I usually ask a new client how I can help them. My assumption is that by the time you’re in the C suite, you know how to draw a horse. I want to see what comes after the horse. I want to create a space where there aren’t restrictions or a rigid choreography of leadership, just an invitation to make space for each person’s unique genius. Most people have at least one genius.

I love working with people who are more interested in the art of leadership, the art of business, the craft of making something where there was nothing, or making one thing exponentially better. Many of my clients are creatives, they make software or consumer electronics or advertisements. And my favorite part is when they move beyond the skills and frameworks and models that other people have built and make their own thing. It’s uniquely theirs, idiosyncratic. It might not conform to the expected best practices, but there’s flight in it, and a kind of genius.