Would You Ever Bother Reading "Leadership for Dummies"?

Have you ever wondered why there is no “Brain Surgery for Dummies” published in the popular series of “things-made-simple" instruction books? Chances are you haven’t, and for good reason. We regard brain surgery as far too complex and critical to assume there is any way to avoid the enormous dedication and preparation required to become a neurosurgeon. Brain surgery is not something we want to try on ourselves or have someone cut corners with. It is simply something best left to the professionals, and to ourself, the most competent professional we can find and afford.

For some reason we don’t feel the same way about leadership – and there are thousands of leadership for dummies kinds of books to prove it.

Unlike surgeons, there is no licensing or even formal training required to become a leader. You might find yourself in the role by design, by accident or by request, or you can simply declare yourself to be a leader, gather a few willing followers and begin practicing leadership however you see fit.

It may seem to be a stretch to compare the complexity or the consequences of leadership to brain surgery. Clearly neurosurgery can only be safely or efficaciously performed following rigorous preparation and training that is afforded only those who have well proven the capacity to literally operate at this level. Done well by competent doctors, lives are saved – and the quality of people’s lives is measurably improved. But in the absence of full competence people are likely if not certain to die – or be maimed to the point of total non-function.

It may not be quite as obvious, but leadership can have similar consequences, both good and bad. Leaders in all walks of life have the potential to bring more life to people and communities, and in many very real situations they have the ability to save lives. They also have the capacity to damage or even destroy lives and in the worst of circumstances make decisions that literally will cost people their lives. Just like the surgeon, the difference is in their competence. Highly competent leaders are heroes and incompetent leaders are not just benign, they can be flat-out dangerous. 

So why do we expect and demand less from leaders than we do from doctors?

Perhaps in part it has to do with the fact that leadership is more art than science, while modern medicine leans much more to science than art. While there is some art and science to both, there seems to be a general academic impression that science is more serious and can be subjected to greater rigor than the arts.

I’m not convinced of that. I would argue that any performance of art or science at a virtuoso level requires exactly the same degree of preparation, practice and rigor. Both require natural talent, developed skill and tremendous dedication.

You can dabble in both science and art without much consequence, and this is where most serious artists and scientists often start out. But the vector to mastery and beyond to virtuosity in either case is what makes both consequential or not.

And in the case of the artist – there is no clear pathway to excellence or recognition the way there is in the sciences. In fact the relevance of one’s art may be unnoticed until after the artist’s death – as was the case of numerous greatly revered artists – who were virtually unknown or unappreciated in their day.

A contributing factor to why the practice of leadership garners less respect than the practice of science-based medicine may also have something to do with the fact that society is lacking and hungry for competent leadership. We deliver freshly minted doctors from medical schools almost as fast as we need them, but are always searching for great leadership and have no such factories producing them for us.

This may be why so many leadership for dummies books have flooded the marketplace over the past fifty or so years and continue to do so at an accelerated rate given the widened access to publishing that technology now offers. This presence of all these book titles contributes to a kind of self-generating demand: the more books available, the more people tend to search for the one that will work, rather than assuming none will. The search for instant leadership is a kind of Holy Grail in the realm of business self-help.

Instant leadership self-help, along with the everything-made-fast-and-easy books, are trends that have become firmly embedded in modern pop-culture, yet the dismal state of affairs in so many areas of life and society speak to increasing levels of dysfunction and incompetence.

The need for competent leadership has never been greater, and the answers are not being found in these books. I would venture it safe to say that none of our modern day great leaders learned to lead from any of these books.

There are also fine, highly regarded and revered learning institutions that offer proven approaches to developing leadership. Among them are the United States Military Academies as well as the top business schools around the world that all offer rigorous study and practical application of proven theory and critical thinking.

West Point and Annapolis turn out some of the finest military leaders in the world, while the Whartons and Harvards of the world stake claim to some of the most famous business leaders. These great institutions focus on pedagogy that aims to provide soldiers and managers with the necessary tools and leadership skills. And while at least comparatively, the pop-culture approach to leadership may be over-simplified—or seem just plain silly, even the most rigorous programs tend to fail to consistently develop fully competent leaders.

The problem may not be in the teaching, but in the learning. While there are likely many reasons this could be true, these three may provide valuable insight as to why this is the case:

1. Leadership is situational. Without context or awareness of the mission and resources, there cannot be effective leadership. Knowing how to lead a parade does not mean you know how to lead war-games. Contrary to most teenagers’ wishes, knowing how to ride bicycle – or even a go-cart does not mean you have any idea about what’s really important to master about driving a car, that it’s the situations you face that matter more than your ability to accelerate, steer and brake. Context and situational awareness matter, and neither can be learned purely through simulation.
2. Leadership isn’t just about having the right tools. Most leadership training programs provide the tools most leaders would need. But any tool is only as good as the person whose hands it is in. You can teach a person how to employ a tool, but only the user can develop the ability to fully utilize it to it’s potential. It’s the potential of the user that matters, not the ability of the tool.
3. Leadership cannot be taught. Leadership is learned. As best as we might try to teach anything, it is up to the student to learn or not. A person or cannot or will not learn won’t. Brilliant teachers may inspire students to want to learn, but they cannot dictate what they learn. While how well a person learns is dependent on their talent and capacity to learn, to a much larger extent it depends on how much they want to learn, and what they are willing to sacrifice in order to dedicate themselves to learning. Conscientiousness may be more important than intelligence or talent. If you ask most any high-school teacher or coach this – and they will likely know this to be true.

If all of this speaks to a problem, the point must be to offer a good solution.

I confess that I do not have all the answers. I don’t believe anyone does. I’m not offering self-help for reluctant or unhappy leaders. I don’t have a proven three-step process for discovering your leadership mojo – or even a way to force talented potential leaders to become conscientious and realize their potential. I may not have any good answers – but I think I have some good questions.

I believe that questions are always more important than answers when approaching problems. Without the right question we will never arrive at the best answer. It is within the art of leadership that we begin to understand, as Antony Jay wrote, “ The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.”

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.

I think the some of the right questions to ask are:

• Why do we undervalue real leadership?
• Is it because we do not understand how to identify competent leadership?
• Or are we more seduced and mesmerized by the power of celebrity and charisma than by competent performance?

I also wonder how we can make real learning more necessary and fully possible. How can we encourage people to learn by exploring ideas when we only reward people for getting the answers right – and make it unsafe to be wrong? It could be why our learning slows down – and even stops altogether as we enter adulthood. We shift from learning to validating what we know and believe.

This deceleration begins in early childhood when the teacher doing the asking already knows the answer to every question asked. How would we impact learning if we made it safe for children to be wrong? Even encouraged them to risk being wrong?

 The same challenge applies to how adults perform as leaders. We tend to feel an obligation to have the answers for those who depend on us – and fear it’s dangerous if we do not. What would happen if were equipped with the best questions, rather than believing that we must have the best answers?

We might think of ourselves as learning beings, continuous learners even experts. We might even encourage people to be continuous learners too. But until we make it possible by making it safe and also necessary to learn – we will tend to foster legions of knowing beings that aspire to certainty, become entrenched in the safety of the status quo, who fail to keep up with the ever changing needs of an increasingly volatile world. When this is the case, we fail as leaders.

A closing thought:

Leadership is about causing individuals and organizations to perform to their potential. To be competent a leader must also cause these people and organizations to accomplish meaningful things with that potential. And because it is always the organization that makes the leader successful (and not the other way around), competent leaders must be prepared to make it necessary and possible for the people they lead to become fully competent themselves.

The biggest piece of the puzzle might be how we either find people who are already conscientious – and therefor willing and able to accomplish whatever it is they need to accomplish – or somehow help develop those who can be. We cannot cause anyone to be conscientious, but we can guide people in ways that they might choose and learn to be.

It is my view that competence does not exist in the absence of meaningful accomplishment. It is being conscientiousness that connects our actions to our sense our sense of purpose – and allows us to make the extra effort that so many people lack. This means that competence requires having and being driven by a sense of purpose. It requires becoming someone who feels a compelling sense of duty and a commitment to their cause in life. And when they can connect their personal sense of duty to the needs of an organization, people become extraordinary performers: people who don’t make or take excuses, who find great satisfaction in their accomplishments – an because they are personally aligned with the cause that drives the organization, are committed to raising the performance of those around them.

Social science talks about EQ, or emotional intelligence as being a greater predictor of personal success than our IQ or raw intelligence. We also know that while our IQ is pretty well hard-wired into who we are at an early age, emotional intelligence can be learned and improved throughout our lives. So how do we encourage people to defer gratification and commit themselves to learning and growth? How do we convince them that, as Dr. Lee Thayer suggests,

“Learning equals growth, and growth equals life?”

Here I do have an answer of sorts. The ability to become a conscientious-learning-being requires, as Viktor Frankl suggested in his writings, exists in our search for meaning. What makes any of us conscientious is our connection to some great worthy purpose: something bigger than ourselves.

If we want our current and especially our future leaders to be competent – we must work hard to instill the value and nobility of living a life of meaning and purpose. It’s in knowing that happiness comes from meaningful accomplishment, that we are truly happiest when we are engaged in the things we are most competent at performing. And this begins with how and what we teach our children to be. Success, in however we may choose to define it – is never what we aim to achieve, it’s the product or result of achieving whatever it is we must accomplish to cause that success.

Having a worthy purpose requires curiosity. We may feel certain about our connection to our cause, but a truly worthy cause in life is one that forces us be intensely curious as to how we can best serve that cause. Purpose drives the curiosity that causes real learning.

Real, raw, pure learning not only requires curiosity, it demands courage: the courage to be wrong, to break with the status quo and to leave the perceived safety of our comfort zone. Competent leaders are unafraid to question what needs to be questioned. They are rigorous learners and often find themselves severely, even violently at odds with the world they seek to change.

Aristotle wrote, “There is only one way to avoid criticism: say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.” Great leaders are guided by the belief that greatest risk to avoid is the possibility that your life never mattered.

Those who choose or are chosen to lead must find and own the courage of their convictions. Developing the leaders we need today and especially those we will need tomorrow requires that encourage them to fully understand that our lives offer no greater joys than what we find in our most meaningful accomplishments. Simply understanding this alone might be all we need to find our way to becoming courageous in all we do. 

You won’t ever learn to become courageous by reading “Leadership for Dummies” or in any book for that matter. It is more likely something you discover looking in the mirror while imagining the future you want to create for yourself and for the world.

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Phil Liebman is the CEO and founder of ALPS Leadership and a Vistage Chair since 2005. He helps CEOs and their leadership teams become fully competent leaders and high-performance organizations. He earned his Master of Leadership Arts and Sciences at The Thayer Institute - studying High-Performance Organizations and Competent Leadership under Dr. Lee Thayer. You can learn more about what it takes to become a more effective leader and building and growing sustainable high-performance organizations by visiting ALPS Leadership at www.ALPSLeadership.com