Why ‘Leaning In’ isn’t always the path to succeed

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Why ‘Leaning In’ isn’t always the path to succeed

By David Noble and Carol Kauffman PhD

Mindful Alertness is the first step in managing high-stakes situations you’re going to face as a leader. You’ve created space to deliberately name the Three Dimensions of Leadership, covering your external, internal, and interpersonal priorities.

But now what? How can you achieve what you want, be who you want to be, and bring out the best in others? It’s optimal to have multiple options available to move forward. Learn how you can generate different pathways forward for each dimension of leadership. Here we focus on the first, finding at least four options for achieving your external goals.

FROM WILLPOWER TO WAYPOWER

You could be mindfully alert to your three-dimensional priorities, think of a way forward, and act—but that’s going to limit your success, no matter how much willpower you have to make it happen. We advocate with our executives to develop what is called?waypower: the capacity to come up with several viable ways forward.?The research is clear, and our experience is even clearer: having multiple options makes success more likely.

Sometimes this is a hard sell with the executives we work with, because they’ve become used to a default approach to leadership, as you may have. One of our high-powered leaders, with whom we were trying to explore these principles, said, “I always win. I go fast and make key tactical moves. Together they make my biggest priorities happen. With the inner game, I just rely on being able to tough it out. I go over, under, or through any wall in my way. And I get your idea of four different stances when dealing with people, but leaning in is what always works best.”

This is a very narrow path (and you can see this leader wasn’t being mindfully alert), which unnecessarily constrains options—especially in high-stakes situations, when we’re most likely to stick to our default settings and become exaggerated versions of ourselves. Eventually this kind of leader will meet a wall that doesn’t break and that they can’t get around. At some point, they may not be able to tough it out. And they may not even know how much they’ve lost by relentlessly sticking to default settings and putting people off.

Another leader had the reverse challenge. He had the lean-back groove down and was an incredible delegator with legendary calm. This worked well until a crisis surfaced and his team was stunned and lost. He remained steady, confident in his default style, telling people, “Just stay calm, I have a lot of confidence you will figure it out.” They didn’t figure it out, and he hadn’t generated other options for responding.

The groove became a rut he couldn’t escape. A more mature leader would have a lean-in stance as a secondary option that was developed enough to be second nature, and available to be called on as needed. That person would have heard his team and understood his organization was screaming for him to be actively involved. He would have sprung into action to guide his team.

Dozens of research studies spearheaded by the late American psychologists Charles Snyder and Shane J. Lopez and their teams demonstrate how people’s capacity to reach their desired goals can be increased by conceiving of multiple possible pathways.?It is a combination of willpower and waypower that drives successful outcomes. They called their research instrument the hope scale.?In our favorite study, the researchers used scores on the hope scale to predict that female marathoners with high willpower and high waypower would come out in front, and they did, very strongly. The studies have been replicated with groups of people from all walks of life and show that that combination of willpower and waypower adds resilience and persistence to a person’s efforts and reliably increases chances of success.?

The research suggests that, ideally, you will have four or more pathways forward for each external, internal, and interpersonal priority.

You can also use the Four Stances to unlock more options. First,?lean in?and come up with a long list of options for your external priority. When you think you are done,?lean back?and ask yourself “What else could work?” so that you can add to the list. Then?lean with?by consulting with others about what they think the options are to meet your external priority. Finally,?don’t?lean?and see if anything else pops into your consciousness.

Now run through the five Cs (calm, clear, curious, compassionate, and courageous) to help you get into an objective and centered state of mind and scan your list. Circle those words you are instinctually most attracted to—they describe your default approach.

For example, you may be drawn to taking risks, inclined to always come up with an innovative new solution, and driven by hunches and subjective emotions. Or you may typically opt for a more strategic route, moving slowly but making big bets based exclusively on data.

If you are mindfully alert, you won’t immediately choose the option that matches your default approach. Instead, ask yourself if your default is the most viable way to achieve your external priority. If it is, great, but you still should go through the list again to name at least three more options, in case that approach doesn’t work or the situation changes.

If your default doesn’t seem viable upon reflection, identify four more options. Once you’ve done this, not only will you have made the space you need between stimulus and response, but also you will be prepared to use that space well and not simply do what you always do without thinking.?

This article is excerpted from Real-Time Leadership: Find Your Winning Moves When the Stakes Are High by David Noble and Carol Kauffman and is reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press.

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