19 How Do I Thrive in Leadership?

By later in life, Benjamin needed two hands and ten fingers to count the significant leadership posts that he had held. His leadership had begun humbly, as it generally does for everyone. Relatively early in his adult life, Benjamin had suddenly had a significant leadership role thrust upon him, well before he had prepared for or expected it. Indeed, he hadn’t even pursued or wanted it. Somehow, Benjamin survived, with a lot of help from friends and despite the efforts of several surprisingly concerted enemies. That success led Benjamin into the next leadership role and then the next one after that, until he could hardly remember the several roles and their many challenges. Benjamin didn’t even know what to think of his leadership, whether he had been a failure or success. In retrospect, though, Benjamin could say that he was glad that he’d been a leader for the awareness, growth, and transformation leadership had brought him.

Thriving

The discussion in the prior chapters has had a lot to do with how to survive leadership. But you can more than just survive leadership. You can thrive in leadership. Leadership isn’t just a challenge, test, ordeal, and trial. Leadership can also be a calling, ministry, and way of life. Leadership can not only be your goal but also your inspiration and the way in which you transform and become yourself. Whether you feel that you were born and made for leadership, and pursued leadership with planning, preparation, and vigor, or whether leadership fell onto your lap, you can make leadership not just what you do but also who you are. We each rule our own kingdom, whether just within the reach of our own hands or well beyond through the many hands of others. We are each thus rulers of sorts, some to greater extent, while others to lesser extent. Seek not just to survive your leadership but to grow, transform, and thrive in leadership. Consider some of the following ways, means, methods, and measures for thriving as a leader. 

Awareness

One distinct thing that leadership does, and does in spades, is to make you more aware of the world around you, especially the motivation of individuals and collective behavior of their organizations. If you’ve been a leader for any significant length of time in any organization of any significant size, you know it to be true. Leadership opens your eyes to the thinking, behavior, and character of others. Leadership deals with so many other individuals, specifically in their corporate behavior and motivation, that leadership inevitably brings to the leader’s attention the breadth of human character and eccentricity. Leaders can see it all, from the heroic to the corrupt and every mundane behavior in between. Leadership also opens your eyes to the patterns of the world that individuals and organizations must follow to flourish. Try to move an organization forward through a complex and constantly shifting world, and you’ll learn something of how the world actually operates. Don’t underestimate the significance of your growing awareness, gained by leadership. To be alive is to be aware, or to be aware is to be alive, whichever way you prefer to state it. The awareness that you develop from leadership may be your gift and glory. 

Authenticity

Another distinct thing that leadership can do for you, that would cause you to thrive in life generally and in relationships specifically, is to promote and at times even require your authenticity. We proceed through life deploying various facades, made necessary or helpful by our peculiar circumstances, conditions, events, and relationships. If, for instance, you have a cantankerous neighbor, you may walk on eggshells outside your home. If, for another example, you grow up with an overbearing sibling, you may adjust by not sticking up for yourself. These personas, often much deeper and complex than just illustrated, may persist outside of the specific situation they developed to serve. We all have them, and they are mostly useful in adapting to our peculiar needs. Leadership, though, can present far too many differing variables, relationships, conditions, and challenges to effectively navigate leadership with a single facade or projected persona. Leadership can make you reach deeper into yourself where you find richly authentic capacities ready to reveal themselves through your whole person, rather than a limited and manipulated persona. Good for you if your leadership forces you into authenticity. 

Interest

Leadership can also supply you with endless interest in the continually changing and yet oddly enduring patterns of creation. You want to see and experience more of life? Try leading an organization that is itself commissioned to generate interest, provide employment and income, and serve, protect, or educate the public. Try, as a team or organization leader, to help other individuals gain their own foothold in a complex world demanding that they offer skills and bear up under stable attributes. Try learning what the world needs, what opportunities it offers, and what challenges it raises, and then go try to navigate that world with what you learned, testing and adjusting your knowledge. If you want to know what the world is all about, try leadership. Leadership will teach you all about mission, purpose, pattern, and design. Leadership will also teach you about yourself and your place in the world, alongside others who care about you and depend on you. Leadership offers continual interest and activity, on which you can thrive. 

Curiosity

Some of us don’t just need continual activity and interest to feel alive and thrive. Some of us also need a field in which we can pursue and satisfy our curiosity. Some of us need to adventure, explore, create, and invent. The world continues to hold mysteries. Each of us is on our own journey of discovery. Our curiosity should lead us on. We want each day not just to occupy us with interesting activity but more so to hold an allure that beckons us forward into new territory. We need to believe that the unknown holds vastly more than the known, and we need to heed the unknown’s mysterious call. The shiny surface of things that everyone instantly sees and comprehends is simply an illusion to those of us who know and trust that the world here and the world beyond hold untold riches more. Leadership gives one full license to chase after one’s curiosity. Leaders have the mantle to adventure. Leadership courts and rewards curiosity. 

Growth

To thrive, we also need to grow beyond our current capacity, to explore our potential to discover what our own unrevealed self holds. A good life isn’t reaching a personal plateau on which to languish, soon finding only stagnation. A good life instead involves discovering concealed paths down into deeper canyons and up toward higher reaches, until one knows that one has grown in reach, courage, and vision. Leadership offers those abundant growth opportunities, both internally into one’s own self and externally in knowledge, skill, and capability. Leaders have more personal and professional-development resources at their disposal, and more reason to grasp and deploy those resources, than virtually anyone else. Everyone in the organization depends on the leader’s courage, character, wisdom, and vision, and thus the organization and its members devote themselves to supporting, informing, and inspiring the leader. If you want to grow wise and courageous, with deep character and broad and long vision, take the helm of a vital organization. You will then grow not just in leadership skill but also in character, wisdom, discernment, and vision. 

Transformation

To truly thrive, though, we may need not just growth but transformation. Transformation implies becoming something new, not just improving upon one’s old self but becoming someone fresh and different, perhaps reaching a new form or dimension. Transformation thus implies the death of the old self so that the new self may arise. We do not die naturally to our own selves. Rather, we hold tight to our old self as our survival mechanism. Letting go of old ways can require their frank and obvious, even catastrophic, failure. Go down in flames, and a new you will arise. A new you must arise because the old you failed so badly as to extinguish itself in flames. That’s how failure contributes to renewal, by removing the old things that don’t work. In the ordinary course of things, we seldom have real and substantial opportunities to fail, with the urgent, indeed demanded, need for swift change. Our ordinary course is a safe course, deliberately so, protecting our familiar old self from challenges that it cannot meet. Leadership, though, doesn’t permit such insulation. Leadership instead demands that you proceed on a new course, using different means, methods, and capacities, arranged freshly in a new self. Leadership requires transformation. 

Relationships

Leadership can also broaden and deepen your relationships. Certainly, leaders can rely more heavily and closely on their leadership teams, directors, managers, and boards to address organizational and operational issues. Leaders get to know more members of their organization, and get to know them more personally and deeply, than any other member of the organization. Do you want to meet new people about whom you quickly learn and for whom you must deeply care? Take a leadership position, and you will instantly do so. And they will learn about you, too. You and your organization’s members will move forward with deeper and more coordinated, integrated, supportive, and appropriately reliant or even dependent relationships. Leadership, properly managed in work-life balance, can also broaden and deepen your family, friend, and other personal relationships. Your family members and friends may see you in fresh roles and ways, and with greater growth and capacity. If you value relationships as a mark of a thriving life, then embrace how your leadership multiplies and deepens your relationships. 

Reflection

In your current leadership role, are you more toward the surviving end of the spectrum or more toward the thriving end of the spectrum? What insights or activities tend to move you more toward thriving and away from merely surviving? Do you find that leadership is making you more aware of individual and organizational behavior, and the patterns and principles that reward behaviors? Do you adequately value your growing awareness? Do you find that leadership is forcing you to be less fake and manipulative and more authentic? Do you adequately value your authenticity? Do you find that leadership is continually engaging you to your full capacity? Do you find that leadership is offering you substantial growth opportunities? Are you adequately pursuing those growth opportunities? Do you value your personal and professional growth? Has leadership brought you to the point of relinquishing your old persona in favor of a transformed self? Has leadership multiplied and deepened your relationships? 

Key Points

• Leadership can involve not just surviving but also thriving.

• Leaders gain awareness of the world’s possibilities and challenges.

• Leadership forces authenticity, beyond performances and personas.

• Leadership offers you continual engaging activity and interest. 

• Leadership invites and rewards your deep subject-matter curiosity.

• Leadership offers you substantial growth resources and opportunities.

• Leadership invites and demands personal transformation.

• Leadership also multiplies and deepens meaningful relationships.

Read Chapter 20.