Average Leaders and Average Followers

The P’s of Leadership #4: Are you an above average leader?

How many leadership styles or strategies are there? How many leaderly frameworks do you subscribe to? How many do you disregard?

If you haven’t read Todd Rose’s, “The End of Average”, I highly recommend it. If you accept his premise and evidence, you’ll notice that some commonly held “truths” (which many people don’t even question as they’ve been engrained into society for so long) are likely not “truth” at all. At the heart of it all?

Humans like to “average” other humans.

Rose’s explanation matters here, but the overview is straight forward: individuals develop, learn, and behave in unique ways, and that statistical averages don't capture these patterns of variability.

Assuming you will read the book, here are some quick hits.  Close to my world, we base our entire education system on averaging intelligence, effort, and ultimately students themselves. What’s a “B” student?  Someone who is “better than average” at their subject or grade level. Ivy League schools seek out the “best” students, meaning they are so far “above average” as to be exceptional, seemingly also assuming that people who are above average at one thing, must certainly be above average at most things. (Ironically, this exact statement was made by Sir Francis Galton who gave money to help fund the first schools as places where the “average” could be trained as workers, while the “above average” rose to the top so as to be managers…) Take this same principle out of learning for a second.  Instead, use the size of someone. You see a man who is six feet, seven inches tall and another man who weighs 350 pounds – which man is “bigger”?  The same question applies to students when asking things like which student is “smarter”.

It goes deeper. We use averages to determine if something is causal or correlative. The number we often use is .05 (aka – a P value) to determine “statistical significance.” Without turning this into a stats class, the p-value is the smallest significance level that would reject the null hypothesis. So….if 5 out of 100 women experience a headache after ingesting cinnamon, we determine that to be “significant”, whereas if 4 get that same headache, it’s seen as random. Why five, you might wonder?  That’s an excellent, weakly answered question. People will note it negates false positives (but false compared to what?). But it’s really just a commonly agreed to value based on interquartiles, standard deviations, and other things that people often take for granted as “scientific”, even though they are based on, well….nothing more than consensus. 

(To my diehard statisticians or scientists who now want to argue this point, PLEASE read the book. This is just a sound byte that needs the copious support of Rose’s work.)

This applies to employees too. Don’t we all have “average” employees versus our “rock stars?” What about restaurants? We all know of the "average" eateries vs the "premium" ones nearby, right?

If you really get deep into the weeds here, there are average parents, average churches, average states, average cars, average bloggers, and of course, average leaders.

When you start to see things through that lens, I hope you feel as uncomfortable as I do.  You may not know it, but what you are feeling is contradictory to the study of ergodics. Ergodic theory promotes that two things CANNOT be averaged unless they ARE the same and will REMAIN the same over time.  (You know….nothing at all like human beings.) 

What Rose’s book (and ensuing videos, classes, and more) helped me develop is not a notion that any given leader is “great”, but instead that leadership archetypes can be optimal for a given set of variables. Take Steve Jobs. How many times was he fired or marginalized as a company’s leader? He frustrated many, many people during his first run at Apple and then again at Pixar. Heck, even his behaviors at Apple the second time did not please some, whereas others thought he was the new digital messiah. Was he the perfect leader?  I don’t believe anyone would suggest that.  But he may have been the best leader archetype who happened to be in the right place at the right time. His style of leadership brought seemingly disparate stakeholders together in concert to produce the iPod, the iPhone, and so much more.

This is why the most consistently successful leaders adapt to contexts with intentionality. And it brings us back to the P’s of leadership image I am using for this series. There are leaders who only lead one way. Some may write books about how they’re “style” is the only way to produce success. But they often confirmation bias themselves into believing any of that. They may have been a lucky person whose leadership approach matched the exact context in which an organization had need. But more often, the most effective leaders adapt to those context clues and move their focus to P’s other than those they are naturally inclined to support.

There will be times that dealing with Politics is required in order to dislodge barriers to Purpose. Some leaders will need to be highly Pragmatic for a season in order to create Positional-mobility for employees down the road. You may want to preach Patience to junior leaders, in order to later generate more Productivity.

But all along the way, try to remember this: YOU are not an average leader…there is no such thing. But just as importantly, there is no such thing as an “average” employee, direct report, or team member either…

Good luck and good leading!