Beyond Control: The Collective Future of Leadership

t was 1 AM on the last Monday of June and I had been trying to get to sleep for hours. My mind was racing, and I was super anxious about the second session of my Heroic Public Speaking course. I was going to spend the next three days with a group of about 40 really brilliant folks who are learning how to take their ideas, hone them into transformational experiences that would change the lives of their audiences. Everybody in the room was ridiculously smart and highly talented.

This moment of anxiety would become a turning point in my understanding of leadership and control.

Toward the end of our first session, the previous month, we got a talking to by Heroic's two founders and our course leaders, Michael and Amy Port . They sternly spoke about how our particular class was quite a bit "extra." Michael pointed out that we were extremely talkative as a group and that some people were interrupting their classmates during practice sessions to give advice and opinions and feedback.

I knew they were talking about me. Not all of it, but I sat there in shame realizing that I had a been quite a bit "extra"

As a dyslexic kid growing up in the New York City Public School system in the 1970s and 1980s, I found that my ability to create relationships, deflect for my inefficiencies, and make people laugh was a huge asset. And maybe it's because I was feeling super self-conscious about being in a room with such talented people or maybe it was just a habit or way of being when I found myself in a classroom. But at that first session of Heroic Public Speaking's program, I found myself slipping into familiar class clown patterns. I hadn't even realized I was doing it. But there I was, staring at the ceiling at 1 AM, knowing that I was one of the ones who was too "extra" and I knew that I didn't want to be that anymore. I had spent so much of my life living out of insecurity and it brought me nothing but misery. What's more, I just set off on a new adventure, with a dramatic change in career and was in the midst of a journey to find our place in the world. Did I really want to keep being driven by the same things that I was trying to get away from? Hell no.

And therein lies the problem. If I wasn't being driven by my insecurity, I wasn't quite sure how I was...

I had spent the last 25 years running a few different recruiting companies. After the financial crisis, the industry changed and became quite commoditized. My clients went from valuing the personal relationship and expertise that my company provided to throwing me into a mosh pit with several other vendors competing exclusively on speed and price. I went from feeling valued by my clients to feeling like a criminal. And I stayed in the game way to long and all that time, playing a game, I was not enjoying and suited to do had taken a toll on me. After a decade, anxiety took the driver's seat more often than not.

If I let go of being driven by anxiety and fear, who would I be? It scared the hell out of me.

This paralysis - the fear of who we might be without our familiar patterns - isn't unique to late-night anxiety attacks. It's the same fear I see in executive suites across the country. I used to think of leadership as the person at the top, the one who set the direction, who was inspiring and made the best decisions. Leaders often define themselves by their ability to make decisions, to be in charge. Just as I didn't know who I would be without my defensive patterns, many leaders can't imagine who they would be if they weren't the one with all the answers.

I am clear that the command-and-control orthodoxy is failing us. Companies spend trillions on corporate transformations despite knowing that 70% of those projects will end in failure. Next year, American companies will spend a trillion dollars on digital transformations alone wasting $700 billion. That's more than the combined GDPs of Belgum and Switzerland and the folks writing those checks will march into those projects using the same methods that are at the source of that abysmal failure rate. It is no wonder that, according to the Harvard Business Review, that 97% of senior executives report being burnt out. Failing 7 out of 10 times will burn out anyone.

These aren't just numbers on a page - they're symptoms of a leadership paradigm that's reached its expiration date.

Leadership in this new era requires empowering others, creating environments where experimentation is safe, and allowing people to make decisions independently. It requires creating environments where it's okay to experiment and make mistakes—where people know they will be supported.

But how do we make this transformation when we're terrified of letting go?

The few adaptive leaders I know who view power and authority as something that's fluid, who are able to navigate those flows effectively and distribute power throughout their organization, live joyous lives. They don't worry when there's a problem; rather, they gather the smart people they work with together and figure it out. They don't get blindsided because of things that they can't see or understand because they have people around them who are able to augment the blind spots that all leaders have.

I've experienced this transformation myself. Personally, the feeling of walking into a meeting to discuss an intractable problem that I had no idea how to solve, with absolute confidence that the answer was somewhere in the room... As a leader, my job wasn't to have the answer, but rather to make sure that the environment was such that people felt comfortable in sharing their ideas and working together to sharpen them. The answer is almost always in the room, but if I look to myself for it, I will rarely find it.

This shift from control to collective wisdom isn't optional - and it's not without precedent.

I am a Quaker, which is a non-hierarchical faith. One of the jokes we tell is that when a newcomer first comes to a Quaker service they might say "Oh, I see, you got rid of the clergy!" and the old Quaker Elder replies, "No, we got rid of the laity." Quakers realize that ministry comes in many forms, and we all need to express it in our own way and in doing so we can collectively serve the needs of the community.

The world is moving too fast and is too complex for a small group of leaders to see and comprehend the totality of opportunities and threats that face a particular organization. As a result, leadership is something that everyone in the enterprise needs to bring. It is the role of adaptive leaders to create the structure that will allow folks to share in the important work of leadership.

And what better way to kick the anxiety that plagues us all, by working in collaboration and building supportive environments.

The answer to our leadership crisis isn't in having better answers - it's in creating spaces where everyone can bring their answers forward. And yes, that's terrifying. Do it anyway. Do it together.

I am curious to hear, have you had an experience in letting go of control that opened up something unexpected and or wonderful? Please let me know in the comments, I would love to hear about it.

Oh, and PS - my cohort at Heroic Public Speaking?  We named ourselves The Extras Duh.