Counterintuitive Leadership
The right thing to do is often easy to identify until you are in the moment, when your primal reflexes kick in and override good intentions and logic. That’s why I say that I made my best parenting decisions before actually having kids (when all my grand ideas went out the window and I went into straight survival mode).
Much like parenting, management leans heavily on reflexes. We see or hear something, make a quick assessment, and then react. It’s a fast-paced world, and we make thousands of decisions like this each day. Leadership, on the other hand, requires restraint. What comes naturally to us is often not the best decision or course of action, making true leadership a counterintuitive practice. Consider this list of ten counterintuitive leadership disciplines:
Listening instead of talking
Asking questions instead of giving answers
Seeing criticism or negativity as a gift (a clue that someone is not happy)
Recognizing your own defensiveness as a clue that there is likely some truth to the message
Setting aside time to think and plan and not sacrificing it when things get busy
Prioritizing reading and self-development
Reflecting more on your own areas for growth rather than what others need to learn
Resting as a necessity, not a guilty pleasure
Resisting the distraction of the urgent to instead focus on what is important
Meeting your needs first as a means to meeting my own
Some of these are just flat out hard. But when you practice these counterintuitive disciplines, you raise the bar on your leadership and inspire others to do the same. With enough practice, you retrain your brain to repeat these behaviors instead of defaulting to primal reflex, and it becomes easier to do in the moment. Don’t try to conquer this entire list at once, but pick one and really dig in. Ask yourself lots of why questions in order to get to the real reason you struggle with the one you targeted. For example, take the first one: why do I talk more than I listen? Is it that I don’t value what others have to say? Or that I need to make my opinion known in order to feel significant? Why might that be? These are not fun questions to wrestle with, but you will reap much more fruitful results if you are willing to go there.
The path to counterintuitive leadership is paved with intentionality and humility. It is a difficult journey and not many people willingly seek that sort of discomfort. If you are ready to take the first step, ask yourself which discipline you need to focus on first. If you are not sure or you are really brave, ask the people around you. Trust me, they know which ones you struggle with! Then reflect, practice, study, repeat. Measure your progress and celebrate when your reflexes start to change!