Five Nouns, Five Verbs for Leaders

When you haven’t posted on your blog in a while, and I haven’t posted since Christmas, it gets harder and harder to return to it, like when you haven’t called a friend in ages. It’s not like I haven’t been writing. I’ve been posting pretty regularly on RebelsatWork.com. You can check out my most recent post here. And if you know me, you know I always have opinions. I always think too much

A favorite topic for me to think about is management and leadership. Actually the more I think about both topics, the less sense they make to me. About a month ago I was at an event, which I will not specify, at which there was a presentation by a rather prominent thinker on leadership, whom I will not name. The ideas were so tired: great men (and all his examples were men) set great visions for their teams who then can singlehandedly conquer the world, or at least next year’s profit and loss statement.

I’ve long suspected the world really doesn’t work that way. Sure some individuals appear to have significant, short-term success, but usually if you wait long enough reality comes whistling along and bites them in the butt. David Petraeus comes to mind. Or an individual, such as Harry S Truman, whom his contemporaries viewed as a poor leader gets reclaimed by history. Will Marissa Mayer be Yahoo’s Savior? Does Elizabeth Warren have gravitas? In the end, how much will their individual contributions matter?

And then there’s the rather inconvenient fact that leadership is a value-free concept. You can exhibit strong leadership traits–i.e. you can influence people and you can point the arrow in a particular direction, and you make decisions quickly, and you rarely change your mind (and I have a few nits to pick with these attributes too)–but none of that necessarily means you will have a net positive impact on your group or society–however we might measure that. Vladimir Putin comes to mind. He’s a strong man on the world stage, say the pundits a little bit too admiringly.

But despite my misgivings, I sometimes get asked to serve on a panel or give a talk about leadership. Grumpy Carmen of course wants to say something along the lines of what I just wrote, but that would be bad and, most important, rather rude to the people who asked me.

The last time this happened I came up with the following list. Ten words. Five Verbs. And Five Nouns. And the more I think about them the more they say all I want to say about being a manager, a leader, an employee, a citizen, and a person.

Conversation sustains.
Empathy connects.
Authenticity reassures.
Optimism lifts.
Purpose commands.

They do not need explanation, but just a few words on the last one. So many significant things are outside of a manager’s or leader’s ability to command. You can’t command people to trust you. You can’t command them to believe in your goals. And you cannot order them to give you their discretionary energy.

But a common purpose can.