Current international crises – the war in Ukraine, the Covid pandemic, the tilt towards authoritarianism across the globe — draw our attention, repeatedly, to those who are in positions of leadership, those who are precipitating or extending the crises, and those who are attempting to ameliorate them. We can easily identify this kind of leadership, played out on a grand scale. Then, too, the American romance with entrepreneurial businessmen, their hagiographies filling our bookshelves, is in high gear.
But often, leadership is hidden in plain sight. It is also enacted by people whose names are lost to history. It can happen on a small scale, sometimes virtually in private, affecting only a handful of individuals. Although I have long been interested in “Leadership” (note the capital L), years ago I also began thinking about lower-case “leadership,” practiced by people without that title, who often don’t view what they are doing as leadership at all.
For the past few months, I have been in the midst of one such experience that I’d like to share with you.
One of my closest friends was diagnosed last year with a complicated, catastrophic illness. I have tried to be helpful, and hopefully I have been. But I’ve simply marveled at how his wife has navigated the seemingly amorphous gaggle of doctors, nurses, and “systems” charged with caring for him. Even as she struggles to comprehend the constantly changing situation, her questions, sometimes gentle, sometimes insistent, occasionally irritable, urge the medical personnel to move forward and to make that situation intelligible, even to us. Always with an eye to at least easing his harrowing journey and optimizing the time he has left. She is relentlessly goal oriented. Her name isn’t scribbled on the white board in his hospital room as his “attending physician,” the chief honcho supervising his care, but if I had to identify the leader, the nerve center, the coach and quarterback of his team (including professionals, family, and friends) – it is his wife.
Very few of us consider ourselves leaders. The very term is a little august and, thus, intimidating. We’ve never galvanized a crowd with a stirring speech nor built a political movement or a major corporation. We can admire the Martin Luther King’s, Angela Merkle’s, Steve Jobs’, and Oprah Winfrey’s of the world, but who among us identifies with them? In fact, our admiration, itself, serves primarily and paradoxically to distance us from our leaders. We can’t help but acknowledge that we are not them. Most of us haven’t even held executive positions, and those who have generally lament the job’s perplexing complexity, along with the stress and exhaustion that come with it.
And yet, almost every one of us has taken leadership at one time or another. We are mothers and fathers who care for and guide our children, set goals for them, set limits for them, and hold them responsible for rules that we have established. We know when we have failed them and, shyly, quietly, acknowledge their successes as partly our own. That place in the background, after all, represents some of the best kind of leadership.
Many of us organize events, like weddings, retirement parties, religious celebrations, all of which require at least a modicum of vision: What do we want to happen? What would we consider a success and how would we measure it? We develop strategies to move from our original vision to its realization. And we have to prioritize among the strategies. Which ones, we ask, will have the greatest impact.
Sometimes the strategies are no more than lists that take us from one task to another. Those lists are simple versions of what others augustly designate “strategic plans.” In the course of managing according to these plans, we have to organize others, urge them to move forward, lift their spirits when they are discouraged. Just like a political or corporate leader. It’s mainly the scale and, more to my point, the cultural attributions about these activities that are different.
As a young woman during World War II, my mother joined a group of other young women to form a food coop that helped support hundreds of families. In the 1950’s, with my father, she joined the fight to create a new high school in my neighborhood. They never spoke at podiums but they surely spoke up in community gatherings. As a PTA chairwoman, my mom would occasionally take the stage to make sure meetings were well organized, and to introduce others, who she considered leaders. And, if you would have told my mother she was a leader, she’d have chuckled and told you you’d been smoking something pretty damn potent.
Our reluctance to assume the mantle of leadership is understandable. Calling ourselves a leader seems like boasting, implying that we are more than we feel we are. It also implies more responsibility than most of us want to assume – or at least want to acknowledge that we’re assuming. I’m pretty sure my parents would not have wanted the official responsibility of building a high school – making decisions about staffing and budgeting and so forth. But when they didn’t have to conceive of themselves as leaders, they had plenty to say about those subjects and others. (Including, of course, what our nation’s leaders should be doing!)
According to our popular imagery, leaders are strong, decisive, outgoing, smart. They have great posture, big voices, great smiles and the look of profundity. They are generally men. Maybe they resemble Moses on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The essential problem with this formulation is its focus on individual people, not the activity that gets things done. We have had many, many leaders who look and sound the type but can’t, for the life of them, move projects and policies along to fulfillment.
So let me bring together a counter-cultural and more inclusive idea of leadership, one that is embodied by ordinary people
First and foremost, leadership is an activity, not a person. Simply put, leadership is the alignment of resources in the service of stated goals, and the achievement of those goals. In the work and political worlds, leadership requires you to identify and organize the right people for the job. That is, the people with the skills, passion, and connection to move a project forward…the necessary finances, too.
Leadership requires you to clarify a goal—or goals—and to emphasize them over and over again, as you move toward fulfillment. This, in turn, requires you to manage others who are consumed by the many tactical issues that lead from step to step. Managing them frees you to take the large or long view.
And leadership demands that you, and others around you, establish strategy: the major activities that will lead to achieving your goal. You must avoid the distraction of small concerns and come back to these strategies over and again.
Together, a laser-like attention to these three activities represents the discipline of leadership.
Day after day, I’ve watched my friend’s wife focus in this way during his weeks’ long hospitalization. First, she checks in frequently with him, making sure that she understands and represents his point of view when he can’t readily do it himself. Then, while she may chat with the doctors, it is in the service of gaining their trust and moving them, and the system, towards the best possible outcomes for her husband. She keeps many plates spinning – trying to ensure that the medical staff visit when they are supposed to, and that they clarify their diagnostic and prescriptive decisions; that the necessary tests and procedures are scheduled and completed; that the bed is comfortable enough to allow for rest and healing; and even that there is sufficiently edible food available once his appetite returns. She presses the doctors to articulate their line of reasoning about his care – what the most promising approaches are to reducing his pain and getting him back on his feet. She has both activated the hospital’s post-discharge care manager and has gathered resources on her own to effect the best situation for him once he returns home.
All this she has done while also managing the desires and needs of family and friends, and of course, her own sadness and apprehension about what is ahead. She has not always been successful at getting others to enact her strategies. But I am filled with admiration and appreciation for what she has accomplished through a combination of clear-thinking, quiet insistence, doggedness, and of course, love for her husband. We, who also love him, are lucky to have her leadership.
Barry Dym 