Is the purpose-driven leader empathetic?
Field notes on everyday leadership.
Hey gang,
Still working out the exact format and timing of this section. I’m thinking bi-weekly on Tuesday AM including points of interest I’ve encountered from the intervening two weeks.
If this isn’t your bag, I totally understand that and would encourage you to unsubscribe from this section, but not the newsletter entirely. It’s an easy toggle and when I send out ‘notes from the field’ you won’t receive them.
Without further ado, here are a few things I encountered over the past couple of weeks:
“Purpose-driven leadership is strongly linked to business success.” Yes, but how?As a believer in the importance and impact of good leadership, I’m a sucker for a headline like this. It would be great if we could truly make a useful calculation on something as nebulous a concept as purpose-driven leadership. Indiggo has made an attempt with their “return-on-leadership” metric, which is based on four fundamental factors:
Connection to Purpose
Strategic Clarity,
Leadership Alignment, and
Focused Action.
Fair enough, but as I kept poking around trying to find some definition or metric that felt firm enough to hold onto, I encountered the wall that seems to be built around all information these days: that Indiggo “leverages its AI-driven tech platform” to come up with the it’s ranking. To me, this either says a) this is pure snake oil marketing, or b) we prompted an AI and made a list and the inner-workings are a black box. Either way, the spark of interest has fizzled. Are lists like this useful or do they only make the work of investing in real purpose-driven leadership that much more challenging to pursue?
“We know scientifically that fiction can play a very powerful role in building empathy. This is one of the reasons why it’s very important for literature to be studied by the young. It is the best opportunity for the young mind to experience or practice looking at the world through different eyes where they see the world differently and they come to different conclusions about it and have different feelings about it. This is what empathy is. And we’re not born with it fully developed. It is something that has to be fostered.” Amor Towles gave a fascinating couple of interviews on the Walker Webcast. They’re long, but if you’re interested in writing, or simply how someone thinks about and structures their work, this is a good listen. I appreciate that Towles references the importance of young people reading literature to develop their empathetic mind, but it’s equally important (perhaps even more so) for leaders to continue this practice. Being able to look at the world through different eyes, see the world differently, and come to different conclusions and feelings is the definition of continuing to learn.
“People want their kids to share, they want them to be generous, they want them to be kind and empathetic, they want them to be brave, courageous. Those values that we teach our kids, we then see somehow as weaknesses in leaders?” To continue with the empathetic lens, Jacinda Ardern (former PM of New Zealand) has a new book out and is arguing for a more humanistic form of leadership. I think we could all benefit from considering the kinds of values we try to emphasize with our kids and whether/how they come through in our own leadership.
Purpose and empathy make an interesting pair when thinking about leadership. Both concepts can seem soft, and yet they only become more important in a world that seems overrun by AI thinking, impersonalization, frictionless communication, and well lacking in purpose and empathy.
What interests me most about both of these concepts is that neither lends themselves to direct intervention. “Be more empathetic,” and “have more purpose” are in some ways akin to telling a runner to “be faster.” Sure they can try running harder, it may work in the very short term, but it’s certainly not a path to becoming faster.
What oblique paths do you have to walk to define, develop, or better understand your purpose? And what if reading fiction really is one of the best tools we have for developing empathy…ever tried reading a novel during the work day?
Cheers,
Ross