After browsing all of the media Top 50 under 50, Person of the Year, Most Powerful Women articles that rung in the new year, it was so easy for me to get sucked into the exciting thrill of being called a ‘leader’. The praise and recognition is sexy, appealing, and glamorous. Most of the ‘top picks’ of year-end media articles hold high levels of authority or power positions, run large companies or are heads of state.
Yet in truth, leadership is about mobilizing progress toward a collective problem, not holding a position of authority. It’s so easy to blur the lines between leadership and power. What the media leadership conversation fails to depict are the real challenges that make leaders who they are, and most importantly: the losses in leadership.
All next generation leaders face losses. In the business of leadership, we are in the business of sustaining loss. This involves the capacity to hold steady in chaos, to see anger with grace and to meet hatred with compassion. Leadership is about holding people through transitions, receiving anger or tears without backing away and renegotiating loyalties to focus on a collective problem.
We have all grown up with a set of loyalties to our professional and personal community and to prior generations. Our work NOW is to build leaders who are free who act independently and make a contribution to the world both as a creature of systems and as not entirely captured by those systems. A major piece of this is dealing with the losses we face when we step up to our real work in the world, own them, and make big changes in our lives.
Next time, you get praised as a leader, remember the challenge of the losses you faced, because that’s real leadership.
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