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How to be human

Good morning

I hope that you are well and that you had a great sleep last night.

I had a plan for today’s letter that hasn’t worked out. The reading that I did, didn’t deliver what I had hoped, so I am engaged in some freestyle writing to you, drawing from my memory and my meanderings through the world. I hope that you enjoy it.

Erin Chaplin and Jenna Wessels are two Cape Town-based artists whose work I’ve been enjoying. Chaplin is the kind of artist I’d love to be. She’s self-taught. I admire that courage and love this particular piece. Wessels is a recent graduate of leading fine art school, Michaelis. She has a wonderful ability to evoke magic and whimsy. If you are a UK-based African, like many of you are, check out the work of Zimbabwean, Xanthe Somers. If it weren’t for shipping costs, my home would be filled with her work.

/ Strategy

I introduced you to the work of Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic in What Good Leaders Look Like.

This week, I revisited his book  Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders (and how to fix it) for work that I am doing with a client and this quotation jumped out at me, “…we have still not realized that traditionally feminine prosocial qualities are critical for effective leadership”.

That’s worth repeating, “…we have still not realized that traditionally feminine prosocial qualities are critical for effective leadership”.

He shares that, “Meta-analytic studies suggest that the gender differences in narcissism have indeed been declining over the past few decades, largely because women have become more narcissistic, rather than men becoming less so. This change reaffirms the danger of encouraging women to lean in or act more like men to climb the corporate ladder. We are only inviting them to strengthen a problematic leadership model and augment rather than reduce current incompetence rates”.

Simply put, we need to change what we think is great leadership. Actually, we need to align with what the research tells us, which is also what our cultures and religions have told us for millennia. We need to care. We need to be human.

Work by Timothy Judge and Beth Livingston shows that men’s careers also “tend to suffer when men are friendly, empathetic and agreeable”.

The absolute irony is that the hyper-masculine traits that for decades have defined the stereotype of leadership are considerably less effective than those traits historically considered to be the domain of women.

Chamorro-Premuzic writes, “Both male leaders with higher EQs, and most women leaders, display a more transformational leadership style. With this style, the leader focuses on changing followers’ attitudes and beliefs and engaging them on a deep emotional level rather than telling them what to do – think Michelle Obama or Oprah Winfrey”.

We often want charismatic leaders, but we misunderstand what charisma truly is.

It is not the person who dazzles the boardroom with their personality. Research by Kevin Groves shows that a leader who is regarded by their teams as charismatic:

  • Inspires employees, communicates, and implements the vision well
  • Acts as a role model and walks the talk
  • Is sensitive to the cultural norms of the organizations
  • Recognizes employees for their accomplishments, giving credit where it is due
  • Uses emotional communication effectively
  • Is good at identifying and nurturing employees’ potential
  • In addition, the leaders also completed assessments of their own social and emotional skills.
We need to consciously reinvent what it means to lead. We need to embrace a different way of being for ourselves and in our organisations. We need to build compassionate organisations, actively and intentionally. We need organisations that work as ecosystems, interdependently, rich in diversity and complexity, not as monoculture plantations, efficient, sterile, and destructive. 
/ Self
Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks is one of my favourite memoirs of 2021.Owusu writing forces us to confront that being human means to hold complexity, that if we are honest if we go far enough in our history, we will encounter contradiction.She cautions us to hold those contradictions with compassion, for “When our stories require us to pass judgment, to inflict shame on ourselves and others, to set ourselves apart, we cause harm”.She speaks to us from a blue rocking chair where she has sought safety after an event that has destabilised her world, triggering old memories, bringing with them pain and uncertainty.We journey with her as she seeks to make sense of the events of her life. She takes us inwards. She lets us see how those moments have marked her, shaped her, made her, and hurt her, left her powerful, insightful, and vulnerable.

When her psychiatrist asks her whether she had found a therapist, she lies, telling her that she is still looking. Silently she reflects that “so many times, I had taken her printed list of recommended therapists, but I had never actually called any of them. I didn’t want anyone digging around in my mind. They might not know when to stop. They might go too far and break the mantle that protected the hot, molten core”.

There are times when we need to protect our pain. Not everything needs the light, sometimes it is indeed best to be protected in the dark, sometimes it’s best to be still and then we find our way.

/ Soul 
Owusu was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and raised in Italy, Ethiopia, England, Ghana, and Uganda.She reflects that “The idea of roots setting a person free is counterintuitive, but deracination from the past, from land, from family, from mothers, makes for an unstable present. We must have, or we will always search for, a place to bury our bones”.Sometimes though, it is not clear what our roots are. We are told that our roots are our family’s roots or our country’s roots, or our profession’s roots, but we know that they are not our roots. To be able to say, “this is my story, this is who I am”, those are the roots that both ground and free you.One evening, as a little girl taking a bath, she asks her father why she has a belly button.“So you know where your center is,” he said.

“Why do I need to know where my center is?” I asked.

“So you don’t lose your balance,” he said. “Your center is where all the different parts of who you are come together. It used to connect you to your mother and to the beginning of human history in Africa.”

That seems like a good place to end today…

I wish you a week that is rooted, centered, and free, a week in which you get to know your story a little better, a week rooted in the prosocial feminine qualities that are the essence of powerful leadership.

Karl

PS: If you’re feeling like there is a yet-to-be-discovered next phase in your life but are uncertain exactly what it is or how to get there, get in contact with me. You might find some benefit in us working together.

PPS: I invest 600 hours a year in reading and learning to support my clients. This newsletter is a product of that investment, you can subscribe here. I share extra snippets on my Instagram and LinkedIn profiles. If you’d like me to recommend something to read or listen to, drop me a mail. I am always happy to share some suggestions.

(this letter was first published on 8 August 2021)

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