Being: The Catalyst for Effective Action
If you’re patient enough to read a handful of leadership books written in the last 20 years, you might notice a strong theme.
The vast majority of leadership theory focuses less on doing, and more on being. Less on what to do, and more on how to be.
In other words, what you do is less important than how you do it.
The reason for that is that leadership is not management. Management seeks to create stable recurrence. Leadership is about creating a different future. Management seeks to maintain the status quo. Leadership seeks to disrupt it.
The future is not created by following a set of rules. Leaders create a future by cultivating a way of being, doing and knowing that increases their ability to navigate complexity, sense what is needed in the moment, and envision a preferred future.
Many people have written about the sorts of positive characteristics that leaders can develop:
Courage. Empathy. Resilience. Integrity. Humility. Focus.
These are all very well, but in my experience, you can read all of the books and try to be all of the things, and yet still not produce the outcomes that you want. That’s because of a misunderstanding of the nature of being, and its relation to getting stuff done.
Being is a foreign concept to many of us. It feels fluffy, vague and etherial. What are we even talking about when we speak about being? Here are some observations that help demystify being, and show the connection between being and doing (good things).
Being is revealed through action, not theory
Being becomes real when we consider three foundational aspects of being: context, emotion and language.
If someone has made a mistake that impacts the lives of others, and they show up in a way that is denying, vindictive and misleading, their way of being has a huge impact on our ability to trust them. Think Scott Morrisson’s rejection of the robodebt findings.
Here was a leader, under whose engagement an unlawful automated debt collection scheme was created in Australia, resulting in nearly half a million false debt notices issued to individuals. His speech after the royal commission saw a series of assertions of blame, as if court proceedings were a personal attack.
If, in the same situation, we witnessed emotions of courage and taking responsibility for the truth, and a willingness to cooperate, we might have seen a leadership moment that led to some kind of action.
This example reveals the relationship between being and getting things done. Being evasive of responsibility has little to do with the kind of action we might hope a government might engage in following a scandal. If the former prime minister had shown courage and taken responsibility for his leadership, justice would be a more likely outcome than further frustration.
The point here is not to point the finger of blame. Rather, it’s to show that being is not an abstract notion. It is not something that can be separated off or measured. Being is revealed in context, through action.
Being predisposes action
Your way of being vastly increases the likelihood of you behaving in a certain way. That’s important because it means you can spend all the effort in the world trying to change (yourself or others), but if you don’t shift the way of being, nothing will change.
For example, if something isn’t getting done, blaming someone for their incompetence may be less effective than understanding why they’re stressed at the moment.
Or, another example is a team that performs well at the beginning of a project, with team members getting along well, easily solving problems. One week out from the delivery date, the same team may be confused, forgetful, avoidant and making mistakes. Why? Because the shift in being has predisposed them to taking different (and less desirable) action.
By showing up, leaders encourage others to show up in ways that are appropriate for the task at hand
Being is contagious.
Someone funny makes us laugh.
Someone anxious has us feel uncomfortable.
One of the roles of leadership is to maintain ways of being that are appropriate to the task and situation at hand.
Being empathetic may not be as useful in a moment of crisis as being focused and resolute.
Being focused and resolute will be less useful in a moment of grief than being empathetic.
We watch leaders not just for what they say, nor only for what they do, but how they do it.
The most powerful leaders move from a place that feels uncannily resourceful.
Mastering leadership is less about what you say and do than how you show up.
Questions for reflection
Pay attention to the hidden realm of being as it shows up in life and work. Some questions to try on, remembering that being happen in action:
How does your way of being influence the outcomes of your conversations?
How do your habitual ways of being preclude certain results that you want?
What could engaging in a different quality of being make possible?