Leadership Asks Fundamental Questions
Influential Leadership is demanding.
Leadership asks fundamental questions of us—who we are, what we are, what we live and stand for, our purpose, philosophy, principles, behaviours…
If it did not ask tough questions, it would not be Leadership!
We also know that Leadership is a skill.
A skill is something we become adept at through diligent and ongoing practice, practice, practice...
While practice does not get us to perfection (which is always just peeking at us from over the horizon), it certainly drives us ever closer.
However, Leadership is more than a run-of-the-mill skill, it is an Apex Skill—it sits at the peak of human skillsets.
This week’s Note discusses just one of the reasons Influential Leadership is an Apex Skill.
Refer directly below to a sample of earlier Notes that discuss Leadership and Apex Skills.
Click on the title link (which follows the edition number and date) to access the Note:
0824_190224: Hard and Soft: Apex Skills
1124_110324: The Door to Leadership
1424_010424: Opportunity
1824_200424: Leadership Goes Beyond Management
1924_060524: Be Tough. Be Courageous
2524_170624: Turning a Team into an A Team
5123_181223: In the Absence of an Apex Skill, will your Existing Skills Matter?
An Apex Skill vs. a (technical) Skill: The Questions Asked
So, what is it that sets Influential Leadership apart, as an Apex Skill, rather than a pure technical skill?
Before we get there, let us set the record straight.
All productive skills are equivalent—humanity and all we have dominion over benefit from productive skills.
Bear in mind that when we set up one skill against another, it is their various roles and uses (applications) that we consider, rather than their relative value. It is so that at specific times and in particular contexts, different skills do have greater or lesser utility. For example, a plumber is a better bet for a blocked kitchen drain than an ENT specialist… although the subject matter might be sort-of equivalent!
With that matter settled, let us zoom in on why Leadership is an Apex Skill, right at the peak.
One of the vital differences between an Apex Skill(set) and a technical skill(set) is that the former concerns fundamental issues about a person’s essence, their nature and character, their motivations and behaviours as human beings.
In other words, Leadership is an Apex Skillset defined by its degree of evolution from Stone Age behaviours to those social skills that are analogous to AI Age technical skills.
A person who chooses to practice Influential Leadership must overcome a multitude of instincts, habits, customs, beliefs and default settings that have hardly shifted since Human #1 emerged.
It takes acute self-awareness, enormous effort and diligent discipline to think, choose and act outside of the well-worn path—which is what is demanded of a person who chooses to Lead.
On the other hand, a person who chooses to be an accountant, a footballer, an algorithm designer, a musician or a manager need only learn the techniques of their field. The practice of their technical discipline is easily conducted separate and distinct from their social domain, other than pleasing their boss, entertaining the spectators, fitting the market’s demands or optimising resource use.
Even when these technicians become masters in their field, they are still functioning in a technical sphere, albeit at a hight level.
Only when these same people transcend their technical skills to ask social questions that bridge their technical skills and prowess, do they enter another level of skills, namely Apex Skills.
So, a person with whatever technical skill, functioning at any level of the skill, is not activating their Leadership capability unless they ask the big questions that have social consequences.
And, to be clear, technical skills as defined here, include all manner of functional capabilities, which most of us have at least one of, but sometimes multiple ones.
For example, Miriam is a mother, a wife, a member of a netball team and plays cello in a community group, while also a senior tax accountant in a bank. In each domain and role Miriam contributes various skills and has built up a general skillset too. If she chooses to add Leadership capability she can go beyond those roles.
I offer the following example, drawn from my immediate experience, to summarise the matter at hand:
- Influential Leadership is distinguished from technical skills by the fundamental social questions that must be asked, which elevate it to an Apex Skill.
Let us call him Matt.
Matt is a highly accomplished software engineer in his late forties. He has only ever worked in the arms industry, since exiting university. He has built a solid reputation as a chap with an advanced work ethic.
His role is developing artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for offensive weapons systems, such as air-to-ground missiles and their associated target designation systems.
The multinational company Matt works for does brisk business—there is immense demand right now for so-called smart weapons that can kill multitudes of people with apparent discerning accuracy.
Matt enjoys a family life in a better-than-middle-class suburb. His wife has her own consulting business. They are gracious home entertainers. They happen to be a devout religious family.
If Matt stepped into the Leadership domain, he would face tough questions about his technical work, and how to reconcile thinking about and developing ways to commit mass murder, while subscribing to the Influential Leadership philosophy and its principles.
For Matt, transcending his technical skillset, his expertise and his economic participation, would be a fundamental Leadership Moment for him because of the tough questions he’d have to ask himself, and to find even more demanding answers.
These sorts of questions and answers enter the Apex Skill domain, and they have their own algorithms…
I would be mispresenting Influential Leadership if I did not acknowledge that it is effortful and challenging, which makes it rare.
However, like all rarities it has rewards and benefits that go beyond the ordinary. It is a choice each of us must exercise, whether to ask the tough questions and fly, or to be silent and keep plodding along.
The Influential Leadership System offers each of us the opportunity to activate our Leadership, to live better.
If you have not already joined the Movement, you are invited to do so—chat with me today.
Regards,
Colin @ Karoo
We Activate Leadership!
Leadership Weekly Note: 4324.211024
e: colind@karoo.world
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