We need the brilliant original thought of those who sit on the fringes and make change happen

Daily Maverick

6 days ago

Whether we are aspirant leaders or currently in leadership positions, most of us have role models whom we either look to for inspiration or against whom we calibrate our own behaviour.
It goes without saying that who we choose to emulate determines just how successful we will be in our quest to be the leaders we aspire to be. So, the million-dollar question is: what should we be looking for in a role model? Perhaps more importantly, the question is, why?
Personally, I admire leaders who have an unshakeable sense of purpose, the vulnerability to reflect on their actions and the ability to admit when they get it wrong – and who get things done.
I respect those leaders who have the incredible humanity to never sacrifice the needs and fears of the ordinary people on the shop floor or the constituency on the altar of their own ambitions. Most of all, the leaders I revere embody hope, which is probably the ultimate warrior attribute of all.
Hopefulness gives you the energy to fight, and keep on fighting for that greater goal. Nelson Mandela is someone who ticks all those boxes. He's almost over-exposed in his own country, held up as a secular saint across the globe, but he deserves every single accolade because he had a vision, he was unashamedly honest and capable of changing course, and he trademarked the common touch.
There are very few world leaders now who can say the same. Most have the vision of where they want to go, but very few have the profound ability to hold themselves to account and even fewer care anything about the ordinary person in the street – unless it is as a stepping stone to achieving their vanity projects.
Great statesmen and stateswomen understand humanity and never lose sight of it, despite how much their personal experience might conspire against them to harden them and to protect them from further hurt. Another vitally important aspect to a great leader is to generate change; the ability to stretch the continuum of what they and the world around them accept as normal.
As a young man travelling to the US, I was struck by an experience I had on the bus from JFK International into Manhattan. A man on the bus started mouthing off, declaiming and raving, and everyone went about their business as if nothing was happening. As a then-reserved Briton, I was simultaneously aghast at the public spectacle and strangely fascinated because that kind of behaviour was wholly foreign where I came from and would have been immediately condemned out of hand because of that.
Yet sometimes that's precisely what we need to shake us from our lethargy – to have someone saying the unsayable. Neurodivergence may be a case in point. We need certain behaviours, often a strength of neurodivergent people, to stop us from heading full speed into a brick wall because we are locked in groupthink, and no one wants to be Hans Christian Andersen's little boy calling out the vain emperor for having no clothes on.
Technological leaps
We need the brilliant original thought of the neurodivergent to provide the technological leaps we take for granted today, whether it affects personal computing, mobility solutions, saving the planet or even settling on Mars.
There's a more prosaic reason, too, for all of us to understand neurodivergence; some research indicates that up to 15-20% of us are neurodivergent in one way or another; statistically as many as one in six of every family, every workforce, every sports team. If we cannot accept and make space for that in them and that in us, literally and figuratively, the consequences are massive, not just to the bottom line, but to relationships, too.
Great leaders with a great sense of humanity make space naturally for everyone, even those who they might disagree with, because as George Bernard Shaw famously wrote, it is the 'unreasonable man' who persists in trying to adapt the world to himself while the 'reasonable man' adapts himself to the world; 'therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man'.
Our species needs people who aren't just in the middle, but sit on the fringes and make change happen when we need it, break up entrenched habits so that the aberration is the mass of people that won't move. It's not necessarily that unreasonable leaders are great leaders. But they must make space for those who are, if not on their team, then at least within earshot.
And it's not always about neurodivergent differences. In an often extrovert-oriented world, introverts suffer. The best salesperson isn't always the extrovert; on the contrary, if the service or product being pitched is complex, often the more introverted is the best to sell it because they are the ones that listen to the client and try to understand, rather than rush in headlong to make the sale based on the benefits of the product, whether the client needs it or not.
Opening the door to the team is one thing, but as always, you must open the door to your own mind, too. Nobel laureate, psychologist Daniel Kahneman, discovered that most of (some say up to 90%) of our decisions are based on our emotions – and then I wonder if we spend the rest of our time rationalising those decisions. A great example of this, if we are brave enough to admit it, is impulse buying.
To properly lead, we must understand our triggers and our biases and our deep-seated prejudices – and in doing so, allow far more logical thought to take their place in our decision making. We need to lean into what we fear, give it a name, look it in the eye and deal with it.
When we do that, perhaps we will make better choices about those we hope to emulate as leaders – and perhaps see the error in our ways of blindly accepting, following and idolising the wrong ones, while there is still time. DM