Successful CEOs often develop a virtuoso understanding of the world around them. But how do they cope when that world falls apart? I explain why the world needs leaders with more advanced skills – the skills of the history maker.
Earlier this year, before the pandemic had taken grip in the West, Jennifer Garvey Berger and Zafer Gedeon Achi wrote an interesting paper for McKinsey Quarterly inspired by Garvey Berger’s book Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps.
Garvey Berger’s advice is emergency surgery for executives dealing with VUCA conditions and is rooted in respectable Harvard research into adult cognitive and moral development. Roughly speaking, mindtraps are habits that enable accomplished performance in stable situations but can misfire, sometimes catastrophically, as the world becomes more complex and chaotic. The direction of advice is clear: climb out of routines and narrow technical understandings of a situation to embrace meaningful context, in its ever-evolving forms. Her recommendations are developmental: grow beyond the self-centred, rational ego; connect with purpose; tune in to your body; build your emotional repertoire; and connect compassionately with others and with yourself.
In Garvey Berger’s view, the most mature leaders adjust with grace to whatever they encounter, and do so with the finely honed improvisational skills of the jazz virtuoso. Influencing and being influenced by the emerging reality, these self-transforming leaders are the cultural virtuosos of the business world.
Garvey Berger illustrates her lessons with the fictionalised case study of Mark, Leroy, and Alison – three senior executives learning how to avoid the mindtraps of contemporary leadership. It’s a picture of confident, multicultural, liberal, prosperous executives becoming better people while their children play happily downstairs, a bottle of Pinot Noir is always close at hand, and the world goes on outside. These are mature individuals helping each other to flourish in the messy real-life of the moment of truth. Fearing he was losing his team’s support, Mark opens himself up to them, hosts a collaborative workshop, and brings pizza. Bingo! They invent a new app!
Garvey Berger is describing leaders as jazz improvisers (p103). Imagine you’re a jazz musician and you find yourself with a problem. Perhaps the PA doesn’t work for the room you are in. If you stand at the front, those at the back won’t be able to hear. Tentatively, you move to the centre of the room and the crowd reorganises itself around you. Now everyone can hear. You have grasped the possibilities of the situation from the perspective of its end – providing a performance for your audience. You opened yourself up and invented your way out of a tricky situation. An audience member’s cellphone goes off. You treat it as a gift and weave it into your performance. Aristotle recognised these virtuosos or phronemoi two and a half millennia ago. The virtuoso’s interpretations of the present rest upon the past – the years of building, sharpening, and elaborating the skills of their trade to such a point they can be summoned and combined endlessly in order to connect better with the people and circumstances of a dynamic situation. Becoming a cultural virtuoso is an extraordinary achievement. But there is one leadership stage beyond it….
Charlie Parker: history maker
Being a skilled jazz improviser is not the same as inventing ‘jazz improvisation’. When Charlie Parker moved improvisation from the margins to the centre of jazz in the early 1930s, he changed the world and values of jazz. More than a cultural virtuoso, he was a cultural history-maker. Similarly, today’s world calls for something more than great improvisers exercising their virtuosity. We need leaders who can go further and invent new commercial cultures. The most outstanding leaders – those who I call cultural history-makers – understand this.
Reading Garvey Berger’s case studies, one is struck by a sense of wisdom but also a slightly self-satisfied, entitled complacency. True these individuals are not defensive. They are collaborative, emotional, expressive, and compassionate. All estimable and worthy virtues. But they seem to lack any sense that their world could come crashing down around their ears. Their concerns are the narrow ones of the individual, team and organisation within the world more or less as it is. Their moments of truth are bounded by a limited sense of the moment of truth that is quite different to another well recognised sense: the road to Damascus conversion.
Remember the story of Saul? He was a prosperous tax collector, in cahoots with the Roman occupying force, and zealously persecuting the tiny band of renegade Christians who sprung up in the days immediately following the crucifixion of Christ. His conversion experience signalled the death of his old life and emptied it of any appeal. The conversion re-drew the lines of allies and enemies. His new allies could be drawn from any walk of life so long as they affirmed the word of Christ. As Saul was thrown into the life of Paul, he consigned his old life to the dustbin and took on the dangerous mission of establishing a new culture.
The difference between history-makers like Paul and Garvey Berger’s virtuosos lies in their different senses of the moment[1]. The virtuosos do what their past in the form of their skills guides them to do in each unique situation shaped by the others they connect with. Guided by their unique understanding of the knottiness of the situation and their own sense of the possible, the virtuoso leader draws on their skills to pull a rabbit out of the hat in such a way that it becomes the example for all to follow.
In the early days of the pandemic, Jim Koch, Chairman and founder of The Boston Beer Company, repeated, with a difference, a philanthropic move he had made several times before and set up Restaurant Relief America to support restaurant workers and donated $2.1m to help local restaurants across 20 states. Previously he made such moves to shore up the craft food and drinks sector. This time it was for survival.
In Garvey Berger’s fictionalised case, Mark’s team also repeat, with a difference, a move they’ve made before. They launch a new business but this time with three different variations of a new app and specially use it to collect data to feed back in to the company’s learning. This is extraordinary virtuoso leadership. But it is recognisably still a kind of digitised, financialised business. This moment in which Mark, Leroy, Alison and the jazz improvisers live is the ancient Greek moment for decisive and skilful action: the Kairos. In the Kairos, one grasps the situation by getting a feel for the evolving context surrounding it and, in the light of the ultimate end of the undertaking in which one is involved, pulls on one’s skills to make the necessary adjustments.
However, history-makers do not live with this sense of the moment of truth as a moment of improvisational repetition, in which the past dominates the present. Instead they face up to threats coming from the future that challenge their whole notion of what it is to be in business at all. History-makers live in an Augenblick – a history-making moment of truth – when something happens that makes them question aspects of the world that others aren’t able to see or acknowledge. The Augenblick is a deep insight into the self and the constructed world that reveals its finitude and makes possible a transformation of both the self and the world.
The history-maker’s moment of truth is not a moment of combining dance moves to pirouette out of a sticky situation. Instead, it is a facing of mortality, a moment of judgment on one’s life and a culture’s whole way of being. While Garvey Berger’s advice suggests such a profound self-transforming mind, its omission of the wider world means it will never be up to the task.
To get a grip on the phenomenon of history-making think, for instance, of the time when the ‘IBM company man’ was the role model in the world of business. But does that feel authentic today? Of course not, he (and it was always a ‘he’) has drifted into history.
Nowadays, it is the individualistic, competitive and deal-making way of being of the entrepreneur that is under threat. Waves of discontent from a politicised pandemic, anger at increasing inequality, and at least two major social movements (BLM and XR) are challenging the speculative entrepreneurial way of life. It’s not sustainable. The greatest cultural history-makers of this generation are the ones who blow the whistle on this – and, crucially, see beyond it.
If you’re in the history-making space, you’re taking decisions that are going to transform people’s sense of what a good life is. If so, you will need to go beyond the improvisatory moment of Kairos and embrace gut-wrenching Augenblick. As you do, you will go beyond the cultural virtuoso, you will be a cultural history-maker.
I’m writing these blogs to share my 30 years of expertise in leading transformational change in major organizations. As an experienced strategic coach, I enable CEOs to embrace the mission that matters to them. Contact me through LinkedIn or visit Missions That Matter.
© 2020 Missions That Matter
[1] What follows draws on the analysis of the moment made by the late philosopher Hubert L Dreyfus. See for example, Dreyfus, H.L. (2008) Skilled coping as higher intelligibility in Heidegger’s Being and Time, Amsterdam, NL: van Gorcum.