The Cost of Leadership
More leadership does not equal more happiness or joy.
Leadership is something a lot of people aspire to.
🔔 Ringing the bell at the IPO.
🎙️ Giving the speech after another successful month/quarter/year.
In practice, and observed up close, leadership is much more about being handed very difficult problems with incomplete information and without obvious solutions. If the solution were obvious, someone would have already solved it.
…and having to chart a path forward regardless.
And in the process of doing that, you let everyone down to some extent, and you have to live with that, and still feel that you made the right call.
Leadership is very rarely enjoyable.
The reward of leadership is something closer to a sense of agency.
By taking a leadership role, you get to own the outcome of your decision, as opposed to owning the consequences of someone else’s. And that does have value.
But more leadership does not equal more happiness or joy.
Probably the opposite.
Build a career long enough, and leadership won’t just test your decision-making — you will face a challenge that will test your reputation.
The challenge will cast a shadow on your reputation, spread widely by social and/or traditional media.
Without complete information, everyone else will have to decide how that new information updates their mental model of you. And you can’t possibly go and share all the details with every person. You have to rely on people’s experience of you directly and indirectly to inform how they perceive you.
In every interaction you have, you are building up to that moment of doubt or challenge. Every interaction with a customer, investor, colleague, friend, or random at a party is building that reputation.
All of these micro-moments are the small drops that fill or empty the reputation bucket.
And at some point, likely not of your choosing, you will be judged on that reputation - the cumulative balance of all of your actions.
By people without all the context and with all kinds of mis/information…
… and in that moment, it will be too late to add any more drops to the bucket.
If you’re able to still hold up to the scrutiny in those moments, then you’ve created something very valuable and very hard to replicate.
👇 54 seconds, that capture The Cost of Leadership beautifully
You will have to make hard decisions that negatively affect people you care about.
You will be disliked despite your best attempt to do the best for the most.
You will be misunderstood and won’t always have the opportunity to defend yourself.
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