Why Leadership is an Art, Not a Science
If culture is the most important work of leadership, it also must be true that culture is a direct result of what the leader does. Leadership is the craftsmanship of leaders. Leadership is authentic, deliberate, and personal work that evokes an intentional response from its recipients. In this way, leadership is not performed on a group of people, but rather for and with a group of people.
As part of a McKinsey Quarterly interview published on July 2, 2020, Bill Schaninger, who co-authored “Beyond Performance 2.0: A Proven Approach to Leading Large-Scale Change” and also led the creation of McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index, observed how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift from top-down leadership to one in which power is distributed.
“We’ve seen COVID-19 accelerating the shift away from classic authoritarian leadership to new forms of distributed decision making, where decisions get pushed to the peripheries of the organization to meet the demands of faster business cycles,” Schaninger said. “The current crisis has only made this shift even more critical to business survival. CEOs still trying to hold on to top-down mandates could very quickly become the impediment rather than the solution.”
The greatest potential in an organization is inside its people, and it is up to leaders to reveal and unleash that power.
In May 2017, I had the honor of serving as a site coordinator for a college marketing course that included two weeks of site visits in Rome and Florence, Italy. On our group’s first morning in Florence, we were welcomed to the Galleria dell'Accademia, which is the home of one of the world’s most famous statues, the 14-foot tall David by the artist Michelangelo.
One of the most compelling aspects of the statue is that the enormous block of marble from which the ancient hero was carved had been abandoned not once, but twice, before then-26-year-old Michelangelo began his work in 1501, after the block from which David would be carved had been neglected for 25 years.
The first two artists, Agostino di Duccio in 1464 and then Antonio Rossellino in 1475, had rejected the block due to the presence of too many “taroli,” or imperfections, which threatened the stability of such a large statue.
With painstaking diligence and patience, however, Michelangelo was able to call forth one of the greatest works of art the world has ever known.
“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it,” Michelangelo said. “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
If we, as leaders, want to get the best out of people, we have to first look for the best inside of them, in much the same way that Michelangelo reflected on his work as revealing the figure hidden within the stone. Leadership, too, is an art, and it is manifested through what you do and what you say.
Like Michelangelo’s ability to bring forth the magnificent David from the same block of marble that di Duccio and Antonio Rossellino rejected, leaders who have developed greater leadership skills will be able to evoke excellence from people and situations where less talented leaders struggle.
