When you ask someone what makes a good leader, plenty of qualities come to mind. Confidence, authority, gravitas, fairness, and empathy are a few I’ve heard recently. But even more important than how a leader presents themselves is how they think.
Writing for The Big Think.com, Donna Wiggs cites psychologist and science journalist Adam Grant, author of several books on how successful people think. Grant says that strategic thinking is the most important quality to look for in a leader. What he means by that is a combination of abstract thinking and concrete thinking – the ability to envision a solution to a problem or an improvement to the status quo – and the ability to make it happen.
If you have a leader who excels at abstract thinking, you get some great ideas. Big picture people can be very inspiring, but a vision without a plan is more like daydreaming than leading. It can be frustrating for employees to be directed to take on a big initiative without any specific direction on how to make it happen.
If you have a leader who excels at concrete thinking, you seldom get innovation or transformational change. They mostly see what’s in place already, and they focus on improving the status quo. In fact, they can get stuck in the weeds often, suggesting more and more tweaks to a system may be functioning just fine.
When I led a team, I insisted that if a suggested change wasn’t a demonstrable productivity-increasing improvement, it was tabled for later (or simply vetoed.) It’s important to recognize people who see opportunities for tweaks, but a leader’s job is to help the operation run as efficiently as possible and, perhaps more importantly, (you can see my bias clearly), help the organization move forward on to bigger and more challenging opportunities.
Strategic leaders, Grant says, have the ability to toggle back and forth between both kinds of thinking. Grant says that leaders who are stronger and more confident in one or the other mode can stretch their abilities with coaching and practice.
Futurist Jane McGonigal, author of Imaginable, writes about how to map out our lives when it seems impossible to predict what the world will be like next week, let alone next year or next decade. She offers advice on how to use “mental time travel” to imagine a new future. Decide what your project, team, or organization will look like five years from now. Paint a detailed picture visualizing how things look, how people perform their work, and how the organization carries out its mission.
McGonigal says this kind of thinking isn’t an escape from reality. “It’s a way of playing with reality, to discover risks and opportunities you might not have considered.” The next step is deciding what to do about it. “What do I need to do to be ready for it? Should I change what I’m doing today to make this future more likely?”
What if you’re a concrete thinker who wants to expand your approach? Grant suggests conducting a pre-mortem, a technique initially developed by research psychologist Gary Klein. “People come together on the assumption that a planned strategy has failed. They then work to identify the likely causes, missed threats, and misread opportunities before considering how to avoid similar mistakes in the future.”
Designing exercises like these can help companies evaluate their next generation of leaders and help them stretch their abilities. The link above to Gary Klein’s pre-mortem includes a step-by-step guide to facilitating a team through the process.
This link leads to Product and Experience Design’s guide to envisioning a future state.
“Leadership is not about a title or a designation. It’s about impact, influence, and inspiration. Impact involves getting results, influence is about spreading the passion you have for your work, and [your ability to] inspire your teammates.”
Robin S. Sharma
Your Work, Your Way 