Book Review: Fun and Fearless Leadership
There’s a striking difference between leadership books coming from academia and those built on experiences in the industry. The first ones have a tendency to bucket leadership styles, extracts the traits specific for each, and make sure that any leader can fit in one of the buckets. The latter usually describe a series of events that the author experienced, generalises, and then assumes that the same winning solution must work out for everyone.
While there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with either style, the thing that fascinated me while reading Fun & Fearless Leadership is that — while it fits in the second category — it maintains a safe distance from generalisations, and describes what could be the leadership style of the future. Why the future? In the author’s own words, the methods described in the book are for “creative work where leadership needs to be fresh and meaningful, but it’s constantly being pulled by forces into becoming predictable and boring”.
It’s not hard to imagine a world, in not more than 10–15 years from now, where virtually all work that still has to be performed by humans fits into the described criteria, with everything else already automated, and the majority of people living under universal basic income. Going with the assumption that the world will undergo such a transformation, for the better or worse, it’s not hard to hypothesise that the established leadership styles (authoritarian, laissez-faire, democratic, etc.) would not apply anymore. Now let’s discuss two of the pillars of the leadership style described in the book.
Compassionate Radical Honesty is defined in the book as voluntarily telling people where you stand. It is not the same thing as not lying but goes way over that. While this is not a new concept (found it very well argued under the shape of Radical Transparency and Radical Truth in Ray Dalio’s Principles), it is extremely powerful. Not being radically honest is as best delaying a conclusion, but not really altering the outcomes. At worst, the lack of sync in a team can wreck a whole project or company. Moreover, the knowledge workers of the future are more likely to operate well in some sort of idea meritocracy. This is because they root their pleasure in solving complex problems, developing their skills, and creating a legacy. When proved wrong, their ego does not suffer, since they believe they learned something new and therefore evolved.
A long, hard look in the mirror describes the introspective process of analysing and understanding yourself, and the various methods to facilitate that (including the beautiful metaphor of developing your Mental Sherlock). This is pretty much aligned with the theory of the amygdala hijack that explains how humans have a reptilian brain and a more rational/thinking brain. Being able to understand yourself requires the ability to identify your amygdala impulses, and channeling them through your rational brain (since repressing them is hardly a good idea). The author also describes the process of unlearning, something that does not come naturally but is amazingly important and the key to being able to be a transformative leader (on this note I loved the exercise described, where in order to unlearn things, you would imagine yourself surviving a nuclear apocalypse).
“You can’t be a leader if you don’t care. You can be many other things, you can be a genius, you can be an expert, you can be a manager, but you can’t be a leader. Before any skills, before anything else, leadership is caring about something enough to put yourself out there, to reach, to step up, to take a chance. It’s that something that compels you to do the right thing and get the job done, even when no one is looking, and especially when you have something to lose. You can fake it for a while, but only for a while” - Excerpt from Fun & Fearless Leadership
How Is It Fun?
Even though fun is referenced in the title, there is no obvious description in the book that I recall that explains why the proposed model is fun. Interacting with various leaders — while they perceive their role as meaningful — it’s mostly described as stressing as opposed to fun. My personal theory on why the book’s leadership model is fun has to do with the compassionate radical honesty bit. I believe that a lot of the stress associated with the job comes from not being able to voice opinions and communicate directly. Internalising emotions is generally a bad idea, and there starts to be some consensus on how showing emotions is beneficial for leaders (Good Leaders Get Emotional). Being truly open, while it will generate some friction in the beginning, will have great outcomes long term both for the results of the team, but also the wellbeing of the leader. Similarly to politics, where it became untenable to spin, the future leader won’t fake opinions for the sake of harmony, since the harmony would be short lived and she will be perceived as disingenuous and not to be trusted.
All in all, the book is a great read for current and aspiring leaders. It emphasises the power of obsessions in accomplishing ambitious goals, it punctually trashes the mantra of self-organising teams and emphasises the advantages of personal accountability and responsibility, and overall delivers the message in a blunt, candid style, with absolutely no sugar coating.
If you find yourself arguing against your self-interest, trying to convince others or yourself why you can’t win anything, why the competition has all the advantages, why you’re stuck, then you’ve fallen victim to a culture of mental poverty.
You can buy the book here: https://amzn.to/2pUBaFl