Unspectacular

TL;DR Why this newsletter? Leadership is neither born nor made, it is a choice. This newsletter aims at promoting and supporting young leaders who made this decision, particularly aspiring CEOs, throughout their unspectacular struggle to reach spectacular successes.

Guido’s approach to leadership development

“You should wear glasses.” “Excuse me?” “Spectacles. They’ll make you look more credible and hide that baby face of yours.”

A decade later, I still feel same confusion, frustration, and disappointment I felt on that gloomy November afternoon in Nuremberg, Germany. Just like in cheesy movies, the thunder outside our poorly lit basement office was timed perfectly well with my internal outrage.

I was 2 weeks into my first job as a management consultant, one of the most sought-after positions for a graduate my age, having my first feedback session with Guido, my manager. The firm took leadership development very seriously, and these feedback sessions were a cornerstone of that journey. Instead of the insightful discussion I therefore expected about my strengths and weaknesses – sorry, development areas – I got 30 mins about how I can become more effective if people perceive me as older.

Does Guido really believe that without spectacles, I will remain unspectacular? Is this how I will develop into the “future business leader” as they promised? What should I expect next, then? A suggestion to become taller, grow denser facial hair, or pretend to have a deeper voice?

I realized that day that despite being at the best “leadership school for Hi!-Potentials” (sigh), understanding leadership and developing into one will not be as straightforward as I hoped it would be.

Are leaders born or made?

Since this gloomy November day, I was lucky enough to have worked closely with some of the brightest business minds in the EU and Middle East, ambitious young professionals and experienced CEOs, full time executives and MBA students. Despite there being consensus about what constitutes functional or industrial expertise, “leadership” remained this mysterious concept everyone had their own theory on.

On the one hand, you had the “leadership is born” group. Despite following several variations, they all subconsciously believed that successful leadership is, at the end of the day, a result of genetics (credible appearance, charismatic personality, natural intelligence, male gender...), age, and a little bit of luck. In short, they subscribed to the notion that certain individuals were just singled out for it. Hence, our influence as managers is limited to finding and selecting these naturally born leaders, since trying to become someone we are not usually fails miserably.

And who can blame them, when all we hear around us is how exceptional some were at a young age – be it how brilliant Bill Gates was as a student, how Elon Musk devoured 2 books a day growing up, or how Steve Jobs envisioned the PC revolution in his twenties. In fact, some scientists actually claim to have found the leadership gene (hint: get yourself checked for rs4950).

On the other hand, the “leadership is made” group. This group believes leadership is a collection of techniques that can be learned through experience and education, a skill much like “financial modeling” or “compelling presentations”. Despite the attractiveness of this proposition (anyone can be whatever they want to be), we know deep down that this is not the case. The ability to effectively lead, motivate, and align a team – whether in sports, politics, or business – requires a very complex and nuanced set of skills and behaviors that cannot be taught in a classroom in a couple of hours. It just sounds paradoxical.

Leadership as a choice

Throughout the years I have gotten inspired by a third group of young professionals, entrepreneurs, family business leaders, and aspiring CEOs, who prove that leadership is neither born, nor taught, but rather a choice they make. Every. Single. Day.

This approach builds on both theories but is much more nuanced. You are not born with “leadership genes”, but leadership is knowing yourself and continuously improving your skills to best serve your teams’ goals. You are not taught “leadership skills”, but leadership is going on a path of honing your skills, fine-tuning your behaviors, and more importantly shifting your mindset – again and again and again.

Leadership is unspectacular

Once they make this choice, young leaders face very intense experiences. Even though the journey can be extremely rewarding, thrilling, and self-fulfilling, it is always challenging, lonely, and full of crushing self-doubt. What does not kill you makes you stronger? Tell that to the entrepreneur who lost her family’s savings, the young CEO who is dreading an upcoming layoff, or the family business heiress who is always haunted by her father’s successes.

Despite the cheesy wordplay at the beginning, the main reason behind the naming of this newsletter is that leadership is mostly unspectacular. As the saying goes, spectacular performance is the result of unspectacular preparation. What we see in movies is usually the A-ha! moment with the brilliant product idea, the great knockout punch, or the key strike that ended the war, but the 2h rarely give justice to the dull, boring, unsensational preparation that preceded it (notable exception, highly recommended). When we read about successful examples and how they lived their lives, it is easy to get demotivated by how advanced their actions, systems, and habits were, and forget that they, too, started somewhere primitive and had to hustle their way up.

This newsletter will try to promote and support young leaders who made this decision, particularly aspiring CEOs of startups and family businesses that receive no or little formal training and mentorship. It is a tribute to their unspectacular daily grind. A companion in their unspectacular periods where they see no results. And a reminder on unspectacular moments of struggle and self-doubt that spectacular achievements await those who survive.

Since leadership is not an exact science with a straightforward playbook, we will do this by demystifying it, ie. shedding light on it from as many perspectives as possible. This will include foundational knowledge and pragmatic advice, time-tested theories and new ideas, general principles and situational tips. The one thing we will not do is present plain theory as there is enough of that already. We will use this newsletter as a playground to test and experiment – and may the most useful ideas win.

Caveats

3 important notes on the contents of this newsletter, even though they are obvious they are worth mentioning.

First, I cannot claim credit for any of the ideas that will be shared. They will be attributed to the much smarter people that developed them, whether authors, thinkers, businesspeople, entrepreneurs, CEOs, or my mentors and colleagues. What I will try to do is put these ideas into context and provide my experiences in implementing them.

Second, I will not provide THE answer(s). Leadership is complex and there is no single path to success. What I will try to do is show patterns that are common across successful examples and bring them back to their first principles. Your job is to research your own experience: absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is essentially your own.

Finally, and most importantly, none of the posts or ideas presented will be final. Part of the motivation for writing this newsletter is to force me to follow a stricter methodology in reviewing the key concepts, put them to test more systematically, and clarify my conclusions more succinctly. Unlike many others, I cannot claim to be writing from a position of authority as a great success story. However, I believe that this is exactly what makes this experiment different. It is the fact that it is written as a work in process instead of a success memoir.

In other words, it is written during the unspectacular, not after (hopefully soon) achieving the spectacular.

Have a spectacular weekend,

/M

P.S.: One cannot mention “spectacular” that many times without paying tribute to the most iconic sentence it was used in

P.P.S.: To the real Guido, if for some reason you read this post and recognized yourself, I still love you!