From Mastery to Service - The Ultimate Elevation in Leadership

One of the most profound shifts for senior leaders rarely appears on a leadership competency framework.

It isn't about strategic thinking, communication or decision-making. Most Chief Officers and CEOs have already developed those capabilities to a high level.

The shift is more subtle than that. It is a movement from mastery over outcomes to serving the conditions which produce outcomes.

Early in a leadership journey, success often comes through delivery: Creating a strategy, Driving change, Establishing credibility, Delivering results. Leaders are rewarded for shaping organisations through force of vision and strength of execution. We can think of this as becoming a master of outcomes. In many ways, it is exactly what is required.

But as powerful and useful as this leadership is, it also carries limitations. There are three scenarios in which those limitations become acute.

One: the master of outcomes becomes what Jim Collins (‘Good to Great’) refers to as the ‘celebrity leader’ - where a business depends too directly on one high profile, high charisma individual. That dependency disables the growth of leadership capability (vision, strategy, decision making, judgement, values etc.) within the organisation itself. When the leader leaves, the business has no internal framework for success, and collapses.

Two: the leader's responsibilities expand beyond what they can directly influence. This often happens as leaders ascend to the most senior roles, but it can also occur as organisations themselves grow in scale and complexity. At this point, leaders must evolve their approach if they want to continue creating impact, enable success in their people, and avoid personal burnout.

Three: external events force the leader to confront the limits of their control. Things like market cycles, geopolitical shifts, investor sentiment, succession timing, acquisition approaches, even mortality itself… All of these have the capacity to disrupt a leader’s best made plans and render their intended outcomes suddenly uncertain or out of their hands. For leaders accustomed to designing and delivering results, this can be a deeply confronting experience.

The good news is that what these scenarios call leaders into is a higher level of leadership - one that ultimately expands their capacity and increases their impact - to the benefit of all those they serve.

In essence, it’s a shift from seeking to control outcomes to cultivating the conditions in which optimal outcomes can occur. That’s significant because leaders rarely have as much control over outcomes as they imagine.

The myth of leadership is that great leaders control outcomes. The reality is that great leaders shape the conditions that make successful outcomes more likely.

This was the journey of evolution for a high performing CEO I worked with recently. The business was facing profound uncertainty outside anyone's control. This CEO realised the conditions demanded a new emphasis in the way they led the organisation. Their leadership became less about determining and owning outcomes, and much more about galvanising people to show up optimally in response to high degrees of uncertainty.

This is such a different approach - both as a leader, and for an organisation. To some extent they became a leader of ‘who we are’ rather than ‘what we produce’. And a big part of this was showing up as a leader truly committed to serving their people.

As a strategy for driving success it may seem a little counter intuitive, but in fact it became the difference between a business collapsing in on itself and a business stepping up to its potential. Had this CEO not been able to lead with that kind of internal clarity - that my opportunity is to serve at my highest rate, and our opportunity as a business is to be all that we can be… independent of what the outcomes are here - it’s almost certain the business would have dismantled.

And what was a precipitous moment in their leadership became a defining moment of it, as a next level of evolution - within themselves, and professionally on their career track.

This serves as a powerful illustration of the fundamental shift with which Self-Realized Leadership is concerned. As leaders become less attached to proving themselves and more committed to serving something larger, they unlock a new level of impact. One that enables optimal outcomes to occur, inspires and empowers the people around them, and leaves a legacy of journeys in which people have felt privileged to play a part - whatever the eventual outcomes.

The paradox: as the leader becomes more comfortable releasing control of outcomes, and more focused on the quality of their leadership, the outcomes actually improve.