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Leadership
Leadership Is as Much Strategy as It Is Determination
Leaders plan ahead and persist, realizing their vision.
Posted February 20, 2024 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
Key points
- Effective leaders play the long game, formulating a strategy even as they exercise determination.
- Leaders often need to produce cultural change before they can introduce new ideas.
- Leadership is a balancing act—you help people accept change while demonstrating that change is not a threat.
- What seems right to you may not seem right to others; you’ll need to bring them around at their own speed.
Leadership is a long trajectory, much of it defined by preparation to become a leader. Thus, if leadership were a political campaign, you would be your own Advance Man (or Woman), taking stock of the challenges, figuring out how to meet them before the candidate —you! —even takes up their leadership agenda. In this sense, leaders need to play the long game.
They can’t just say. “Okay, I have an idea and I’ll run with it.” Instead, they must assess the situation, determine what opposition they may face, and take steps to overcome it. In practical terms, they must win people over, especially in situations where their idea may be different from what most people want or expect. They must take the pulse of their community, and, if they want to create something new and different, learn how to go with the flow of that pulse so that people don’t resist them.
This notion of playing a long, calculated game is crucial when your idea butts up against long-held attitudes that your potential constituents take for granted. For example, if people are invested in cooking with natural gas (“Hey, that’s how we’ve always cooked!”), you wouldn’t just start a company that made hydrogen-powered stoves. It’s too much of a departure from the norm. You’d first have to show that people’s customary practices (which seemed to work just fine) should give way to a cleaner, more efficient alternative that might even save them money (think about how long it took to get people off incandescent bulbs and into LEDs). In effect, you must change the culture that surrounds people and that defines how they think.
Culture matters, and you can’t easily disrupt it without causing discomfort. People rely on culture because it makes things easy. It allows people to act without pondering how to act—they just know what to do because they’ve always done things according to their culture, and so has everyone else that they know. A potential leader who wants people to accept new ideas must situate those ideas so that people can accommodate them within their accustomed frame of reference (“Well, this isn’t just what I’ve always done, but it fits with what I might have done!”). In the case of those hydrogen stoves, someone might still say “Well, the cooking times are about the same, so I won’t have to junk all my cookbooks.”
Here, I’m thinking of a young immigrant musician who overcame resistance from her traditional community to a new type of musicality that, while departing from tradition, still features and extends it. She pulled off a kind of balancing act (crucial to precipitating any cultural shift), which led her to experience a new sense of acculturated freedom and personal self-assurance.
Her determination is in part intellectual, as she constructs arguments to convince more conservative community members that innovation is vital to preserving the fundamental tradition. She advocates a type of cultural openness that is nonetheless non-threatening—if only because she makes it seem natural and organic, a product of the immigrant experience that embodies growth and maturation. She appeals to a desire to put down roots and prosper, even while remaining identifiable as a group (that is, as a group that has retained its cultural integrity).
She also achieves a practical coup, enabling every community member to discover for themselves how exciting a type of new, fusion music can become. She makes her case in real-time performances. She allows the experience of her music to sink in—sensually, spiritually—so that her intellectual arguments seem irrefutable. She puts in the hard work to teach other musicians how to work in her idiom, so that the experience of her new, fusion musicality becomes a fact of local life (and beyond). Ultimately, she makes a career: as an apostle, a performer, and a leader.
Her story illustrates how determination can operate on many levels, which finally cohere into a well-coordinated campaign. Determination is inflected by the constituency that a would-be leader hopes to influence. Here, a young musician deployed different types of persuasive techniques based on who was listening, who was making decisions, and who might join her in performing. Her overall approach required careful calibration among its various elements. In her case (as in all cases), determination was not just summed up by the will and energy to plow ahead. It was, rather, a careful, well-focused effort that brought together (and found the synergy in) several intelligent tactics.
As you think about this young woman and her determined strategy, ask yourself:
- Do you understand determination to be the application of intense energy to a defined task, or do you see it as a subtler practice that attracts people to your project by appealing to their interests?
- Are you culturally sensitive, and aware that what appeals to you and your crowd may offend other people—i.e., that they may have values that you may not understand?
- Are you an all-at-once or incremental type person? Are you a competent judge of how much incremental change will succeed and at what intervals?
- Can you pick out the key people who must be brought around if your project is to take off? In other words, have you taken time to understand your constituency and its current influencers?
- Do you understand that determination requires not just willpower but also a strategy, applied over the long haul leading up to your assumption of a leadership position?
Cultural issues are highly sensitive, and an effective leader learns how to navigate them effectively. He or she is never condescending and recognizes that change may come from a very deep place in someone else’s psyche. Even if that person is not afraid of change, they may be afraid to express their willingness. So, it’s almost as if consent has to happen across an entire community if it is to happen at all, but not necessarily.
Leaders know how to find the right people in a community to facilitate what they propose. They can turn these people into credible allies, trusted by the community. My client accomplished this, and her strategic planning may apply as you take up a leadership role.
