Consider: the USA and most of the developed world does not know a very big difference between an expert and a leader. This has serious impacts on our work force, our political system and our educational system.
A leader and an expert are not the same thing. We have millions of experts and very, very few authentic leaders. An authentic leader is transformative, that is, they create. originate and initiate impacts, futures, that were not foreseen, not predictable and yet in retrospect are seen as precisely what each era had wanted and needed.
So what’s the difference?
An expert is about knowing stuff, i.e., analytical intelligence : to analyze is to take things apart so as to explain and understand their nature. Experts generate content, ideas, information, data, methods, analysis, projections, predictions and explanations. In other words, an expert is about k n o w i n g things or said formally, epistemology.
A leader by contrast is about being and creating, specifically, being a stand for the empowerment of people and organizations. Leaders master the conversations that empower people and organizations to realize their vision, concerns and commitments. By empower I mean three things: to engage authentically, to inspire, and to equip.
A leader and an expert are thereby equipped with and marked by quite different kinds of intelligence. Note that all kinds of intelligence, fully realized, are not inbred. They are developed. Nobody is either an expert or a leader by birth. Both leaders and experts are developed and they are marked by very different focus and abilities.
Background: Dr. Howard Gardner, a leading authority on intelligence and IQ testing, has concluded now that there are many kinds of intelligence, besides the usual verbal and quantitative intelligences that we are familiar with from school and “aptitude” tests such as SAT, ACT, GREs, LSATs, etc. In fact he has identified 9 intelligences that include musical intelligence, spatial intelligence (as with designers and architects), kinesthetic intelligence (such as with dancers and athletes), abstract intelligence such as with philosophers. These are but 3 types of making sense of the world.
Intelligence is how we make sense of things, how we make them intelligible, how we assign useful and logical meanings to events, things, concepts, peoples, methods, observations, and living creatures. The assumption is that in making sense of things, relating things to each other, making observations, developing concepts, we become more effective and more fulfilled.
Both leaders and experts do share a foundational intelligence called analytical intelligence which is the kind of intelligence you and I are trained in when we go through our educational system. Analytical intelligence is the kind of intelligence that can take things apart into their component parts, understand something in its intricate details so as to be able to predict, explain and understand the “nature ” of it. Usually the ‘nature’ of some thing means the structure and function of some thing. Thereby it is hoped, contended, presumed such understanding will allow us to control or least knowingly navigate events in the future where the future is often presumed to be risky, dangerous and threatening.
In other words, analytic intelligence is the central element of what we call understanding, explanation and prediction. It is very good in using the past to predict, explain and understand the likely future. Analytic intelligence studies the past of something (what is already known) as the means of predicting its future. In schools of almost all types, for example, we almost always study the past of something…..the past of chemistry, the past of English, the past of mathematics, the past of shop class, or of economics or of engineering, et. al with the presumption that such an understanding of the past is the best and really only way to prepare for the future. Of course if one goes to “the best schools,’ then one studies the best accountings/renditions of the past and is thereby presumed to have the best shot at navigating (and winning with ) this future. Most all of us anticipate that such a future will be some variation of what has gone before.
We who coach executives to become authentic, transformative leaders disagree that the only real access to the future is the past or that even it is the best access.
The result of studying the past to predict the future is of course to become knowledgeable about the past and thereby presumably knowledgeable about the future. This preparing our people by being so exclusively focused on the past and its knowledge produces expert after expert after expert but as we will see, this almost exclusive focus on the past does n o t produce authentic leaders, i.e,., transformative leaders. A transformative leader is effective in producing extraordinary outcomes far beyond the expected. Transformative leaders create and stand for, w i t h their people, a purpose and vision for what is possible even if it is very unlikely. They inspire and engage people to stand for, act into and fulfill a purpose beyond the predictable. Where they are, there is an energy and a no-kidding commitment that is palpable.
The other kinds of intelligence that a leader studies, practices and has access to that many experts have not yet developed, are:
1. Emotional intelligence.
2. Social intelligence.
3. Creative intelligence.
Let’s start with emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is knowing keenly and astutely what’s going on with you internally: your thoughts, feelings, body sensations and what meanings you assign, attribute to, your thoughts feelings and body sensations. It is the ability to observe your internal states and know what’s going on with you and your thoughts and feelings moment to moment to moment and at the same time to keenly realize that one’s thoughts and feelings are often merely reactive and don’t necessarily constitute, express or represent who you really are, what you are really committed to, what you intend or aspire to. Your thoughts and feelings are often immediate reactions to the environment around you. As you learn to recognize, identify, and interrupt your reactive thoughts and emotions, you become inventive, spontaneous, intuitive. Your skill in being with people, leaving them known, respected, understood and appreciated, increases, often dramatically. Your immediate reactions are simply that:: im-mediate reactions, un-mediated by what you are genuinely committed to or aspire to. As your EQ increases, your communication becomes more thoughtful, caring, and relevant in being with others, in t h e i r world, not just yours.
You could say that high emotional intelligence is “profound and immediate self-awareness.” Critically, it is the awareness of being able to observe and thoughtfully re-present and re-direct what’s going on with you internally, moment to moment, not merely react on impulse to what’s going on with you and around you. It is an intimate understanding of how you think, feel, and perceive things and people, and how y o u r specific biases, prejudices and reactive patterns from your past influence, shape and pull on you in the present moment. It is the ability to recognize and interrupt reactive patterns from the past that are no longer optimal behavior in your current situation. With emotional intelligence, EQ, even routine, familiar reactions can turn…in a moment…… into creative, authentic responses..
The way to develop emotional intelligence is primarily through keen self-observation, others’ formal and informal feedback (the honest inputs of others) that clarify and expand your awareness of yourself and how you impact others. How you impact others through how you communicate (or wisely choose not to) your own thoughts and feelings can and does also impact their thoughts and feelings. Last, emotional intelligence is also empowered and developed through meditation/introspection, through study, and through professional coaching.
The early popularizer and pioneer of Emotional Intelligence, EQ, is Daniel Goleman who has written both books and articles on what EQ is, how it operates, especially with leaders, and how we all can develop it over a lifetime. Google and Amazon his work as sound introductory background for you.
This brings us to the next leadership intelligence, social intelligence. Where EQ is about KNOW THYSELF, social intelligence is about KNOWING (RELATING TO) OTHERS..
Social intelligence is the ability to create, develop, nurture and complete relationships. Relationships are made of only one thing: communication.
Relationships do not exist “out there,” in the outside world, on their own, independent of the communication that constitutes them. Relationships exist, as the way they exist, why they exist and how they exist, happens only in communication, with ourselves and with each other. By contrast, things like a fence post or a toaster or a house or a computer mouse do in fact exist “out there” as some thing in the world independent of language. But relationships exist only in communication which includes mostly words, pictures and numbers but also can be movements and sounds (jazz , dance, silent movies ) and whatever else human beings assign meaning to or draw experience from.
The world you and I inhabit, the world meaning our “consciousness” of the world and how it occurs to us in our experience of the world, and of life, is constructed out of how we communicate, first of all to ourselves through our thoughts and feelings and also equally to the world. The World includes our families, our friends, our communities, our co-workers …. everyone and everything.
Communication is not a fixed, dead, static thing. It is fluid, creative and ongoing. It is alive and it is what gives us life. Movies, books, rituals, sports, politics, child-rearing, healthcare, drama, and community et. al. are all completely constructed in the communications we’ve made up. Key words here are ‘made up’ or ‘constructed’ or ‘created.’ Contrary to popular belief, all our communications are the inventions of we human beings. And while some communications have, perhaps through over use, become hackneyed, over-familiar and stale, all communications were, at their origin, simply made up, and some where at some time, put into language for the first time ever. We invent our communications while often pretending that we do not.
Social intelligence begins with coming to realize that life is always and only communication of some kind, including when the communication is with ourselves in our thoughts and feelings, our internal states. Social intelligence is the ability to create, develop and complete relationships and relationships are a function of how we speak and listen, how we read and write……or more broadly, communication most broadly which includes dance, art, athletics, craft, signaling, the cues and clues of nuance, et.al.
Being an authentic, transformative leader is to devote a lifetime to the art of communication and recognizing that fundamentally, that is all there is to life : communication……of one kind or another. And given all communications can be/are invented, maybe, just maybe, life for a human being can be invented not merely be a script lived out.
It is critical to note that while experts work by means of their knowledge expertise (methodology, data, information, analysis, assessment, prediction) in order to solve current problems, and that is primary for them, leaders by contrast work through and with, focus on, people.. Leaders often create new problems and challenges that deliver an extraordinary future. Being effective with people can work quite differently than being effective with the dx!knowledge, methodology and expertise with things and data.
Authentic, transformative leaders are committed to design and deliver conversations that empower people. That intent informs and shapes every conversation they have….. including with themselves. To reiterate: Very important to see that we all are in an ongoing conversation with ourselves, sometimes called our thinking or our inner voice or simply thinking and feeling. Leaders monitor, edit, shape, generate and re-invent the conversations they have with themselves and with others. The intent is to have each conversation be empowering for others and themselves towards their shared larger purpose.
So what does empowering mean? There is no one final definition for empowering but I’d like to offer this as a starting point. To empower means to:
To engage someone authentically
To inspire them and you.
To equip them and you.
Imagine if your intent and practice were to deliver this kind of empowerment in each and every conversation and to practice this empowerment for the rest of your life both with yourself and with others. Imagine you came to know yourself and others came to know you as someone who reliably empowers human life. The mind set and skill set of empowerment can be adopted by anyone so willing to engage it and to practice discovering what is it to be empowering and to be empowered. Being coached is also critical to discovering what your blind spots are regarding empowerment. PS : Leadership is not a solo sport nor a spectator sport.
Imagine walking away from each and every conversation knowing and feeling that you made that kind of difference, that you and others were left bigger out of the conversation and you both recognized, realized, sensed that impact. And when you didn’t, you corrected what was said/heard and trued it up so that it did. You got anything that was missing, complete and up to date.
Imagine being completely reliable with empowerment. What would that look like? What might that take? Would you be willing to experiment with that just out of reading this article? Would you be willing to share your experience on this blog of what you noticed when you took on…perhaps as an experiment….. having each conversation be empowering to both you and your audience/listeners ?
Prowess. How does anyone get good at anything? If you consider that whatever you’re good at ( and you are good at a number of things ), you practiced it by intentionally repeating its actions, and you got coaching in some way and somehow. Coaching is input designed to elevate, clarify and empower how you see what you do so you can do it better, or even do it at all. You’ll notice that if you’re practicing and being coached in something, you are likely committed to it. This applies to every skill you have, or will have of any kind. Prowess, let alone genius or mastery, do not fall out of the sky on top of you. No matter how compelling your “natural” predisposition for something is, I assert that it will not deliver the extraordinary without conscious practice and coaching over time. Even true for naturals like Mozart (his immersion beginning close to age 2 so at each 5 he could compose . Often you can see with athletes very early immersion in the sport that they go on to excel at. )
So how do we human beings develop our social intelligence? How might we get good at this and better and better at it, no matter how old we are ? In fact, aging/ experience /wisdom may be our friend in our ability to develop and perhaps master social intelligence.
How ? Interact with people consciously. with full awareness. Observe what conversations evoke what behaviors. Ask people for feedback on your communication and the impact of your communication on them. And theirs on you. Practice incessantly and keep a journal each day. Read. Study … everyone and in every medium. Get coached.
The last of the four intelligences that constitute leadership is creative intelligence. Creative intelligence is simply the ability to conceive, create, imagine, express, invent new possibilities. Everything that you and I know currently was first born as a possibility. Creating is conceiving, inventing and discovering an idea and imagining, a thing that hadn’t existed before and such thinking, imagining and envisioning brings forth new realms of possibility. Human beings are quite naturally curious, interested in, intrigued when they can see new possibilities.. We can and do then investigate, inquire into, wonder about, speculate about, experiment with and take action into new possibilities. These actions thereby create new learnings which learnings become what we call, knowledge or know-how. Possibility comes from the Latin p o t e r e and e s s e. Potere means able, potent, from which we get the current English word potent meaning able, capable. Esse means in Latin to exist. So possibility literally means “able to be.” It is the originating thought /vision/ idea /action regarding something that’s never been seen or said as possible and becomes possible because it’s conceived or seen or said for the first time ….. as possible.
The source and origin of everything you and I know as knowledge is possibility. So where do possibilities come from, genuine possibilities? They come from nothing. They actually can be imagined, conceived, created without requiring any inherent, causal connection to anything that already exists in language or physical reality. That said, things that already exist often do prompt new ideas that go beyond what already exists and bring New Dimensions and capacities into play. I am challenging the notion that every new possibility is merely the result of something that went before. Maybe not.
So where do brand new possibilities come from? They can be made up like Tom Sawyer is made up, or your honeymoon is imagined, or your career envisioned; possibilities are conceived, created, invented, including from nothing.
So creative intelligence is the ability to create, conceive, imagine new possibilities…..as if from nothing. Turning that imagination and capacity into useful products and services distinguishes innovating, materializing, something of use or value which is distinct from imagining or conceiving the possibility. Genuine Innovation requires bridging back to the past and seeing what’s missing from the imagined possibility that is attractive and seen as useful or valuable to the market, to people, to buyers. So while imagining, conceiving, creating, inventing an idea as if from nothing is the source of possibility, business and life value most highly how that possibility can become a material innovation that impacts life, benefits life, is useful and valuable and practical to life.
To go into material reality from creation, innovation requires re-claiming and re-using the past freshly, newly and then shaping the new possibility so that it produces useful, valuable, attractive ideas, services, products, events,. While innovation begins with creating new possibilities, it doesn’t end there. It requires a process of taking and testing actions against an outcome that can have commercial value……commercial success….. because it is seen as attractive, valuable or useful to a market / people that becomes willing to pay for that advantage.
In a very real sense, possibilities are first declared, made up, brought forth as if from nothing. They are distinct from assertions which are statements that require evidence from the past for their validity. Effective leaders are good with imagining and declaring new possibilities that can be said as a new vision or purpose/mission or strategy. While at the same time, authentic leaders are able to forward those new possibilities by being informed by, including of, relevant knowledge from the past. They are given by the future while being informed by the past.
When Picasso makes a mark on a painting, he is declaring a new possibility. When Tom Brady spontaneously and ad hoc invents a new play on a football field, he not only s e e s a new possibility but he also is bringing the new possibility into action so it can be realized and fulfilled, as reality.
So while your company may not pay you merely for possibilities per se, if just delivered as possibilities, they will pay you for inventing new possibilities that can be fulfilled in a commercially effective way through action. And quite often will fund a process of generating those actions such that new products and services can emerge.
So genuine leaders can bring this capacity to create a future from and as possibility in a way that distinguishes them from experts and managers. By contrast, managers and experts are often less about inventing new futures and are more about applying the past to solve problems that must be solved to deliver on the bigger vision, purpose or possilbity.
If you said this in terms of the domains of time, knowledge is a phenomenon of the past; it is what is already known. Action is a phenomenon of the present because action only happens in the present. And possibility is a function of the future, of that domain which hasn’t happened but could. Knowledge is brought forth by assertions, debate, examination. Action is brought forth through speech acts that we call action language (such as requests, promises, offers, demands, and invitations).. And Futures are brought forth by declaring new possibilities, imagining new possibilities, conceiving new possibilities,.i.e.. declaratively.. Like Thomas Jefferson “declared” the possibility of representative government in the declaration of independence.
Regarding education: for the most part the premise/assumption that education is based on is that the knowledge of the past is the best way to equip a person to navigate the future. In this model of education and development, the future is often seen as something like a threatening challenge or an evanescent ‘hot’ opportunity for which the “best” knowledge is the answer. So when you study chemistry you studied the past up to the present moment of chemistry; and when you study English you study the past of English up to the present moment; when you study shop class you study and work with the past up to the present moment. So our education is thoroughly past-based and is good at equipping people to handle more-or-less predictable, foreseeable problems but it’s not useful for creating breakthroughs which is the domain of leadership.
One of the challenges of current education is how to introduce transformative learning that discovers and creates new inquiries, new possibilities, new hypotheses ….beyond the informative learning of the past………….which in turn would enable schools to begin to train leaders not merely experts. We could educate leaders who are focused on empowering people to create breakthroughs rather than merely prescribing answers to foreseeable problems and familiar challenges.
Regarding our political culture: At the beginning of this article I mentioned that this distinction between experts and leaders has real consequences for our political culture. I offer you, dear reader, this: the disappointment, frustration, disgust and defiance one sees so publicly with a number of our fellow citizens, often the people who protest, argue for and even riot for, radically demanding solutions…from both the ”Left” and the “Right”…may very well be a reaction to their human experience of seeming to be mistreated culturally and politically, i.e., treated merely as objects, as things, mere statistics, as mere concepts to be manipulated rather than engaged authentically and directly, to be seen, heard and felt as real, live, feeling, thinking, worthy human beings. When we human beings are seen as or reduced to being merely ‘objects,’ statistics, or concepts, we the people may very much feel prescribed to, directed, manipulated. It can seem we are being ‘told what to to do, to be, and to.have, by distant knowledge experts with their huge, pervasive, intrusive technologies ….
Being told what to do or even who to be through machines (such as the media of all sorts, or governmental edicts, or google or Facebook or Twitter or Amazon ) or from far away places of elite knowledge, can leave people feeling as if they don’t really matter, as if they’re just a number, not really unique, feelingful and thoughtful human beings with real and worthy lives. In such a political model one encounters ‘distant’ elites ( such as Washington, D. C. or Silicon Valley or Academia) who know and prescribe the “right” BIG answers to people as mere statistics, it is as if we citizens are expected to fit into and get on with a political game or model already set up and dictated by expert elites and their machines. This political model may and can leave us dis-connected, resentful, disgusted, cynical and angry, i. e., upset. By contrast, what if our cultural and political life were based in human beings starting from a radically different possibility, premise or assumption : that human beings can be naturally developed so as to directly connect and empower each other as a top priority, in both private and public life. What if we created, shared and practiced a commitment that all differences can be worked through in communication……especially communication committed to the possibility of empowering human beings to live together collaboratively,.as their natural self-expression ?
If my speculation/assertion here is on the money, that transformative learning is now essential not optional, it will no longer be a ‘nice-to-have’ that education wakes up to transformative learning. Education that allows for and empowers a student to invent, discover and create and declare t h e i r own possibilities, their own vision/purpose/life with others … works. Rather than waiting for some heroic leader with “the answers”… transformational education, training and development is available now both.in coaching and some teaching approaches.
(See vsacoach.com). Schools can learn to incorporate and integrate transformative learning …..learning that skillfully and usefully unsettles strongly held and often unexamined assumptions, habits and beliefs already in place, and allows and develops creative inquiry and discovery as a foundational mind set and skill set for all of life and learning. A school that introduces transformative learning alongside the effective transfer of what is already known, knowledge, can also focus on, study how, one invents and discovers new ideas, experiences and new knowledge. Transformative learning need not and does not displace or replace transferring what is already known from one generation to the next, i.e., epistemology. Rather, it is offered and presented right alongside the informative learning of our knowledge disciplines of the past……. transformative learning comes alongside traditional knowledge as elective seminars, workshops or courses. If we human beings are to survive, let alone transform, our current challenges, it will become essential and required that education expands its tools and reach deeply into emotional intelligence, social intelligence and creative intelligence…..allowing for mind sets and skill sets that empower all human beings. We humans do now have the tested transformational methodologies to do so (see reference below to Being a Leader, Erhard, et. al., SSRN). And the clock is ticking on our unexamined repeating of the past over and over again. It is time to update how we develop ourselves and our emerging leaders..
It is not untoward or unreasonable to pose that with the challenges of the climate, migration of populations, and past-derived impacts such as military aggression, hunger, coordinating World Health, et. al., that training our young people and our adults work force in all of the 4 intelligences of a leader, of a creative life, is no longer optional but mandatory …. and needs to happen now. All of our people can and will benefit profoundly thereby.
If you see and get the points of this article, including where you see these matters similarly or differently, feel free to write to me at tonys@vsacoach.com and we can develop this framework further. Thank you for participating in this article.
Acknowledgments, Recommendations & References:
A number of the ideas and some of the material that reflect on mindset, leadership, and culture in this blog are derived from the work of Werner Erhard, Michael Jensen, Jeri Echeverria and Steve Zaffron. See Erhard, Jensen, Echeverria and Zaffron, Course Materials for: ‘Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological/Phenomenological Model’ (Revised copy of July 15, 2019). http://ssrn.com/abstract=1263835
Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences/Simply Psychology.
Learning as Transformation, Mezirow et. al.
