Five qualities of a great leader, seven leadership traits, ten characteristics of a good leader. How many titles like these have you read while browsing your favourite social network?
I can't help but wonder that if it were so easy, we should have plenty of great leaders. What if every great leader is great in their own unique way?
All these common traits are observed and extracted in hindsight once their greatness has already manifested.
In our book Subtraction, we wrote, "It would be easy to imagine that to re-ignite the Being innovator, all we have to do is to study the life of the remarkable ones, the ones who left a mark on the history of humanity. We need only to learn the practices, techniques, gambits, skills and strategies that made the remarkable ones successful and use them, modelling ourselves after them. However, we can all agree that whatever we learn from successful innovators, and no matter how well we repeat it, it will not guarantee that we will achieve the same results."
When we analyze and benchmark great leaders, we tend to focus on what they do differently. Instead, we should ask how do they think differently? And even more importantly, who are they? What is their worldview?
Not to imitate them but to find inspiration to become our unique version of a great leader. Knowing what great leaders do is extremely valuable, but it's the starting point of our journey to become one.
While I write this post, the Japanese word Shuhari pops up in my mind. It's an extraordinary word that summarizes and distils the three stages of learning to mastery in martial arts. In short, the three steps of becoming a master are; to repeat, to detach and to transcend.
Studying and repeating existing models is the starting point. But we must continuously check what is working and what not, what comes natural and where the resistance is. After a while, we can learn what is aligned with our identity and what is not. In the end, we will learn to combine pieces from all the different sources and transcend them to become leaders in our own unique way.