While so much is being written today about how to become a truly remarkable leader, from my perspective, most of it falls very short. Transformative leaders don’t just achieve phenomenal business success. Transformative leaders do something greater. They help organizations, people and cultures experience deep, lasting meaning and purpose from the work and outcomes they produce. These leaders foster a culture that nurtures in people the ability to feel they are contributing at the highest level towards something that is making a true difference in the world.
To learn more about what is required to become a transcendent leader, I was thrilled to catch up this week with Fred Kofman. Kofman is advisor, leadership development at Google and former vice president of executive development and leadership philosopher at LinkedIn. During his time at LinkedIn, he worked with the top CEOs and executives around the world. Born in Argentina, Kofman came to the United States as a graduate student, where he earned his Ph.D. in advanced economic theory at U.C. Berkeley. He taught management accounting and finance at MIT for six years before forming his own consulting company, Axialent, and teaching leadership workshops for corporations such as General Motors, Chrysler, Shell, Microsoft and Citibank. At its height, his company had 150 people and created and taught programs to more than 15,000 executives. Sheryl Sandberg writes about him in her book Lean In, claiming Kofman “will transform the way you live and work.”
Kofman’s new book – The Meaning Revolution: The Power of Transcendent Leadership – is out today, and explores how to become a transcendent leader so that any company of any size in any industry can dramatically improve its long-term growth. Bringing together economics and business theory, communications and conflict resolution, family counseling and mindfulness mediation, Kofman argues in The Meaning Revolution that our most deep-seated, unspoken and universal anxiety stems from our fear that our life is being wasted – that the end of life will overtake us when our song is still unsung. Material incentives – salary and benefits – account for perhaps 15% of employees’ motivation at work. The other 85% is driven by a need to belong, a feeling that what we do day in and day out makes a difference.
According to Kofman, transcendent leaders are rare, but they do exist, and he profiles a number of them in this book. They inspire followers not by relying on carrots and sticks (offering a nice salary, bonus, and tangible perks, or threatening them with demotion or the loss of their job) but by appealing to the belief that they are spending their waking time making a difference in the world.
Here’s what Kofman shares:
Kathy Caprino: From your view, what’s going terribly wrong today in leadership of our companies and our country today? What’s missing and how can we fix that in a practical way?
Fred Kofman: People equate leadership with formal authority. They confuse leading with bossing. Bossing is to use formal authority, rewards and punishments, to get people to do your bidding. Leading is eliciting their internal commitment to pursue the mission.
Leadership has nothing to do with formal authority; it has everything to do with moral authority. You can’t threaten or buy hearts and minds; you can only earn and deserve them. People will only give their best to worthy missions and trustworthy leaders. This applies not only to professional but also to personal life. As a father-boss, for example, I want my children to do their homework before they play. My strategy is to threaten to take away their phones if I see them using them before their work is done. I add a carrot to the stick, promising that when they finish their homework they’ll get ice cream.
By contrast, as a father-leader, I don’t just want my children to do their homework. I want my children to want to do it. I want them to do it because they want to do it, not because I forced them to do it.
Today, there are too many people with formal authority (bosses) that are satisfied to use material incentives to drive people to do things (this is called, extrinsic motivation), and there are too few people with moral authority (leaders) that want to inspire people to pursue noble goals.
Caprino: What are the top three challenges to transcendent and meaningful leadership that you see most when coaching CEOs and other leaders? What steps to you take them through, to overcome these deep challenges?
Kofman: Not just the top three, but all of the barriers to transcendent leadership arise from ego. Think of ego as the part of your psyche that is constantly preoccupied with self-worth and status. Ego is like a character in a play about your life. It asks, “Do I look competent, smart, attractive, powerful, right, good, in control? Am I respected, admired, liked, appreciated, envied, revered?”
When the answer is yes, it feels pride and peace; when the answer is no, it feels shame and anxiety. Ego is always hungry for acknowledgment, recognition, and success. It yearns to be the best, the smart one, the hero. It wants others to need you, to look up to you, to follow you.
Successful executives that derail because of ego, generally show one or more of these symptoms:
– Have to win or appear “right” at all costs. Need to always look good and are overly concerned with public image. They’re enraged by and reject criticism, even if realistic. They take credit for others’ successes and put blame on them for their own failures.
– Set overly ambitious, unattainable goals; are unrealistic about what it takes to get the job done. Work compulsively at the expense of all else in life; run on empty, burn out. They push people too hard, burning them out.
– Seek power for their own interests rather than the organization’s. Want to tell everybody what to do. They micromanage, obsessively control, and take over. They build up a “power base” with those who never challenge them and they consider anyone who disagrees an enemy.
The only way to overcome these challenges is to take a hard look at oneself, and redefine one’s beliefs, values, and even one’s identity. There are no quick fixes. It’s a long process that requires that the leader “dies” (as an ego) while still alive (as a soulful being). I wrote the book to encourage and guide leaders through this process.
Caprino: In your book you talk about how can we “die before we die,” and discover our own legacy we want to leave behind, while we still can shape it. How do we do that, exactly?
Kofman: The first reference to “die” here means to “confront the fact of your mortality” by reflecting on it, bringing it fully into your awareness, and considering its implications.
The second reference means to die literally. Dying before you die means coming to terms with the limited nature of your existence in order to fully grasp life’s richness and possibility. If you leave thinking about your death until you are about to die, you will miss death’s counsel—which is a very wise one.
To do this you can think about it, journal, meditate, talk, paint, watch a movie, or do anything that allows you to connect with such an awesome (and perhaps ominous) presence, and engage it “coolly.” That is to say, with calm intelligence rather than fear or anxiety.
Imagine that you have only three minutes to live. Say, for example, you’re on a plane which is about to run out of fuel in the middle of nowhere. You have a chance to make one final phone call. Whom would you call? What would you tell that person? And, most importantly, what are you waiting for? When you have just three minutes to live, (and you can be sure that some day you will be only three minutes away from death), you may not be able to make that call.
When I pose these questions to participants in my workshops, many call their loved ones during the break. Once we understand that the clock is ticking and there’s no time to waste, we want to express our feelings to those that matter to us. But beyond this, we want to set our sights, pursue something worthwhile, make every day count. The prospect of death directs us to focus on what truly matters.
Caprino: For those of us who want to lead a truly heroic life, what do we have to overcome in ourselves first?
Kofman: The first thing to overcome is the belief that heroism is beyond our ordinary lives.
We have been conditioned, by comic-book superheroes, to believe that we require superpowers to live heroically. This is false. Heroism is about values and virtues, not about power. Responsibility, respect, humility, truth, justice, freedom, and love, are the essence of moral heroism.
Every day, we confront situations that give us the chance to demonstrate these virtues. We just have to realize that it is precisely in those situations where we need to behave heroically, and not wait for the life-or-death struggle against a super villain — which will likely never come.
Take, for example, an engineer that discovers a quality defect in a production batch. She could keep quiet and let the product go to market–it will never be traced back to her. Or, a heroic response would be to stop the process and alert those in charge that things are not good. Nobody likes giving bad news, but heroes don’t do the nice thing, they do the right thing.
Caprino: Finally, how can people who aren’t top leaders and influencers still make the meaningful impact they dream to?
Kofman: I can’t do better than quote Mother Theresa: “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
For more information, visit The Meaning Revolution.
Originally published at Forbes