What Does It Take To Be a Leader in an Age…Like This?

Three Qualities of 21st Century Leadership — For Everyone

Photo by Ales Maze on Unsplash

What do you see when you look around the world? Here’s what I see: a startling lack of leadership. There’s a leadership vacuum in this age — especially of the kind we need, at this crucial juncture in history, beset by crisis. So what does it take to be a leader in the 21st century?

I’m going to briefly discuss five qualities I think are important. And they’re in stark contrast to the idea of leadership as it’s come to be known — which elicits eye-rolls. That’s because “leadership” in this sense, the old sense, today’s sense — it means something like being cunning, shrewd. Being able to take advantage of people and situations. Extracting the most, and giving the least. Horse-trading and negotiating for a better angle — and not leaving anything on the table.

Today, this age needs what are known as transformational leaders — and even a step beyond that. Because, of course, we now face the greatest set of transformations in human history. Everything must change now — economies, polities, social contracts, infrastructure, basic systems. We can’t go on the old way — or did you miss the message of our First Extinction Summer?

So what are my five qualities? We’re going to discuss three in this little essay, and two in the next one — because they’re a little more complicated.

The first is empathy. 

I don’t mean that in a cliched way, a pop psychology way. I mean deep, abiding, resonant, heart-stopping empathy.Think about the greatest existential threat we face — climate change. What motivates someone to…do something about it? Money? Power? A grand title? Of course not. Empathy. Based on a kind of profound grief — for all that we’re losing. From all the noble and beautiful creatures on earth, to forests, to oceans teeming with life. Empathy on that scale — for all life itself. Spiritual level empathy — not just “step into the shoes of the customer.”

This is profoundly different than yesterday’s idea of leadership. That was about “step into the shoes of the customer” kind of thinking — and it still is. That’s what they’ll teach you in leadership courses and in management courses. What they won’t teach you is deep empathy, for life, futurity, for being and existence itself. To get there? You’ll need to…do a lot of things. Meditate, maybe. Reflect. Contemplate. Read — great minds like Heidegger and Sartre and Camus and beyond. 

This isn’t about stepping into the shoes of the customer, the user, the consumer — it’s so far beyond that it’s in another galaxy. And if you don’t have this — why would you change much of anything? It’s much easier to sleepwalk into apocalypse. This level of empathy about looking with the eyes of history, futurity, life, death, dust, time…so that your purpose is unshakeable and unbreakable.

That brings me to my next quality — deep purpose. 

It’s another overused term, “purpose.” It’s so watered down that again, we think of it in terms of “customers” or “consumers” or “users.” But now, to be a leader — it takes having a purpose on another scale, and of another scope, entirely.

Let me ask you a question. How many organizations are going to be around in a century? Any of them? Think about the world even a few decades from now. If things keep going the way they are — global warming becoming global boiling, fanaticism on the rise, economies stagnating, societies fracturing — how much worse do things get, and how fast? Most organizations today could care less about this question: are we going to be around a hundred years from now. They’re interested in — forced to be, by financial systems — the next nanosecond’s profits. That’s not a deep purpose. It’s not much of a purpose at all.

So. If you’re going to be around in a hundred years, as an organization — how? What are you going to do stop the world from…falling apart…at light speed…like it is right now? It’s not enough to say something like, well, I’m going to monopolize a society’s water supplies! Good luck with that — maybe for a decade or two, and then what?

You can think about in a personal way, too. These days, everyone’s switching up careers, because, well, our economies are a mess. And the question arises: what should I do next? The answer — the better one — comes from a sense of deep purpose. All these existential threats facing us. What are you doing to…help…change…alter…fix…transform them? How do you leave the world a better place than you found it, goes one way of thinking about this, and it’s not a bad one — but in this kind of age, that’s a harder and harder thing to do, because, well, it takes…deep purpose.

If heartbreak-level empathy ignites deep purpose — where do you go with it?