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Lead from Full Power: An Unprecedented Empowerment Strategy

–Savanting Study 7:  Sam – Lead from Full Power by Lauren Holmes July 2021

Based on Savanting Studies 1 to 6 in Savanting: Outperforming your Potential (2019): Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Jim Carrey

I    THE CHALLENGE

Dear Lauren,

I’ve just been told that my company’s Executive Succession Planning Committee has assessed that I can’t rise within company ranks until I demonstrate leadership.  Since they don’t see my potential on that front, I appear to have been sidelined at age 34. 

Could you please suggest new strategies for me to attain the leadership roles I crave, Lauren?  This is not about a desire for status.  Rather, it’s a yearning for contribution, for purpose, for meaning, and for making a difference in the world.  It’s about doing work every day that I’m passionate about.

Here’s more about me to inform your insights.  My strength is vision – for this company, its industry, and its opportunities within the global economy.  I’m a big-picture thinker.  I can’t help but dream big dreams.  I thrill to high-speed, high-impact achievement while scaling new frontiers.  I always see myself leading the charge into new horizons. 

I started reading leadership books in my teens.  I’ve taken the best leadership development programs.  I’ve accumulated the latest leader disciplines, models, approaches, and tools for doing the work I was born to do.  I graduated summa cum laude with an MBA in Global Management from a top university for this same reason. 

Since the Committee’s decision, I’ve been trying to figure out my weaknesses.  Why is my leadership not recognized?  Why do I fail to get people to follow?  Is it me or am I in the wrong corporate culture? 

Could my failure to be recognized as a leader be due to my abusive childhood?  I had to learn how to control my demeanor in the face of bullying, judging, and conflict, for example.  I had to develop a quiet, respectful manner to survive.  Perhaps my unshakeable calmness or emotional control in the face of hostility, conflict, disaster, or uncertain futures is viewed as a weakness as a leader in my current company.  Could my issue, therefore, be simply due to cultural differences in how leadership is expressed?

Any suggestions for turning up the volume on my leader strength, Lauren? 

Sam,

Unrecognized Leader

II    THE GOAL REDEFINED

LAUREN: 

1.     “Leader” vs “Manager” redefined

Your visionary and pioneering strengths, emotional intelligence, and craving for impact, Sam, are a strong foundation for you to become not just a good leader but a great one.  My assessment is based on my long-standing theory that managers run what exists; leaders bring the new into existence – whether new creations or the new knowledge that comes from penetrating unknown territories.  In my view, the person who can “frontier” will always lead.[1]

In fact, without “frontiering” into unknown territory or without achieving some sought-after change to reality, I would argue that leadership has not occurred.  For me, the degree of change in the world is a measure of the strength of the leadership that has been exerted.

Leadership is a creative and creational act.  Your potential as a leader, Sam, may have been overlooked by those who don’t differentiate between leaders and managers.  With your passion for “high-speed achievement while penetrating new frontiers,” you would despise managerial roles to control what exists.  You’ll want to ensure that you only accept “leader” roles or tasks to show yourself to advantage.

2.     Leader power is measured by the degree of change in reality

I, therefore, want to recast your goal of stronger, more visible leadership, Sam, to one of more expansive and impactful advance of reality.  Meaningful achievement at your full potential will nourish and strengthen you at your core.  I want to release you from seeking external validation from subordinates or the succession committee.  This diminishes you.  Pursuing this validation will therefore interfere with you leading from full strength, Sam.

SAM (enthusiastically): 

My energy has just skyrocketed, Lauren.  This must be the right path for me.  I feel free and fearless when I think of completing some of the projects I’ve been thinking about that would benefit my company.  I feel powerless when I think of trying to please the Committee, my boss, or my reports.

LAUREN:

Excellent, Sam.  Use this “feeling” difference for decision-making going forward as to what is nourishing and what is depleting.

3.     “Biologically-maximized” or “self-actualized” leadership

Your biological maximum would be the ideal foundation from which to operate at full power as a leader, Sam.  What would that look like?  You’d be leading from your strengths, talents, passions, and emotional highs at your full potential.  You’d be doing impactful, reality-improving work that (a) engages your strongest, most rewarding talents, (b) is most meaningful to you, (c) is most valued by others, and (d) incites your most gratifying emotions.

Notice that this definition of biological maximum is also the formula for self-actualization.  They are one and the same.  Self-actualization is “becoming everything that one is capable of becoming” to quote American psychologist Dr. Abraham Maslow who coined the term.  Self-actualized leadership is therefore the number one means for you to lead and achieve at full volume, Sam.

Evolution selected for mechanisms which would entice us to maximize.  These would ensure the best chance for the survival of the individual and the species.  For example, a biochemistry for emotional highs is embedded into the state of self-actualization.  The fulfillment, exhilaration, and gratification we experience ensure we’ll strive to repeat this peak state.

My strategy, Sam, is for you to exploit built-in maximizers such as biochemical rewards, processes, drives, emotional highs, and other bio-levers to trigger your greatest leadership strength.  This is a much simpler process than you might imagine.

Thanks to smart evolution, human beings come equipped with a multifaceted mechanism which will quickly click us into our maximum state.  It is a mechanism which instantly activates all those maximizers so that peak performance emerges.  Let me introduce this mechanism and describe how it will strengthen your leadership over time.

III    THE STRATEGY:

Empower self-actualized leadership “in the zone”

Picture a sports superstar operating in the zone – his or her peak performance state.  Now imagine your impact if you were leading from the zone, Sam.  Imagine the strength of your leadership if you were applying your strongest, most rewarding talents to the most meaningful work for an audience most valuing of that work.

To put you into the zone, Sam, you’ll need to be doing work which will trigger a peak-performance, peak-growth, and peak-rewards “flow state.”  More specifically, you’ll need to operate from what I call in my articles and books “top-talent flow”[2] or “savantflow.”[3]

“Top-talent flow” is a specialized subset of Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow” that I’ve identified and been studying for decades through real-life experimentation with my clients as an executive career manager.  Flow is the altered state of consciousness I learned about from renowned psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi.  His 1991 best-seller, Flow: The Optimal Experience[4] came to me in a magical way just in time to validate and accelerate my experimentation and creational process.

I developed my top-talent-flow strategy by applying my degree in evolutionary anthropology to my analyses of hundreds of accomplished executives interviewed while I was CEO of an executive search firm specializing in the recruitment of Board and C-Suite global change leaders.

The “built-in maximizing biochemistry, processes, drives, emotional highs and other bio-levers” I mentioned exploiting earlier will all emerge automatically when you shift into peak performance in top-talent flow – a.k.a. the zone.  The biochemical highs of both self-actualization and flow are part of the same complex system we’ve evolved to entice us to operate at our maximum.  The thrill of growth, learning, improving, and pioneering new territory are also part of this same enticing and addicting system invoked in the zone.

Therefore, Sam, our action plan is simple.  We need to find you tasks which will trigger top-talent flow daily.  Preferably, these tasks would be cumulatively beneficial to the advance of your career.

This strategy dovetails nicely into the fact that serial daily flow states will automatically launch predictable growth processes.  These will continuously raise the bar on your baseline level of performance and hence your leadership strength for the rest of your career.

Lauren Holmes
Lauren Holmeshttps://laurenholmes.com/
Lauren Holmes is a cutting-edge career maximization strategist specializing in accelerated growth to sustainable self-actualization. Her work is driven by an obsession for pushing the envelope on human potential and accessing the consciousness and capabilities of the future human now. As CEO of an executive search firm specializing in corporate change leaders, Lauren interviewed the best in the C-suites and boardrooms of some of the most successful global companies. Her breakthrough maximization theories resulted from viewing these interviews through the lens of her degree in evolutionary and biological anthropology. Lauren then tested these theories through action-learning experimentation with clients during her two decades as CEO of Frontiering, her career acceleration firm. The Savanting Study series which Lauren is now writing is an extension of studies in her 2019 book, Savanting: Outperforming your Potential. The first six studies arose from her comparative analysis of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Jim Carrey. Savanting reveals the commonalities behind their success which prove Lauren’s unique paradigm for true human potential. Each Savanting Study provides actionable instructions for how to resolve common career and work challenges in a way which simultaneously springboards one to self-actualization and the emotional, material, and meaningful rewards of career maximization.

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4 CONVERSATIONS

  1. I love your writing, Lauren. The post overwhelmed me. I want to share two of the thoughts that I appreciate from your grand post.

    Leader power is measured by the degree of change in reality. This is a super definition.

    I want to release you from seeking external validation from subordinates or the succession committee. This diminishes you. Pursuing this validation will therefore interfere with you leading from full strength, Sam.
    This is a treasure. It coincides with a post I am writing on some rare negatives (by rare I meant not much discussed) and including negative leadership.
    What you wrote here is like negative pressures that keep hospital rooms clean so we need to be. This is a negative pressure that has a positive effect. However, if a leader has strength from inside she/he would not be subject to negative influence. She/he has the ability to avoid the negative light of peer pressure as openess with self shall not allow for negative peer influence or management influence to filter in his heart and mind.

    • Wonderful to have your feedback on what was meaningful to you, Ali.
      Good luck with your upcoming post. I agree with the necessity for leaders to insulate themselves from external “power zappers.” It’s so important that our leaders remain internally referenced and creating reality rather than externally referenced and depleted by it – or worse, created by it.
      I was moved recently by the re-elected Prime Minister in Canada during the election just completed. PM Justin Trudeau was under continuous hostile attack from all sides during the election and indeed during his multiple terms.
      He was unaffected throughout until there was scathing attack on his wife. When media attacked him for his hostile response to the heckler, he revealed that he never internalized any of the attacks on himself because he signed up for this and had learned to be immune. His anger was because his wife did not sign up. An uncontrollable switch had been flicked.
      I’ve found that the only time Trudeau snaps from external attacks is to protect victims – his family, Canadians, or victims around the world.
      This is an externally referenced flaw I can respect. As you say, Ali, “a negative pressure that has a positive effect.”

    • I consider today a blessed one to have “discovered” you, Lauren.

      What a beautiful response and an example fro real life. You are a unique thinker and I truly admire your mental and huan attractor.

      I have already submitted my post to BIZCATALYST 360° and titled it
      In negativity there is positivity and vice versa with examples.

      Needless to assure you that I quoted you in it.

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