I am a terrible executive leader
I am a terrible executive leader. I have tremendous anxiety. I tend to have trouble sleeping and wake up late. I’m the son of middle-class immigrants and I’ve gone a couple decades without an undergrad. Extroversion is counterintuitive and exhausting. I love working in unconventional locations like my backyard or a park. I have many physical ailments that I just work through. I’m super frugal. I can’t stand business attire. I’m a totally active father including mid-day pickups and sick days. PTO means literally uninstalling Slack and Gmail. I care a lot about the details and how they interact with the whole “system”. Like a lot. And I am radically transparent, up and down the chain of command.
I often look around at other executives and wonder, “Are they superhuman? Why am I not more like them?”
I am a terrible executive leader - if stereotypes have anything to say about it. And yet, it all works quite well for me and for the organizations I represent. The positive outcomes far outweigh the numerous negative stereotypes.
It took the first half of my career to let all of this fertile soil for imposter syndrome fade to the background and own who I was. Once I did that, it gave me the unique voice and perspective I needed to be an executive that could have a real impact.
It turns out, being an executive isn’t about being superhuman or about fitting in. It’s about achieving outcomes. And as much as society - the business world included - likes to stereotype certain people or ways of working so that they can best position themselves for the achievement of positive outcomes, the reality is far more complicated.
Imposter syndrome, diversity, and stereotyping has exploded into a huge subject of conversation at individual contributor and management levels over the last decade. Much of it is still quite taboo at the executive level, which is still too often viewed with an auroa of purposeful exclusivity around it. It’s time we change that. Being an executive is not about proving superhuman abilities and it is not about conforming to societal norms. It’s about leading others to achieve outcomes most others cannot. Period. That actually takes a healthy amount of diversity and uniqueness in behavior and perspective. If we’re going to stereotype at all, let’s stereotype accordingly!