Held, Not Owned
On identity, service, and the roles we occupy rather than become
Before they retired, my parents were teachers. For them, it was a vocation - they cared deeply about both the subjects they taught and about the impact they could make on the lives of young people. I think, though, it also tapped into a deeper philosophy on how they saw the world - the idea of being of service. They were both, in essence, public servants, and took this responsibility seriously. Once they had retired, they took on a range of volunteering roles, including a long stint as a magistrate, working as an advisor with their local Citizens Advice Bureau and being part of a service that drives older people who don’t have access to a car to medical appointments.
This perspective definitely rubbed off on me. I’ve always volunteered alongside work or studying - when I turned eighteen I joined the Samaritans, and when I moved to London I volunteered for a brilliant charity called The Food Chain, an HIV specialist nutrition charity who, at that time, ran a Sunday meals service, cooked and delivered by volunteers in a variety of kitchens around London. Over the last decade or so, volunteering has mostly been in the shape of Trustee positions, and I’m already starting to think about the kinds of volunteering we might be able to do as a family once my kids are older.
Not everyone is in a position to give away their time for free, but the point that I’m getting at is that being of service is a mindset that can be carried into all aspects of life, including (perhaps especially) leadership. Whilst a service mindset perhaps comes more naturally to the work of the public or third sectors, there are plenty of for profit businesses who develop a philosophy, shaped by their leaders, that their ultimate goal is to serve their customers in the best way possible, or bring a groundbreaking product into the world that will help to improve people’s lives. We might also be able to imagine (or may even have met) leaders who work in the charitable or public sectors whose mindset tends more towards individual advancement or recognition than orienting towards those that their work is meant to be benefitting.
In his book Legacy, James Kerr writes about the leadership lessons we can learn from the New Zealand rugby team the All Blacks. One of the chapters is entitled whakapapa, a Māori word that refers to our place in the living order of things. This paragraph from the middle of the chapter really stuck with me:
‘There’s a big saying in the team’ Graham Henry [former chief coach of the All Blacks] says. ‘“You don’t own the jersey, you’re just the body in the jersey at the time.” It’s your job to continue the legacy and add to it when you get your opportunity. The current All Blacks team is playing for the guys that have played in the jersey before. That’s hugely important to the current guys.’ They also play for the All Blacks yet to be born.
High level sport could easily be played with a focus on individual glory. But the culture and spirit of the All Blacks shows something very different - the whole team are in service to a tradition that is much bigger than them. They wear the jersey for a brief moment in time, during which they honour the legacy of the team and try to build on its success ready to hand over to the next generation when the time comes.
This mindset is also significant for the way that it shapes our conception of identity - to use the example above, not ‘I am an All Black’ but ‘I get to be an All Black right now’. I think the same can be applied to any leadership position - not ‘I am a CEO’ but ‘I get to be the CEO of this organisation for this period in its history’. You follow on from what’s gone before, and seek to build on it for whoever comes after you. Because, let’s face it, one way or another, one day you won’t be the CEO of the organisation you currently run, and to identity yourself too fully with your position paves the way not only for a massive identity crisis when your time is up, but also the potential for some fairly warped decision making whilst you’re there.
If you are leading an organisation through a difficult financial period (as many of us are, thanks to today’s particular depressing economic climate), your time as leader might be characterised as contraction rather than growth, of hunkering down and preserving the organisation’s core activities and values rather than something big, costly and high profile. This is less glamorous but completely essential work, and can only be accomplished by a leader that has a strong sense of what is best for the organisation, rather than focusing on what they wish to achieve during their tenure. Almost every leader I know will join an organisation with a big and ambitious vision - as they absolutely should. But that vision must, first and foremost, serve the organisation not merely themselves, and they must have the clarity of understanding and grace to know when it must be altered and reshaped to fit the circumstances in which they find themselves and to safeguard the organisation’s future.
There is a reason why David Attenborough and Martin Lewis topped this poll of which celebrities might make the best prime minister - it is because they are both viewed as people who are in service to much bigger ideas than simply themselves. I heard David Attenborough on the Outrage + Optimism podcast recently and whenever there was a reference to how impressive his output was, he simply insisted that it was nature that was impressive, not him. Martin Lewis seems to be a man on a mission to single-handedly help us all gain some kind of understanding of the madly complicated financial world that we find ourselves in - and his deep dive on how MoneySavingExpert is financed paints a picture of someone who applies this vision to the workings of his own business too.
The older I get, the more obvious it seems to me that to live your life to serve only yourself is kind of pointless. No true satisfaction lies there, and, ultimately, the people around you will know that this is the case and respect you less for it. To find something bigger than yourself that you can serve - be that creating art that delights audiences, inventing a product that makes people’s lives easier, or committing yourself to developing and supporting the careers of the team that you manage - will, I think, lead you towards a much happier existence, as well as improving the lives of people other than yourself. Perhaps the most sensible answer for any leader to give when asked what their vision for the organisation is is simply this: to leave things a little better than I found them.