Lifting Leadership: Influence
The disciplines of fitness and leadership share several important principles related to ownership and complexity. Interestingly, the popular conversation regarding these principles has been diverging. Namely, while influential thinkers on the topic of leadership perpetuate the message that "There are no bad teams, only bad leaders," health conditions such as obesity are increasingly being recognized as diseases for which no individual bears responsibility. Taken as a pair, these views present quite the contradiction--they cannot both be true, yet they both reveal something true.
Considered as systems, our bodies and the teams we lead share many similarities:
1- Both have constituent parts (e.g. the body's organs and the team's members).
2- These parts cooperate in various ways to create subsystems (e.g. the nervous system or the design cohort).
3- These subsystems interact such that their containing system exhibits capacities uncharacteristic of its parts (e.g. the body is conscious even though its parts are not, and the team can produce outcomes that none of its members would individually be able to).
There are, however, consequential differences. Whereas the constituent parts of a body are able perform a number of predetermined tasks, the members of a team can choose the purpose(s) they will pursue. This amounts to teams operating at a higher order of complexity than do our physical bodies. And yet, we are led to believe that leaders should take ownership over the health of an entire team, while no individual need do the same for their own health. The most workable position, and the one closest to the truth, lies somewhere in the middle.
A leader cannot control their team, and an individual is responsible to (not for) their body. In either case, it is a question of influence. A team that lacks key know-how or finds itself on the wrong end of unforeseeable events will struggle to succeed regardless of leadership quality. An individual whose genes predispose them to undesirable health conditions, or whose context does not readily support health (e.g. they live in poverty or a food desert) is unlikely to have the same potential for health as someone who faces fewer challenges. What, then, is the value of influence?
By maximizing the degree and application of influence, leaders and individuals can produce synergistic outcomes--what might be called overperformance. Properly cultivated and wielded influence is what accounts for the whole constituting something more than the sum of its parts. It is what aligns a team or a body with the pursuit of a goal, be it sales and innovation or fat loss and increased strength. Influence is a function of behaviors. Leaders who behave such that team members feel a sense of belonging and purpose are cultivating influence and contributing to overperformance. Individuals who engage in healthy behaviors are providing their body with an organizing purpose that will result in greater robustness and responsiveness to future behavioral demands.
We are neither omnipotent nor helpless. We are a source of influence with the capacity to understand our position as empowering in spite of any evidence to the contrary, provided only that we choose to do so.
