I was at a leadership event this week and the CEO told his top 100, “The most precious resource on the planet is leadership.” And then of course, everyone wanted to know how to get more of it. You can’t mine for it, take it in a pill, or use compute to grow it. You can’t find a cache of it and stockpile it for later. But most of us have had the experience in our lives of someone who worked and worked at the craft of leadership and dazzled us. Leadership does grow, but it doesn’t seem to grow automatically. So what do we do to increase the chances that leadership grows in us or around us?
I’m going to make a claim here that comes from researching leadership over 30 years, from speaking with thousands of leaders and those they lead: there is one movement anyone can make that creates the conditions for leadership to grow. That is the shift that my mentor Bob Kegan calls from “subject” to “object” and that we can think of as the shift from looking through something to looking at something.
Easy example: When I look through my glasses, I see a clearer world because my vision is corrected. But I forget that I’m looking through them and from time to time will even start to look for them before I put a hand to my face to notice they are perched on my nose. The truth is, we tend not to notice at all what we’re looking through.
What we’re looking through fundamentally changes what we are looking at. If I don’t have my glasses on, I can look at a sign in the distance and think that it’s illegible. I forget that my eyes create the sign in my brain and therefore it’s what I’m looking through as much as what I’m looking at that makes a difference.
Imagine I ask you a question about how you think AI is going to shape the world our kids grow into. You’re looking at the question of AI, but your answer will be shaped fundamentally by what you’re looking through.
This looking through can be an assumption (we can look through our assumption that “things work out in the end”), it can be an emotion (we can look through our anxiety or our hope), it can be a professional stance (we can look through the worldview we’ve developed as a lawyer or a scientist).
We tend to argue about the things we’re looking at and we tend to have our focus there—on the content of our conversations, on the decision which is the outcome of our thinking. But the thing doing the invisible work is what we’re looking through, and it’s not even that we don’t talk about that, it’s that we generally don’t notice it’s there at all.
When something really upsets us, we tend to wonder what we can do about that something. When a person makes a claim we disagree with or find abhorrent, we try to change that person’s mind about the claim. But until we get curious about the thing we (and they) are looking through, we can’t do the real work.
Imagine two leaders recovering from a stark organizational disappointment. Each of them has significant feelings about this disappointment: grief, perhaps, or even shame. If they look around them through those feelings, everything they say will be tainted by grief and shame. Even their self-talk, the possibilities that are available for their minds to think about, will be created through the lens of grief and shame.
Now imagine they can look at their grief and shame: actually examine it, consider what it’s attached to, illuminate the ways it shapes their thinking and actions. Suddenly they have more choices about how to respond, not because they denied or didn’t feel the grief or shame, but because they could shift from looking through it to looking at it.
And this isn’t just about emotions, this little switch between looking through something and looking at something can happen in every interaction.
You have a frustrating conversation with a colleague, and you find that you can’t let it go. You thought you two were aligned about what proposal you’re going to take to your boss, but now she seems to disagree with your proposal, and she’s offering another one that seems to obviously center what her group needs at the expense of what your group needs. It makes you mad in the moment, you’re still mad at dinner, and you wake in the middle of the night framing your argument to her. Our most common approach is to look at that proposal, or perhaps at that colleague.
When you shift instead and try examining what you’re looking through, an entirely new category of insight and action arises.
Why are you so upset? What is the hook here?
You look at yourself and the assumptions/ emotions/ history that shaped your reaction in the first place. You watch the sentences your inner voice is forming. You say, “It’s not fair,” over and over to yourself. When you really explore what you’re looking through, you notice that it’s not really just anger, it’s betrayal.
Now if you’re still looking through the emotion and the assumptions, you’ve just accomplished “unproductive insight.” I had a friend who called unproductive insight “the booby prize of life.” It might help you sound better, but unless you can do something with it, there’s no change for you.
But if you can keep looking at it without looking through it, you can begin to understand the way you’re making sense of your colleague’s actions. You can take her perspective. You can recognize that the proposal that you were pushing had some of the same self-centered features as the one she’s pushing, but you didn’t notice, since the self it centered was yours. You can, in fact, see a much bigger and clearer picture than you could before.
And with that bigger picture comes more options. You can have a more productive conversation with her, naming not just the issues you have with the proposal, but inviting her into a conversation where you both look at what you were looking through before. And as you both change the lens together, a new solution emerges. You might be able to each talk about what you were unknowingly protecting or deal with a secondary problem each of you thought you were carrying alone. You can make compromises together. New possibilities unfold through the conversation.
If this sounds a little like magic, it’s because it is a little like magic. It transforms stuckness into opportunity, and it transforms difficulty into development. As far as we can tell, humans are the only creatures on the planet that can intentionally evolve their capacity to see and understand the world. This is the way we learn, over time, to have the bigger and bigger view that leadership requires right now. Examining what we are looking through allows us to see what was once hidden from our view, in order to rise to the complexity of the world around us. We can’t manufacture more leadership, we can’t get AI agents to produce it while we sleep. But we can cultivate it through this practice of paying attention to what we are looking through and grow enough leadership to craft a better world.