The Intelligent Leader

CHAPTER 9 It’s Not About You The Inseparable Relationship Between Leadership and Culture

When you pick up a book like this one, your motives for doing so are likely to be at least somewhat selfish. I don’t mean “selfish” in a negative way. I mean that you are probably interested in improving yourself so you can be a better leader and achieve something personally. To me, this is a noble motive. Personal improvement, in nearly any context, is a good thing. As you better yourself, your life improves. But it’s more than that, too: Your improvement as an individual is inseparable from the overall betterment of every group or project of which you’re a part, whether it’s a family, a team, a company, or—if you want to go really big—the human race. As we discussed in our exploration of the duty mindset, we all belong within a vast configuration of greater wholes. So when we develop, everything our lives touch does as well.

For me this is the Trojan horse of Intelligent Leadership. You might initially be compelled by the promise of improving your leadership capacity so you can get a promotion or be more personally successful. But at the end of the day, the truly great leaders understand that this development is not really about them. They learn—and eventually internalize—that the most important effect their leadership development can have is on the cultures that they are a part of. Leaders are stewards of culture, whether they like it or not.

So what is culture? That’s a difficult question ...