When asked how she gets ideas for her books, the novelist Lionel Shriver once said, “I pick something to be outraged about and then I write a book.”
Sometimes we don’t pick the things we’re outraged about. Sometimes when encountering the world, our businesses, or our family systems as they are we become if not outraged, then at least disturbed by the extent to which things do not work.
The strength and character of your emotional reaction to this run-in with reality is a signal. It’s your soul begging you to confront something that must be faced, demanding a fix.
When Shriver, as a novelist, addresses her outrage, she’s listening for a story. She’s taking sides on some social, spiritual, or cultural conundrum and building a world around it so that you and I, the reader, will enjoy the self-imposed process of being disturbed and forced to think.
I have noticed that often people do not want to take sides. They avoid it at great cost to their blood pressure. I understand the fear involved in not wanting to take too firm a stand on some issue or another. We’re taught to pick our battles. However, I think we misinterpret that as “keep the peace as often as possible.”
But what “pick your battles” means is: Fight some battles, just fewer.
Your outrage or perturbation signals that there is a battle to be fought. It’s your soul telling you which side to take.
Many years ago I got to hear a lecture from a legendary Fortune 500 CEO. One point he made has stuck with me for the better part of twenty years. He taught that the primary responsibility of leaders is to define reality.
At IGW, we believe that reality is the gap between our seemingly impossible potential and the suboptimal current state. Assessing that gap is a leadership skill that can be learned and requires courage. Looking into the future without limits takes the courage to silence the voice in our heads that says, “Oh come on…that’s impossible!” Assessing the brutal, cold, hard facts of where the organization stands currently in contrast to that vision also requires courage.
At IGW, we use The Focus Equation for that assessment and its implications:
The aspirational vision of the future – a brutal assessment of the current state = the organization’s demand on leadership for innovation and execution.
In other words, get real with your outrage. Let it influence your vision of your company as needing to exist. As doing God’s work and giving a gift that the world may not even know it needs.
Listen to your most friction-inducing frustrations, and let them influence your assessment of the current state. Invite them to serve as a catalyst for raising the standard as high as your organization can stand.
For Shriver, her outrage is worth the sweat and loneliness of writing a book.
What is your outrage worth for you?
One more critical note about leadership: your outrage must lead to innovation and execution. If you hang out for too long on the left-hand side of The Focus Equation, you’re what is known as a “complainer,” or worse, an “activist.”
Complainers and activists stop at the outrage. The leader identifies the fight worth fighting and gets down to business.
Are you ready to dive in? Join The Courageous Business Leader, our forum of like-minded business owners and executives seeking to learn and commit to principles of people-centered leadership and personal evolution.
