You don’t have to be a table tennis-playing, dress code-subverting maverick to win hearts and minds… But it might help.
Not long out of university, I started my first ‘proper’ job at an accountancy firm, Arthur Andersen, just off the Aldwych in London.
Before joining I had a year working with a training organisation called The Industrial Society, whose goal was to better equip young managers with confidence and ambition. I sauntered that morning into the smart Andersen offices in my scuffed brown brogues and knew within minutes that this was a different world altogether.
Much of my first salary payment was spent on some shiny black footwear, but that stone-cold moment of revelation still rings true. It is enormously difficult to deviate from the corporate norm. Being unusual is hard and ‘not fitting in’ is not easy.
In the subsequent 30 years, I have spent much of my time and energy trying to navigate a professional career while being slightly off to one side, a round peg in the corporate square hole.
Surprisingly, that journey has found me working among some very senior executives, wealthy family business owners and highly talented young leaders, where I have been afforded an opportunity to watch, listen and learn a great deal.
I have observed how most of these executives have been very careful to hone the conventional skills and behaviours associated with senior leadership. But among them were a rare few who had something else in their armoury. In their day-to-day behaviours and ways of working, they were a little bit ‘unusual’ compared to the norm around them. And the best of them did this deliberately, with some considerable skill.
Jack Ma is a notable example. He built the vast Alibaba empire from humble beginnings in a flatshare in Hangzhou. Ma was not just a workaholic, he was also quirky and unconventional in his leadership style.
He encouraged his first leadership team to do headstands against the wall so they could see the world from a different point of view. His style was an unusual fusion of adopted US practices and ancient Chinese wisdom. His job title was CEO, but he was also known as the ‘teacher’ by his employees, who he in turn endowed with funny nicknames inspired by Kung Fu novels.
John Varley is another. I worked closely with him after he became the CEO of Barclays in 2004. He conveyed the well-established image of the archetypal city banker and had many qualities as CEO, but also an unusual passion. For table tennis. Every few weeks, as you came into the ground-floor lobby of the Barclays offices, you would find a table set up. Varley would send round an email and offer to take on all comers. It was a quirky, unusual thing to do, and the CEO was suddenly seen and heard in a way that staff would have never expected.
The bar for being unusual in corporate life is not particularly high. You don’t have to act like a complete oddball; you just have to deviate in small ways from the norm.
The smartest leaders know the power of being unusual is that it is scarce, and that such rarity gets noticed. Being unusual intrigues peers and team members and makes leaders more memorable.
This is not about being wacky, subversive or weird. Neither is this an excuse for being reckless. In fact, unusual leaders must take care to demonstrate propriety, as their quirkiness often creates greater scrutiny.
Firms never advertise “being unusual” as a requirement on job postings. Similarly, few management development courses specify “being unusual” as one of the key criteria to join the talent pool. Which is a shame, because in my experience and research being unusual appears to be the key to winning the hearts, minds and commitment of others – which is one of the most difficult tasks of any senior leader.
Corporate recruiters are very wary of strange, quirky and unusual traits, but then CEOs wonder why they need to go outside for creative ideas, or hurriedly convene workshops (dress down of course) in a desperate attempt to encourage their managers to ‘think outside the box’.
Today, back in scuffed shoes, I lead executive development programmes at London Business School. Many of the corporate clients we work with are wrestling with disruption, new market entrants and the never normal of constant change. They know that ‘steady as she goes’ is no longer enough to lead firms through the fog. They want their executives to be smart, agile, innovative, creative and imaginative.
Firms today are immeasurably less stuffy than they were on the day I stumbled into Arthur Andersen. Now airline employees have piercings and tattoos, relaxed offices have dress-up days, companies have pursued diversity, equity and inclusion strategies, and authentic leadership and empathy are way more common. And yet, if we do commute midweek into town, few of us will ever meet a David Bowie, Lady Gaga, or Jay-Z in the head-office lift.
Fortunately, you don’t have to be a creative genius to make waves. There are many other famous candidates for the unusual badge – Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, Richard Branson, Anna Wintour, Marc Andreeson, Julian Richer, Michael O’Leary and Arianna Huffington. All have their unusual traits, but have been extraordinarily successful.
So, as well as carefully reading the room in your own firm, and applying the occasional shoeshine, take some time to notice the mavericks, observe their differences and see how they use being unusual to their advantage. Usually, you should have little to fear and unusually much to gain.
This is a repost from https://www.managementtoday.co.uk/power-unusual-leader/opinion/article/1857271
John Dore is director of the Senior Executive Programme at London Business School and the author of Glue: Transforming Leadership in a Hybrid World.