The Self-Evolved Leader | Book Review

“We’re barely starting to move away from the old, industrial-era
way of thinking about leadership and its relentless focus on
top-down hierarchy and planning.” (p. 2)

Dave McKeown’s most readable work counters the passive mindset many of us have, especially early in our careers, that we are not and will not become leaders – those leaders are people of unreachable and unrealistic achievement we’ll never compare to. We may think of his book as a more focused version of Marshall Goldsmith’s Triggers’ self-coaching treatise. 

McKeown observes that our role models for leadership are the visionaries who completely reimagine a product, an industry, or the world (p. 5), which can easily make one feel insignificant, when in fact, there is plenty of room for leaders who are less focused on pushing the boundaries and more likely to press for evolution rather than revolution (p. 6).

Parts 2 and 3, The Key Elements of Self-Evolved Leadership and Mastering the Self-Evolved Leadership Disciplines, respectively, comprise the heart of the book. Our review highlights connections between active self-leadership techniques mentioned in McKeown’s book with several Academy Leadership workshop teachable points of view.

The Passive Landscape

In our Setting Leadership Priorities workshops, the significance of important yet not urgent activities emerge. We’ve allowed every input into our daily routine to become “urgent” and spend most of our time stuck fighting fires and lurching from crisis to crisis rather than affording ourselves the headspace to think about what’s important… (p. 20) The Covid environment has seemingly exacerbated the situation as many of us now live with additional distractions working from home. As a result, we often seek heroes, but most heroic leaders find themselves in an almost addictive feedback loop (p. 22).

Why not incremental team progress over a sustained period, akin to deliberate practice, rather than hoping and waiting? It’s more sustainable to build a foundation of great leadership that’s based on shared accountability rather than heroics (p. 6). There’s great utility in distinguishing responsibility from accountability and requiring both from everyone on our teams. The resultant cultural shift is toward each team member understanding the connectedness between each other and the specific role each plays (p. 27). Stanley McChrystal shares this discovery in Team of Teams, with subsequent breakthrough performance. We may think of empowerment as no more than the institutionalization of shared accountability and a pursuit of development in your team (p. 28).

McKeown summarizes internal characteristics of Self-Evolved Leaders (pp. 33-38):

• They push for growth
• They demonstrate vulnerability
• They practice empathy
• They feel a sense of connectedness
• They operate from the locus of their control 

How many of these traits are found in your Leadership Philosophy? They [Leaders] purposefully build in time to have developmental conversations with their teams and strive to link the strengths of everyone to the appropriate roles and projects on their team (p. 41). Leaders coach.

Vision and Alignment

Creating a higher purpose for your team is fast becoming one of the key distinguishing factors for attracting, hiring, and retaining top talent and a necessity for building collective morale when you go through a turbulent day, week, or month (p. 49). There’s no better place for stating this than your leadership philosophy, and earlier in the document is better.

Recall in our Energize2Lead workshops, most of us don’t want to be told, what, when and how to do things. A compelling vision statement is less about the what or the how of what you do and will explain clearly and succinctly the why your team exists (p. 51).

Continuous alignment is much like deliberate practice. Ask your team to share it (common vision) at the start of meetings, put it in your email signature, print it out on laminate cards and stick them all over your office (p. 57).

Once we’re past telling others what and how to do things, delegation comes naturally. Anywhere that you and at least one other person is interacting, you can practice one of these disciplines:

• Take a pause
• Exist in the present
• Set context
• Be intentional
• Listen first
• Push for clarity

These are great times for sharing a common language and vocabulary around great leadership, communication, decision-making, and accountability is the catalyst that unlocks team performance (p. 9).

Leaders coach.

Moving Beyond Passive

We offer the term Tyranny of the Urgent during Setting Leadership Priorities workshops. When you’re trying to deal with a seemingly unlimited number of tugs on your attention, you’re unable to get to the headspace to think creatively (p. 105). That’s a death sentence in our competitive global economy, not to mention ineffective leadership.

If you assume the people on your team have positive intent with the desire to learn, grow, and ultimately develop, then finding ways to give them additional projects and tasks that may be at the edge of their ability can help accelerate that process (p. 120). This may be challenging when we place great value on our own Subject Matter Expertise (SME).

Consider this: When you position yourself as a leader with all the answers, you create an unspoken win/loss tally running and an inherent desire to throw up more wins than losses (p. 139). Worse, people will only tell us what we wish to hear, creating a large leadership blind spot.

Being a leader as coach provides an ideal antidote. Stop protecting people’s weaknesses. Instead treat them as if they will succeed and be there to support and guide them as needed (p. 126). Embrace a positive, abundance mindset. Pivot toward discussions of how they can use this situation to learn something new about themselves that they can work on over the long term (p. 137).

McKeown offers a valuable coaching term. A symbiotic conversation is any interaction that acknowledges the interdependence of the group and provides an opportunity for further growth among its members (p. 149). Great term and great idea. Where may these conversations lead? The main characteristic of a group with deep accountability is that there is enough trust, respect, and desire to see each other succeed that they’re able to spur one another on toward achieving their common goals (p. 164).

Sustain

Positive transformation takes time. What does it look like? Those organizations that display exemplary leadership across the board have a common set of definitions and vocabulary that means the same thing no matter what part of the organization it’s used in, yet the language remains flexible enough for individuals to still impart their own uniqueness (pp. 220-221).

McKeown includes a variety of follow up resources, useful for continued journaling, reflection, and self-evaluation. Like our Academy Leadership Action Plan:

Self-Evolved Leaders Resources
Selfevolvedleader.com/resources

Self-Paced Leadership Mastery Program
Selfevolvedleader.com/master 

Self-Evolved Leader Public Workshops
Selfevolvedleader.com/public

Self-Evolved Team In-House Workshop
Selfevolvedleader.com/workshop 

“We haven’t fully developed our thoughts on what comes
after the bureaucratic organization.” (p. 2)

Dave McKeown generously provided a copy of his book for review.