Leadership

One of the first people I had the pleasure of meeting again today on my trip to Phoenix was Sami Kerrouche.

We haven’t spoken for a couple of years and I was in awe of how much he has changed and the leader he is becoming.

Sami quit one of his jobs to focus full-time on running the London Media Lounge, a growing media studio for creators, and the best part was hearing how he’s now operating in the business.

He didn’t want to call himself a leader, but in my mind, the best leaders are those who create leaders and that’s exactly what he’s doing.

When he speaks about what he does, you can immediately sense the care he has for his work and the people in it.

He talked about wanting them to thrive and how he wants them to see themselves as partners to him, rather than subordinates. He’s constantly including them in the vision he has for the company and asking them to co-create it together.

That’s one of the traits I’ve noticed of great leaders:

They enrol others into a possibility higher than they have imagined for themselves and then create an environment where they can step into that.

We also talked about how his change in behaviour boiled down to who he is choosing to be and to a constant letting go of his ego.

He has imagined the kind of person he envisions himself becoming 3 to 5 years into the future and then chose to be that Sami right now with the resources he has available.

I will leave you with an excerpt from a leadership paper from Harvard Business School which describes one of the qualities of an effective leader that I saw Sami demonstrating. My hope is that this story about Sami and the description below will inspire you to step into this possibility for you and others in your own life.

Being Given Being and Action by Something Bigger Than Yourself

“Being given being and action by something bigger than yourself is the source of power in leading and in exercising leadership effectively. Being given being and action by something bigger than yourself creates for a leader the kind of power that replaces the need for force.

Being given being and action by something bigger than yourself is the source of the serene passion (charisma) required to lead and to develop others as leaders, and the source of persistence (joy in the labor of) when the path gets tough.

In a certain sense, all leaders are heroes. Heroes are ordinary people who are given being and action by something bigger than themselves.

What we mean by “being given being and action by something bigger than oneself” is being committed in a way that shapes one’s being and actions so that they are in the service of realizing something beyond one’s personal concerns for oneself – beyond a direct personal payoff. As they are acted on, such actions create something to which others can also be committed and have the sense that their lives are being given being and action by something bigger than themselves. This is leadership!

Each of us must make the personal choice to be a hero or not, to being given being and action by something bigger than ourselves or not, to go beyond the way we “wound up being” and have the purpose of our lives and our careers or schooling be about something that makes a difference or not, in other words, to be a leader or not.

Not everyone will choose this path, and that is certainly OK.

The following is a quotation from George Bernard Shaw from his play, Man and Superman (the epistle dedicatory to the play), that captures this idea of being given being and action by something bigger than oneself:

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Follow Sami Kerrouche on Linkedin. Learn more about London Media Lounge.

References

Erhard, Werner and Jensen, Michael C. and Zaffron, Steve and Zaffron, Steve and Echeverria, Jeronima, Introductory Reading And ‘Course Leadership Project’ Part II For Being a Leader and The Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological / Phenomenological Model (August 8, 2018). Harvard Business School Negotiations, Organizations and Markets Unit Research Paper Series No. 10-091, Barbados Group Working Paper No. 08-01, Simon School Working Paper No. 08-02, Gruter Institute Squaw Valley Conference 2009: Law, Behavior & the Brain, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1585976 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1585976