The magic of leadership: beyond the illusion
Tags: Management And Leadership, Xcelerator, Leadership Development, Leadership, CEO

The magic of leadership: beyond the illusion

Lessons leaders can learn from magicians on how to make the impossible possible.

Lyndon Rego

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Leadership is not a science. It is more of an art. It is also about magic, the magic of doing things that seem impossible. Magic is very much on my mind. I just attended an innovation gathering hosted by AMI, the oldest innovation community in the US, titled Making the Impossible Possible. The conference was an exploration of magic. A team of magicians presented us with an array of mindbending card, coin and rope tricks, making things appear and disappear at will. But the magic wasn’t for the sake of mere entertainment. It served to explore the idea of what it takes to make magic happen. I found a lot of relevance to leadership.

Magic takes belief, that something seemingly impossible is actually possible. The best-known expression in magic, Abracadabra, means “what I speak is what I create.” The words that articulate a vision are like a magic spell, an incantation to create a new reality.

Magic, while mysterious and wonderous, is not the same as a miracle. It can be understood and replicated. We should have no illusions that magic happens with a snap of the fingers. Magic is truly the result of creativity, effort, failure, and practice. In the session I attended, the magicians revealed how they did the tricks they did but we could not easily replicate them. Their act was the result of much practice. In one act, for example, the magician borrowed a $20 note from a member of the audience and made it disappear and then reappear in the middle of a whole lime that he cut open. As we gasped, he revealed that there were more than a dozen ways he could do the trick. There are many solutions possible but it takes creativity and effort to find them and make them real. So, what does this mean for leaders making the seemingly impossible possible?

Well, for one, the job of a leader is more difficult than that of a magician because a leader needs others to perform the magic — outcomes aren’t dependent on their own effort. If we look around the world, we see so many magical things that leaders have been able to invoke others to do — from building cathedrals, to putting a man on the moon, to inventing cures for age-old diseases. Some of these efforts took decades and tens of thousands of people; some took generations and centuries. The magic that the leader performed was to inspire people to believe it was possible and to motivate them to make it real. Sometimes it is the very difficulty of the vision — the greatness of the task — that motivates people the most. Great effort is only warranted by great goals.

The architect Daniel Burnham wrote: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and our grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us.”

A great leader is then like a magician who makes great things possible but does so by getting others to believe and act. In the Seven Transformations of Leadership framework published in Harvard Business Review, the highest order of leadership is an Alchemist who can transform things. An Alchemist, says Bill Torbert, is “able to catch unique moments in the history of their organizations, creating symbols and metaphors that speak to people’s hearts and minds.” Magic is a summons to wonder, to dream, to believe… and do what it takes to make it real.

Satya Nadella is a leader who exemplifies this quality of alchemy. As CEO for Microsoft, he has shifted the floundering tech giant into a new phase of growth by reframing its purpose and reshaping its businesses. Nadella had seen the center of gravity for computing move dramatically from Microsoft’s early days, from PCs to mobile computing, from software packages to apps, from devices and drives to the cloud, from products to services, from IT specialists to users. This called for a reboot of Microsoft’s very identity and its understanding of value creation. He stated, “It’s one of the key things that we’ve tried to reframe even what our mission is. I feel that, as a tech company, our core sense of purpose is how do we take this technology and democratize it, and its access, so that others can reap the benefits of technology.”

Nadella has enabled the 100,000 person organization to embrace collaboration, on the inside and outside. He states, “We start by having respect for all views, of all of our employees. We definitely want to make sure that we are hearing their views, their opinions, and being very respectful from where they’re coming, and even seeking to understand, deeply, their concerns — and at the same time, being very clear about our principles, about the choices we make.” On the outside, Microsoft is partnering with other organizations and customers, seeing itself as enabler of the success of others. Nadella emphasizes this ethos, “That’s the realization that ultimately that’s what our business is about. But it comes with that understanding that, unless you’re making a lot of people successful around you, you’re not going to have a long-term business. I think this is what I feel the most proud of, and the most grounded in.”

It is clear that Nadella’s outlook has inspired people within the organization to see themselves as vital, integral, and central to the trajectory of the future. The new Microsoft is a fundamentally different organization and the stock price of the company has risen 600% under Nadella’s watch.

So the true magic of great leadership is to conjure up a great and worthy task that inspires people to rise up to take on themselves the hard work of doing the seemingly impossible. Antoine de Saint-Exupery stated: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

At my former organization, the Center for Creative Leadership, I launched an effort named Leadership Beyond Boundaries that cascaded to 30 countries and 500,000 people over the course of a decade. This effort scaled because it became a movement that empowered more people in organizations around the world with the means to incorporate and offer leadership development to their stakeholders. Like Microsoft, we worked to democratize the practice by enabling others to do what was once the realm of expensive specialists. With this, we also made leadership development more relevant, in fields such as education, entrepreneurship, public health, microfinance, and conflict mitigation. The magnitude of our vision — to democratize leadership development — drew people for whom this was deeply inspirational. It was through their efforts that the vision was translated into programs and carried into sector after sector in country after country.

Magic and the great things we achieve are truly no illusion but the result of big ideas and great effort. We must see things in our minds and believe them to be true to be able to make them real in the real world. What is the magic you wish to create and what is it that you will speak to inspire people make the impossible possible?

About the author: Lyndon Rego is the chief catalyst for CoMetta. He previously headed the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at the African Leadership University and led innovation at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL). At CCL, he initiated a global effort that extended leadership development to half-a-million people in 30 countries.