Leaders must be unreasonable

I did a double-take even as I was writing that title. It seems just controversial enough that it necessitates some additional thought, and that’s why it seemed good for me to write about it. Remember, the point of these essays is to hone my thinking.

Recently I’ve been dealing with unreasonable-ness a fair bit. With unreasonable demands at work and an unreasonable toddler at home, I can sense my own reason fading.

But as I reflect on these experiences, I start to see how leadership needs to be unreasonable - at least to the eye of the masses - in order for it to work.

Leadership is difficult. If it wasn’t, there would be more leaders around.

Leadership is inherently about getting a team of people to produce more than the sum of their parts. Without this, there is no purpose in gathering a team, and certainly the leader has no purpose in this endeavor.

But to produce more than the sum of your parts is hard! Teams don’t just work synergistically out of the blue. This takes time and intentional effort for the team to learn how to work well together.

Some leaders do not recognize this, and instead demand more of a team while withholding the time or resource that is needed. Perhaps they hope that the team will rise to the challenge and overcome, thereby producing more. This is one way to go, but I think it is a short-sighted one. Eventually, the team becomes tired, frustrated, and they leave. This leaves the organization worse off than before.

There are reasonable ways to get more out of a team. For example, being selective about what they work on, or playing to their strengths, or simply planning ahead so that there is ample time to build up the team’s performance.

But what if you have a Leader who is simply unreasonable?

I have thought long and hard about this, referencing my own experience, and my conclusion is this.

To deal with an unreasonable leader, you need to be unreasonable.

It seems to me that the one who tries to reason with an unreasonable leader is just inherently on the back foot. It is like trying to use rhetoric in a hostage situation; not very helpful, and maybe making things worse.

What does help, is responding to violence with double the violence. So, faced with unreasonableness, it seems like the best option is to be twice as unreasonable, until they are willing to come to the table and negotiate.