What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are leaders.
What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.
—William Deresiewicz, Solitude and Leadership
When he gave this speech, Deresiewiicz was speaking to West Point, thus his reference to the Army. My translation of his excellent and essential piece is what I tell people in big jobs: Your work begins in the woods.
I usually say this to people at a crisis point. They are totally overworked and ready to quit. My insistence about time in the woods is, then, first of all a matter of self-care. (And yes, “the woods” can be “in the pool” or reading or journaling or from wherever else a leader can, as it were, climb up into the Crow’s nest and look out for direction.) But this time must be—Dear Leader—the first thing, not the last, you put on your calendar. (Otherwise, as you will know, the time will get eaten up by what look like priorities.)
Because it is also, as Deresiewicz argues, crucial for your organization too.
If leaders are not in the woods as a matter of their routine they cannot fulfill what is most vital about their role—that gaze into the distance. I might, however, rephrase what Deresiewiicz calls technocrats into “survivors.” Let me explain this.
We live in a time of hyper-speed: rapidity is all. Compared to farming, manufacturing taught us to work fast, day and night, the unrelenting and mechanical rhythms of mass production soon becoming how we operated at school and office too.
The computer has supercharged that pace. Emails and check boxes and systemized systems for making sure the system is up to date (before we launch a new way to systematize) makes the person who can get the most done the person of the most value. (That so many of us work this way without much knowing what it is we do is a problem for another time, but it certainly adds to the stress.)
We promote those who can work the fastest for the longest and thus those in charge are often the people who burn out last, the survivors.
That may be great for Google and Facebook (oops, today’s headlines are of massive layoffs in tech) in the short term, but obviously what we need is not more speed, it is better direction.
I should be clear and say that the leaders I know—the survivors—are fantastically humane and want nothing more than to lead well. But my point is that the system we have allowed ourselves to operate under takes what is best about them—their capacity—and makes it a liability rather than an asset.
Because we don’t need a system that rewards the few who manage to survive it, we need one that makes more of us healthy. The people who can work harder and faster than you or me should be in a position to make good decisions, not to show us they deserve their position by working yet harder and yet faster tomorrow.
If your boss can never say, “Hey, I am not doing anything, how can I help?” Your organization puts the grind of working like a computer ahead of the creativity of working like a person.
If your boss does not have time to talk to people without any agenda then the problems which can only be solved in conversation and culture will remain problems forever.
I should be clear too that this is a cautionary tale for those of us who are, so to speak, “the workers.” Because we will have to understand that it is essential for the boss to be away every Wednesday, walking in the woods, thinking on our behalf.
It would help us be less resentful of the time they have to do this thinking, however, if the boss knew that we need space to reflect too, that such time is how we lead ourselves, especially if we do creative work.
Working hard is great. Work is worship. But the makers of the world’s best shoes or instruments or furniture do not rush. And while the nurse who goes from room to room at their own pace gives patients the feeling they are being looked after, the one moving at the pace the insurance company demands makes patients feel as though they are gonna die in this hospital. That’s not what you want if it is you or your family member in that hospital bed.
Yet we treat work and school as a kind of constant emergency rather than where we craft a life.
So . . . . Dear Leaders . . . don’t measure yourself as an Alpha against Alphas, measure yourself instead by how engaged in the job those who work for you are, the joy they spread. In the long run, you will be happier and make more money or whatever too. Solve the people problem, not the system problem.
And to make that happen, spend time—as part of your routine—thinking, pondering, and looking for a clearing through which the horizon you believe in beckons.
That is what your time in the woods is for, and that is where we need you to be.