Reading - the lifeblood of leaders

Leadership away days are a genre all of their own. The wet November morning with the UK leadership team of this global brand was typical of the genre. An early arrival at Barnes Underground station in South West London, a confused walk to find the hotel allocated for the day, the coffee and dried out mini Danish pastries, the friendly but slightly superficial banter and then it’s time to drift into the hotel Board room.  Let the day commence. I knew, as the years of consulting had taught me, that unless we found a way of engaging in deeper, more meaningful conversations that we wouldn’t get deeper, more effective outcomes from the day. So I started by reminding everyone of the agenda they had agreed to in the preceding weeks one to ones and then suggested that before we started we should try something a little different. What I was going to suggest seemed very harmless to me, but I was wrong. I suggested we allow the opportunity to build some deeper conversation by each answering what I thought was a simple question.

“Tell each other about the most recent book you read and what you learned from it”.

Silence.

Now, there are different qualities of silence in these kinds of leadership meetings. There’s the silence that says “I didn’t understand the question”; there’s the silence that says “that’s a stupid question, it’s not even worth answering”; there’s the silence of deep and productive thinking that, if left to ferment, will produce great answers; then there’s the silence of awkward terror. The silence that is seen in the panic within people’s eyes, like being asked to sit an exam that no one was prepared for.  The silence of this group was that kind of silence. The truth was that barely any of them had read a book recently. Yes, they had browsed, they had dabbled, they had read things on their phones, they had started novels on their last summer holidays which still lay unfinished. They were too busy.

Here is the problem. Reading in the life of a leader is not an optional extra, a nice-to-have, a luxury item for those leaders who don’t have enough in their in-trays.  For the leader reading is an essential habit, it’s their life blood. I honestly don’t know any great leader for whom reading wasn’t one of their core disciplines. Whether its Mandela’s daily habit of reading not only books but a ten-inch pile of newspapers from around the world, to Bill Gates list of his books of the year. Top leaders have more reason to be to busy to read and yet the opposite is true. They are never too busy to not be reading. They have made it a habit of a leadership lifetime. Why is it so essential? Why is it the life blood? Why do they make reading one of their core disciplines? (Core means “I will do this today, even if something else has to go by the wayside”) There are two main reasons. The first was summed up by the writer Salman Rushdie, when he said, 

“Those who do not have the power of the story that dominates their lives – power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it and change it as times may change – truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts”

Leadership, as Gardner[1] says, is the ability to create a story that affects the thoughts feelings and actions of others. Leaders create stories – stories of organisations, influence, products, relationships, change – that’s what leaders do.  But the story they create will be as original and relevant and effective as the thoughts that are in the leader’s head.   If you stopped seriously reading books when you left University then that’s how old your thoughts will be. Leaders need a constant source and flow of new thinking.  The late John O’Donohue captured the necessity of the leaders reading in his poem For A Leader[2]

May you treasure the gifts of the mind

through reading and creative thinking

 so that you continue as a servant of the frontier, 

where the new will draw its enrichment from the old, 

and you never become a functionary.

How does a leader stop becoming a mere functionary? How do they become a servant of the frontier? By reading all kinds of books. Books within your work-subject, books you agree with, books you disagree with, books your parents and mentors read, books that stretch your world views, books that stretch your intellect, books that make you smile, books that make you uncomfortable, books that stretch your heart and soul, books that connect you with your friends and your kids favourite novels (it was my son who told me I needed to read The Fault in Our Stars), articles and opinion pieces. A leader once told me he read The Economist cover to cover so that he would always be prepared should he find himself seated next to Henry Kissinger on a long plane journey.  

The second reason why leaders need to read for their life blood relates to inspiration. A leader’s job is to inspire. I’ve never met a group who didn’t put ‘inspiration’ in their top five list of leadership attributes.  To inspire literally means to breath in, to inhale life giving oxygen. To inspire other means to breathe life into them – the life breath of hope, possibility, vision and courage. If we ourselves are breathing in old stale air then that what we will breathe in to others on our teams.  An inspiring leader is always breathing out to others what they’ve been breathing in privately in their reading. That fresh breath flows out through their words, decisions, actions, and influence. The maxim is that if you as a leader inspire (breathe in new thoughts) then you will inspire others (breathe life into them).  So how does a leader develop or recover the vital habit of reading?  Here are a few, but not exhaustive, suggestions. 

Firstly, start where you are.  In the film City Slickers, they called it a ‘do-over’. Don’t beat yourself up over what you haven’t done. Just start today and start with whatever grabs your attention. You can do a lot worse than giving yourself an hour just wandering around a good book shop and note down or take a photo of whatever books touch your interest, whatever they may be…….Dr Seuss or A Brief History Of Time, it doesn’t matter. Just note it down. Take the time to ask yourself what in your life has your attention right now? Where do you feel you don’t know enough? It doesn’t need to have any connection to your leadership job at all. For instance, your job may be a design engineer but what fascinates you is why and how Vincent Van Gogh was such a prolific artist, so you read Lust For Life by Irving Stone. Just find something that interests you and start. That first step will always be the hardest. When you take your mind to one place it actually frees up your brain space for other new thoughts.  It’s similar to the principle of when you have a tough decision to make, go running or exercising. Occupying the mind with new thoughts that interest you frees up the mind’s bandwidth for other necessary thinking that you need to do.

Secondly there is an unspoken myth about reading that says “once you start a book you must finish it before going on to the next book”.  Completely untrue. We read to feed our heads and hearts. If the book you are reading isn’t feeding you, holding your head or hearts attention, then move on. Put it down for good or come back to it when you want to reengage. Follow your energy and your joy. Of course, some books are hard because they are stretching, but if you’ve just read 20 pages and can’t remember a thing, then the book isn’t helping you. Everything, even good books, have their time. The danger of the “I must finish this book” fallacy, is that you simply stop reading altogether. It is like some kind of false honour. We sit with the book by our bed side for months on end, unread, and we deny ourselves the freedom to say, “I’ve got what I wanted or needed from that book, so time to move on to a new one”.

Or,

“maybe this book isn’t for me right now. I thought it was, but it isn’t, so I’ll shelve it until it calls to me again sometime in the future”.

It’s a fiction that all books are worth reading until the end. We give the writers far too much credit. Some books the author makes its point in the first two chapters and the following twenty chapters are a repetition of the main point. If you’ve got the point, then move on. The key is to keep up your reading momentum regardless. If the momentum dies then the new thoughts die. As Mandela once said, ‘don’t linger’, move on.

The third suggestion is to grow your own reading journey. Treat every book like a clue in a detective novel. Every book is likely to be influenced by other books, so when you come across the writer referring a book that inspired them to write that last sentence and that last sentence inspired you, then note down the book the author is referencing and buy it. When you feel a spark of interest, curiosity, inspiration, treat it like a clue, treat it like a sniff of a scent leading you to the kitchen. Log it and get it onto your Amazon wish list or noted in your journal. Buy the new book before you are ready to read it so it is there waiting for you the moment you finish the current book or your interest in your current book starts to die. Like a circus act, the key is to keep the reading-plates spinning and don’t let the reading habit crash.

Fourthly find your own rhythm, but find a rhythm. Read little and often as a minimum; an hour a day, on the commute, (I knew a leader who would read the Financial Times into work every morning and a book every evening on the way home) or an hour before sleep. Engage with what you are reading. My wife reads with her journal next to her, I write all over the pages I am reading with underlines and comments in the margins (remember you can both underline and store comments on Amazon kindle as well as paper books). Do what you need to do to stay engaged with what you are reading and the thoughts it is proving inside of you. Feel free to mix your reading medium, or stay with the one that works for you – paper books, electronic books, both – just stay reading.

Finally let me return to the ‘why’ of reading. As you develop the reading habit every day (not just the holiday binge reading), then leak out what you are reading into every aspect of your work. Ideas can be fed into meetings, unique perspectives fed into innovation sessions, quotes into power point presentations, insights into coffee conversations, personal growth vulnerability into peer leadership forums. Leak. Leak. Leak. This is how you will continue to digest what you read, fuel even more reading for yourself and inspire others to think new thoughts.

Reading is the leader’s necessity, life blood, discipline and gift. Enjoy!

[1] Howard Gardner   Leading Minds  Basic Books 2011

[2] To Bless The Space Between John O’Donohue  Convergent Books 2008