Author: Brook Manville

If you cut your finger, reach for a Band-Aid. Wake up with a headache, grab two Aspirins. But quick remedies aren’t a regime for managing overall health. Nor for managing a career. You can power pose like Wonder Woman to boost your self-confidence, or  tweak your mornings to be more productive. Helpful stuff, but not the same as a conscious, long-term plan to develop professionally over a lifetime.

OK, how to think about that?

I recently put that question to Kathy Gallo, Founder and Managing Partner of the Goodstone Group. Kathy has developed business professionals for some twenty years, and now oversees a global network of 65 professionals who coach leaders at all levels, in companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 50 corporations. She answered with an eager smile.

Learning From Patterns

“Well, we shouldn’t paint with too broad a brush. Everyone must build their own plan over time. But you can learn from patterns, for example how winning professionals manage their careers through lifetime eras—early, mid, and later career, or roughly speaking, in your 20s, 30s, and then 40s and beyond.”

Gallo began with a few cross-cutting themes. “Throughout a career, three leadership competencies are always a focus: problem-solving, executional capabilities, and people skills, especially “emotional intelligence” (leaders’ ability to read other people and connect it with what’s inside their own head and heart.) Then context—being aware of your organization’s culture; and changing it for the better when you can. Great performers work on all of these in every era.”

Because It’s Different Today

Listening to this prologue, I had a whiff of Mom’s apple pie, and asked: Is professional development really different today? The Goodstone Managing Partner pushed back. “Yeah, it is. The best jobs are much more competitive—twenty top-qualified people are going for every good position. And candidates are already well-coached—it’s how they excelled in college admissions, sports, music lessons. The most successful are now constantly improving themselves in a fiercely intentional way.”

So how does the game change as you move through the three eras?

Kathy described the classic matrix pairing consciousness and competence. “The best competitors co-develop self-knowledge and capabilities. At each step they are working to understand more about themselves and their goals, and the skills and knowledge needed to get there.”

Your 20s: Building Baseline Awareness And Competence

“Imagine a child first learning to walk,” she continued. “Not only does she not know how to tie a shoe, she doesn’t understand that shoes need to be tied. In your early jobs, you’re both learning what success in a would-be career is going to take, and then assessing your assets and gaps against that. The average performer bumbles along, trial-and-error. The top professionals are much more intentional.”

Kathy elaborated. “The rising stars relentlessly clarify expectations for winning. They are metrics-oriented, and constantly seek feedback, from supervisors, other colleagues, even clients. They develop a picture of success, then go after it. They ask, ‘if I want to head a sales division, what do l I need to do?’”

Are You Ready To Hear The Feedback?

But it’s not as simple as it sounds, she added. “Most organizations are not very good at giving feedback— timely, critical, actionable—which is what you need to raise your personal performance. In most cultures you have to work hard to get that kind of feedback. Women and multicultural talent usually have to work even harder for it.”

She offered a further warning. “Younger professionals often don’t want to hear the answer if it’s negative. They aren’t emotionally ready to hear anything less than ‘awesome.’” So success in your early career depends on learning both to seek and take feedback. And then building the discipline to act and improve upon what you learn.”

Gallo then noted the importance of recruiting sponsors, informal or otherwise. “As you start to grow, you need someone with power and credibility in the organization who can advocate for you—to get you staffed on the right projects. As with getting feedback, this is particularly critical and often more difficult for young women and multicultural professionals.”

But even enlisting support has its pitfalls. “Millennials are so social-media-wired, they’re always reaching out for help and suggestions. But they can lack discrimination—they don’t realize that some sources aren’t as reliable as others. Or that friends may not be totally candid. It’s a big issue for young CEOs. They buttress their managerial inexperience with all sorts of advisers. But they aren’t critical enough in choosing or using them. Great professional development in your twenties depends on learning how to judge and leverage the right people.”

Your 30s: Rounding Out Your Skill Set

Kathy continued the metaphor of the newly walking child. “So in the next era you know how to put on your shoes, you can loop the laces and tie them on your own. Now you want to get good at it, so it becomes automatic.”

“In your middle career,” she went on to explain, “you’re now established in at least one of the three leadership competences; and you’re clearer about aspirations and what it will take to get there. You develop plans to better leverage your strengths, and also address your particular short-comings.”

I pressed this coach for the real headline.

“For most people,” Kathy continued, “this middle phase means strengthening EQ. Typically they’re getting their first 360 evaluations. And they’re shocked to learn that maybe they have a reputation for being difficult, uncaring, or communicating poorly. It can be a real wake-up call—but the winners hear it and work on the problems.”

It’s also in this middle era that the best professionals start to look beyond themselves. As Gallo explained, “Even if people work on their EQ, progress can be limited by the culture of the organization. Some companies don’t care if you run over people to get results.”

So what then?

Kathy continued: “Losers are complainers. Winners face reality. You don’t have to be a jerk to succeed, but you do need to understand the cultural context. Sometimes that means getting better at playing the game (authenticity can be over-rated!); or better yet, changing the culture by bringing in more like-minded people. If necessary, they’re willing to leave for another company more suited to their values.”

Your 40s (And Beyond): Impact And Still More Self-Knowledge

Great maturing professionals don’t sit back and smell the roses—they continue the self-improvement that’s by now second nature. They seek out new assignments, different experiences, and look for innovative ways to “sharpen their saws.”

But, Gallo cautioned, they now face a different set of challenges. “Accomplished leaders are under more pressure to create impact; they have to project a certain gravitas, inspire talent, excite and align stakeholders, as never before. It’s a world of maximum transparency and like it or not, leaders today must have some level of charisma. And not just CEOs—everyone on their way to the top too.”

I asked the enduring question—can charisma be learned?

“Yes, up to a point,” she offered. “You can do a lot by working on public speaking, posture and style. But charisma can mean different things. The real strategy comes down to finding and developing the right version that suits who you are. If you’re more introverted or analytical, for example, you can get better in projecting confidence and impressing stakeholders with your expertise; or learning to speak more openly and firmly about yourself. If you’re an internal candidate for a top job, you can seek out a particularly difficult assignment, to show your courage and skill for tackling a big problem. That’s worth more to a board search committee than ‘flashy showmanship.’”

The Potentially Isolated Leader

Kathy continued with a final warning. “Another challenge for senior professionals is difficult and even dangerous. Successful leaders can become isolated without knowing it. People shy away from disagreeing with them, or won’t ‘speak truth to power.’  So suddenly these leaders are back to where they started twenty-five years before: they’re ‘unconsciously incompetent’, they no longer know what they don’t know—and nobody is going to tell them. If the world is changing around them, or they’re creating dysfunction in the organization they lead, they might be totally oblivious. They think everything is fine, when it might be catastrophe. Great leaders force themselves to keep learning, including the hardest of truths about themselves.”

Kathy finished by reflecting on one particularly effective CEO she knows. “He’s at the top of his game, but he won’t let up, even though he realizes more self-knowledge could be pretty painful. I’ll never forget what he confided to me: ‘If I want to be the best possible leader, I have to be willing to travel to the ‘Dark Side’—the part of who I am that I really don’t like. And then commit to improving that too.”

Originally published on Forbes.com

I recently profiled the talented theatrical director Ethan McSweeny, as a case example of Creative Economy leadership. Three insights from that post can apply to any leader pursuing innovation: design your product in a contemporary competitive context; construct it as an overall experience; and develop a distinctive “theory of value” that powerfully differentiates it.

A fourth insight from the previous post, equally applicable, focused on the “how” of  McSweeny’s leadership: fostering an emergent process of creation with others. I came to understand that his sparkling dramas result from messy but deliberate experimentation, and iterative collaboration among many people, both behind and on stage. Today’s post elaborates on his process approach.

Probing The Emergent Creative Process

1. The Creative Leader sets up the opportunity for success. Ethan’s discussion about starting a project reflected a keen sense of strategy and self-knowledge.

Work begins when he pursues a directing opportunity. Beyond predictable questions about schedule, budget and prestige, he looks for at least two of three drivers of creative impact:  “Is it a play I want to do? Is it a theatre or producer I want to work with? Will there and can there be other talented people involved (actors, technical staff) whom I trust and am excited to collaborate with?”

2. The Creative Leader builds a team around a core operating philosophy. The engagement of actors and technical staff for live theatre is a complex, multi-layered process. McSweeny pursues arrangements that build a shared understanding about how he wants the team to work. People join the production clear about a particular (and proven) way of working.

His beliefs embody an operating philosophy, a set of under-the-surface behavioral assumptions to support high-performance collaboration.

Core Beliefs

First, that although financial constraints must be respected, good art is what drives commercial success, not vice versa. “Too many plays today are hollow, designed backwards from producers’ guesses about audience or critics’ desires,” he avers.

Second, that the creative process must foster experiment and discovery. “I build a team that together will create magic–but we won’t know all of it on day one. I’ll have a preliminary vision, but it will evolve. My mantra is ‘plan relentlessly and be totally open to accident.’ Accidents spawn breakthroughs.”

Third, that all team members are responsible for success as “full citizens.” Adam Green the actor recalled early meetings of cast and crew in McSweeny productions. “He communicates that everyone in the room is important to the show, and will be trusted to do their best. He delegates well, doesn’t micromanage, and will frequently step back for someone else to lead. His rehearsals are pretty damn swell.”

McSweeny later commented: “My main goal is simply to get everybody operating at peak creativity. I’m not the racehorse, I’m the jockey. I have to get the real athletes ready to run the race of their lives—all at the same time.”

Project, Talent, Culture

3. The Creative Leader guides production as both project and process of talent and culture development. “Staging a play,” McSweeny noted, “is a left and right brain exercise.” For this director, left brain oversees a tight management schedule: recruiting, organizing, designing, and integrating the work of different sub-teams (acting and technical) into a final, polished production. Milestones and budgets must be met; the company tracks progress weekly, and together addresses problems if something is “still not working.”

But right brain is also always flashing—developing ideas, and nurturing creative impulses, both the director’s and his collaborators’. Concepts emerge through ongoing experimentation by different professionals, and the freedom—within a structure—that McSweeny encourages. Joe Smelser, his Shakespeare Theatre stage manager told me: “Ethan understands this is an art where ‘the paint talks back.’ He encourages people to speak up, try new things, and to keep developing their own craft.” Jenny Lord, Assistant Director for the Midsummer production agreed, observing that “theatre is an extremely collaborative art form–it’s very rare for anyone involved to be able to look at anything in a production and say, ‘That’s there because of me.'”

Adam Green explained that “much of what Ethan does is editing— ‘heightening and expanding’ what company members improvise during rehearsals.” McSweeny himself talks of “licensing actor’s experiments,” because “people own the idea better if it’s theirs. As the play moves from rehearsals to performances, you want the product to deepen and improve, while still maintaining structure and form.”

Right-Brain Messiness

Exploring accidental ideas is a messy, right-brain process. As the production marches forward, McSweeny also works with the company to circle back and retrofit creative concepts that have emerged. Ethan recalled that “In Midsummer Night’s Dream, we decided to portray the lover’s quarrel as a playful mud fight in the forest. It wasn’t working until the third week of rehearsals, when Adam suggested Puck  play a mischievous role in sparking the chaos. But then we had to redesign all the movements, and the prop and costume departments had to try different mud mixtures and washable clothes.”

A major right-brain imperative is dealing with fear. McSweeny was adamant: “What actors do is very, very hard; they know I know that. They’re constantly afraid of failing before an audience. When you invest the whole company with responsibility, they all have fear too. Fear is the ultimate killer of creativity. Removing fear is one of my biggest jobs.”

McSweeny further reflected:  “I signal that everyone will be respected. I learn each person’s concerns. I build confidence bottom up, starting with different sub-teams, so they find comfort in a smaller group before facing everyone in full rehearsal. We also do early rounds in deliberately informal settings—around a table, just reading; and then later in a dedicated rehearsal hall that’s not the main stage. It reinforces ‘it’s ok to try something that might not work out.’”

Storytelling Too

McSweeny also builds team culture with storytelling. “In table readings, I invite people to talk about personal experiences, perhaps with family or colleagues, or maybe a television program from the night before. It starts a safe discussion about ideas to try. I also share some of my own vulnerability. That also builds trust.”

Personal coaching is constant. In rehearsals, McSweeny will walk on stage, to help a particular actor or small group to improvise something not playing well.

“In The Tempest, we needed a flying Ariel. We had an actress perfect for the role—but it turned out she was deathly afraid of heights. We worked on that fear, at first privately, and then on stage with other actors. She went on to perform brilliantly— suspended from a cable 40 feet in the air.”

The Tempest Montage

Closing Open Doors, Slowly

4. The Creative Leader curates the final product by “opening and then closing doors” at the right time.

The step-by-step development of a play—recruiting and casting, rehearsing different designs, sounds, characters and action—follows a classic project management funnel. You start wide, and get more focused as ideas gel. Narrowing the funnel requires making decisions that stick. So when there’s an ethos of experimentation, and “the paint talks back”—how do you move the company towards final creative choices?

McSweeny’s answer is by “opening and then closing doors.” At first, he’s all about opening: inviting any actor or technician to propose different ideas, or a new take on a scene or character.

But as the schedule advances, he forces inflection points. “I remind people every week where we are, and what comes next—which they like. And timing is everything. You need to build a sense when exploration ends. But not all at once. You use intuition; and also the text of the play—a source of authority, beyond just ‘what the director wants.’” After a while I’ll start closing doors, and then converge the team around a final answer. Cutting actors off too soon kills their creativity. Let debate flourish too long, actors then lose their way. Structure is freedom.”

Stretch And Capacity

5. The Creative Leader stretches for higher collective performance, and building future capacity. McSweeny summarized a leadership approach simultaneously nurturing and challenging. “I’m open to ideas from anyone but also have the self-confidence to critique them, as long as the team understands it’s to make them and the show better. I respect people’s views, and admit my mistakes. But I also expect them to do the same for me. If an idea isn’t working—whether it’s mine or someone else’s—we have to be willing to discard it.”

This leader also challenges himself and his team by recruiting a mix of both known and unknown talent for every production. “I start with a core of people I know and trust. But I always add some new people I don’t know—a designer, certain actors, or other contributors whom I’ve never worked with. It keeps all of us from falling into familiar patterns. It adds risk, but we all benefit from more innovation. It also keeps expanding my networks for future productions.”

Banishing Ego

6. The Creative Leader builds self-awareness through practice. Ethan McSweeny closed by reflecting on his own professional growth. “When I was younger,” he smiled, “people would naturally challenge my authority. I was more dictatorial, out of insecurity. Now I lead by example. In a collaborative environment, it’s really the better way. I still have to work on managing my own fear-based reactions. Those come out as frustration, or even anger sometimes. I’m getting better at ‘counting to 10’—and recognizing the frustration when it’s coming.”

He finished with advice for any Creative Leader. “The key thing with creative people is to understand where they’re coming from, and simply focus on what will get the best result –regardless of what you think you want. To do that well, you have to manage your ego out of the equation. Ego is right next to fear in killing creativity.”

Originally published on Forbes.com

As my colleague Steve Denning writes, we all now work in a Creative Economy. Creative is surpassing traditional business and financial economies, with its innovation-seeking “ethos of imagination, exploration, experiment, discovery, and collaboration.”

It’s not just media, advertising, and movie studios. Every enterprise is trying to make, sell and do things more creatively. Leaders are hustling to become more creative too. Gone are the Mad Men days when the high pay-graders in suits simply cracked the whip and pushed bearded artists and quirky writers to come up with the ideas the company would sell.  Now leaders have to develop their own creativity, and also cultivate the chemistry for innovation all around them.

So what does a Creative Economy leader do to create creativity?

To answer that, I got creative myself. Instead of benchmarking the usual corporate exemplars, I thought, why not learn from a leader of unambiguously creative experiences?

Enter, Stage Right

I found a willing subject in a brilliant theatrical director, Ethan McSweeny. Today internationally acclaimed, McSweeny has been a rising star since American Theatre hailed him in 2006 as a “wunderkind with a Midas touch.”  Enjoying critical and commercial success on Broadway, regional and institutional theatres around the world, this 44 year-old- talent has directed some 75 plays (classics, musicals, new works), from Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Shaw to experimental off-Broadway productions. He’s now moving into film and opera too.

Last autumn I attended his production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. With its lyrical acting, imaginative staging, and awe-inspiring dream sequences, this rendition of the romance was hands-down best I had ever seen. When I later heard McSweeny talk about staging the play, I realized his creation was not just his own clever ideas; it was also the collaborative harvest of many talented contributors he had nurtured as a “creative leader.” I wanted to know more.

The Tempest – Puppets

A Dialogue Begins

We began a dialogue about his craft and leadership. I saw a couple of his other productions and a rehearsal of his A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I interviewed members of that show about working with Ethan (Adam Green, who played Puck; Joe Smelser the Washington Shakespeare Theatre’s Resident Stage Manager; and Jenny Lord, McSweeny’s Assistant Director on the production).

Through it all, I was probing the mindset and practices McSweeny brings to “creative leadership”; and also gleaning more general lessons for leading talented people to develop innovative products or services.

The insights that emerged addressed two critical questions: First, “the what”: what makes for a great creative product or service? Second, “the how”: how should a leader work with different creative people to achieve that?

What follows summarizes my findings for question #1. Question #2 will be the subject of a future post.

What Makes For A Great Creative Product/Service?

Four principles emerged from our conversations. They’re applicable for any leader developing a creative product or service:

1. Creative Leaders situate their product in a broader and competitive context. In earlier times, live theatre was literally “the only show in town.” Today, multiple visual, auditory, and other entertainment experiences compete for attention of potential audiences—television, YouTube, video games, even texting with your friends: “No theatre director should ever forget,” Ethan noted, “that we now live in a multi-mediated age. You have to stage A Midsummer’s Night Dream as a worthy alternative to someone’s experience at home watching Downton Abbey or playing War of the Worlds with friends.”

McSweeny sees today’s richer (even intrusive) media environment as opportunity as much as challenge.  He strives to fuse live performance and digital, technically-delivered content and effects, as part of his signature style. As he reflected, “I have a reputation for ‘visual, large-scale stagecraft’—because I bring powerful images, across-the-stage-movement and high impact design to my work. As a child of the digital revolution, I‘m comfortable integrating video and specialized sound and music with visually-inspiring settings. But it has to be done in a way that honors the text and story.”

His comments did faint justice to the gripping sensations I had watching his productions: an Elizabethan romance reinterpreted as lovers’ folly in a noisy and louche Havana sugarcane plantation of the 1930s; a fantasy wedding of The Tempest symbolically represented by luminous 40 feet-high puppets; fairies and spirits of Midsummer Night’s Dream cavorting on chandeliers, dressed like 19th century French cabaret players, rhythmically swaying to music blended of romantic and surreal electronic sounds.

For McSweeny, visual stagecraft helps position live theatre against competitive offerings of cinema. “In a film, the director’s camera forces you to look at certain things moment by moment. In a theatre, the audience can—and does—look wherever it wants, seeing more than this or that actor talking.  The theatre director can provide dramatic and visual engagement more richly, high, low and sideways across the stage picture.”

Creating Experience

2. Creative Leaders configure their products as an overall experience. The shift of businesses towards experience-driven products and services has been underway for some time. But what in fact is “a creative experience”? And how does a creative leader construct it?

When Ethan McSweeny directs live theatre, he builds an experience holistically, in often surprising ways: “I put a lot of attention into the ‘entire package,’” he commented. In fact, the “package” goes well beyond visual and auditory stagecraft.  He pulls in multiple elements to support “the central premise of theatre: the actor speaking on the stage.” The play’s story, for McSweeny, is all important, and informs the auditory experience of live people speaking to one another.

But McSweeny mixes in still other ingredients, for example the contemporary conversations and narratives that people bring into the theatre with them. “They all are reading the same newspapers and watching the same events that I and the actors are. We look for opportunities to bring that wider world into each performance.”

And the timing of speech and action adds further to “the package.”  Live theatre exists in time with its audience, Ethan explained, but what spectators sense and feel from performance must also “lift them ‘out of time,’ to a heightened, and exceptional realm.” The pacing and rhythm of the production are tools to create an experience both of the moment and beyond it.

Even the physical space of the theatre plays an experiential role. “We look at the shape of the stage, arrangement of seats, acoustics, how close people are sitting next to each other. We consider them all to create an intimate, group experience.”

Director Ethan McSweeny’s Cuban “Much Ado”

A Central “Theory of Value”

3. Creative Leaders build the overall experience on a central “theory of value.” To deliver a distinctive and emotionally meaningful experience, the creative leader must offer a specific “theory of value” (my phrase). For McSweeny, the actual text of the play, and the way the actors project and bring its multiple stories to life must be the center of everything. The experience should radiate out from that core.

That is perhaps not surprising. What gives his “theory of value” a special edge is the unusual constellation of ideas be believes (and trades on) to make great drama compelling.  First, he explained, successful live drama must make vivid human behavior and emotions: “we attend a play to see a mirror held up to human nature itself.”

Second, what the mirror shows must be enhanced by story – but story that explores status-clarifying interactions among people. Ethan suggested that “great drama is not simply characters seeking wealth or power or similar. It’s a picture of human relationships in dynamic hierarchy, people struggling with each other to work out some pecking order, like the animal kingdom. It might be about wealth or power, but also about emotions, or romantic interest, or someone validating his intelligence relative to a foe or a friend. We’re fascinated to see that aspect of the human condition unfold in the language, gestures, and voices of actors.”

Bringing In The House

The theory of value extends beyond the edge of the stage. It rests also on portraying nature and status to touch the prejudices, anxieties and hopes of people watching. McSweeny directs his plays to enmesh both actors and spectators in the same moment of human emotion.  “The actors and I always look for ways to spark laughter or other feelings collectively among people sitting together. Their joy or sorrow has to play off each other’s, and also that of the actors. The best experience is shared together.”

“Yet at the same time,” Ethan elaborated, “great theatre must also make members of the audience each feel as though they are being spoken to individually. Universal emotional truths are understood by any audience person’s specific circumstances. They become real for different people in different ways.”

Building Culture and Process

4. The Creative Leader builds the experience as an emergent process. Though McSweeny described clearly his goals and beliefs about great theatre, he was also adamant that realizing those is a team sport. Actors, stagehands, prop people, costumers, technical directors and many more all play a role in what the director facilitates. It is an iterative and collective process that the creative leader must cultivate. Through his or her guidance, all together discover a collaboration, and find a shared rhythm of group creativity. All must believe and behave so that the talents of many people sum to more than individuals working alone.

*****

This final proposition looks ahead to my next essay: about the “how” of Ethan McSweeny’s creative leadership. Please watch for it in a future post.

Originally published on Forbes.com

In olden days, when you started a career, nobody told you to “follow your passion.” You joined the family business or found another job. If you liked it, you did what your boss asked, and maybe more, to earn a raise and get promoted. If you didn’t like it, you did the minimum the boss expected, so you could collect the wage, and look for ways to spend less time at the office. Passion wasn’t part of the story (except winking about someone’s romance off in the stockroom). Your job was following instructions of the person you reported to; the career advice was “just make your boss look good.”

Causes That Make The Heart Grow Fonder

Today, the new career wisdom is finding work you love. Whatever you do, go after a job or organization that emotionally grips you, where you can “find personal meaning;” “join a cause you care about;” “make a difference.” Above all, when building your career, to thine own self be true.

There’s nothing wrong with crafting a career that engages you with all you like and believe. Plenty of research supports “employee passion and engagement” leads to higher morale and performance. If you’re lucky to be in a job that pays you fairly to work on something you absolutely love—well, step on the accelerator. Such gigs are rare, and don’t last forever.

They also have the added benefit of making bosses, supervisors, or “accountable team leaders” less important to your satisfaction. You can deal with annoying management if you’re over the moon with the work. If you’re really lucky, Mr. or Ms. Higher Paygrade actually helps you be more successful. Here, by all means, stay-and-play and count your blessings every day. You’re probably in the top 10% of working stiffs out there.

Quandary In The Middle

At the bottom of the distribution is perhaps another 20%–people who have just awful jobs, grinding, boring, poor pay, stupid co-workers, abusive bosses. If you’re one of these poor souls, you’re trying to find something better, every day. Godspeed.

Harder is when you’re in a job like 70% of the world actually has. The job is sort-of OK but the program is not something you really love. Or something changes to cool the passion you first had. Maybe you’ve discovered the dream project you were promised was just cleverly labelled drudgery. Maybe the company that so intrigued you when you applied takes a new direction, abandoning the mission once so engaging to you. Maybe the boss who was first cheering you is succeeded by a total jerk. Who wants to follow him or her? Or stay in a company when your passion goes cold?

Here’s some grey-haired wisdom: don’t pull the rip-cord too fast. Bailing out prematurely might cost you career enhancing opportunities.

Put aside obvious considerations about risk, compensation, and “grass is always greener” mirages in today’s volatile economy. If you’re in search of more passion at work, sometimes staying put—and following the boss for a while longer—can be the wisest course.

The Bank Shot Strategy

Here’s why. Smart and ambitious people always do some job-hopping. It’s how you find what you like and what likes you; it’s how you raise your experience and salary. But the cleverest people play the game like billiards: they don’t always knock the ball in the pocket straight-on. They use a bank shot. Sometimes you have to zig before you zag to work that thrills you.

You might feel faint enthusiasm—or even hate—your job and your boss right now. But before you rush after some new opportunity, consider some critical assets you could be building by staying put, at least a little longer. Right there in River City there’s a potential platform of skills, knowledge, and networks that might accelerate your access to—and faster success in—a job you really want.

Before You Bail

Before you discard your current situation, take stock of three questions:

1. Does today’s boss/company/project build my skills for a future passion?

Enthusiasm and excitement will not be enough to succeed in your dream job. You’ll have to be good at lots of different things, many not part of your wheelhouse today.

A young professional I knew had a passion to work in a “food revolution start-up.” He had plenty of experience in biology and agriculture, but needed more operational chops. He took a job at an online retailer, and weathered through long and mind-numbing hours, and a decent enough if not necessarily inspiring boss, managing warehouse logistics. He left a year later for a bigger, better position, overseeing all operations for an urban farm start-up.

“No question, the former warehouse experience was major in landing the new position,” he reports.

2. Does today’s boss/company/project build knowledge for a future passion?

Excelling at a job—and landing one you dream about—requires not just skills but more general understanding too: of an industry, trends and changes affecting its businesses, and even the lingo of its practitioners. You can learn a lot of that just by coming into a sector that interests you, even in a lowly or boring job: get familiar with the problems leaders in that world wrestle with, how the winners within it talk and think, how its business models are changing.

If you open your eyes, and talk to your boss about those things, you can make yourself a much more strategic candidate for the dream job later. If you want to join an educational technology disrupter, work first in a public school, and absorb the dynamics of classroom teaching and administrative budgets; if you crave a cool job in publishing, benefit from peripheral lessons about customers and merchandising in your menial job at Barnes and Noble . Ralph Lauren began his journey as a global fashion magnate by first selling ties at Brooks Brothers.

3. Does today’s boss/company/project build networks and relationships for a future passion?

You’ll always need strong networks and connections to people who can supply money, knowledge, and innovation for the work that you love. How can you use today’s situation, including relationships offered by your boss, to extend your own networks?  You may be sitting on more golden people capital today than you realize.

Earlier in my own career, I ran an intern program at United Way Worldwide. The organization was, in the eyes of the young professionals we recruited, an old-fashioned, staid charity. But the ambitious interns figured (rightly) they could use their UWW experience not just to build meat-and-potatoes skills in fundraising and donor management, but also to cultivate relationships with other mission-driven organizations in the United Way ecosystem. The stars of the program tapped networks to land future positions in social innovation start-ups, urban community organizations, non-profit consultancies, and international development NGOs.

Timing the Leap

Stated simply, sometimes following a current boss, even if less than inspiring, can let you extract a lot of professional development value for a passion to come later. When you’re on your way up, and are eager to make a change, rethink the old saying. Don’t just look, but learn before you leap.

Originally published on Forbes.com

Steve Jobs is a flawed movie about a flawed leader. But go see it. The price of admission is well worth the two hour exploration of the moral ambiguity of leadership.

Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin have created an engaging but uneven production. Visually vivid and fast-paced, Steve Jobs lacks the storytelling brilliance of The Social Network: interwoven tales of Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions, insights, relationships and blessed luck that alchemically launched the multi-billion dollar Facebook. In this film, Sorkin expects us to take Jobs’ vision and abilities for granted, relegated as footnotes to the melodrama of parent-child abandonment, and redemption. OK, Jobs’ lost father and denial about daughter Lisa are part of the great Apple mythology. But the story of this guy’s leadership is so much richer.

Questions Unexplored

Throughout the film, I was longing for deeper understanding: how did Steve Jobs’ market-moving insights about the new digital future arise? What allowed him to attract brilliant acolytes and then extract every drop of their creative blood? How did he learn from failures at NEXT and Apple? Isaacson’s biography fills in some of those gaps—but the film was never intended as just the TED talk for the book. Missed opportunity.

But the film does excel in one important way: its heart-wrenching dramatizations of Jobs (played with cruel insouciance by Michael Fassbender) coolly manipulating those who served him so well. This biopic tells us too little about why Apple soldiers like Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Wozniak, and Joanna Hoffman were willing to go so deep into their personal wells for the boss. But the slavish experience of it all does shine brightly through. It reminds you why Jobs is a leader you hate to love and love to hate.

Performances of supporting actors (Michael Stuhlbarg, Seth Rogen, Kate Winslet) grab your gut: the pain of unrequited sacrifices; pleadings for even a small gesture from Jobs to ennoble one’s humanity; in-your-face emotions of well-intentioned people struggling for dignity when abused and challenged so unreasonably. You’ll wince knowingly watching the personal wreckage forced by “Steve’s reality distortion field.”

The clash of emotions pulls you in. You keep asking yourself, why has this guy risen to the status of secular god when he seems like about the worst boss anyone could ever have?

But You Know The Answer

Because people everywhere overlook bad behavior and HR prescriptions when a leader-perpetrator creates products and financial success that “dent the universe.” And despite objections to the film by Tim Cook and widow Lauren Powell, Jobs’ demeaning (if also messianic) leadership style is well established.

So should we be proud, embarrassed, or simply resigned to the lionization of leaders like Steve Jobs? Is he a “model leader” or just an exception to what the model is? Or should be?

Ambivalence About Heroic Leaders

Hard to say, given the cognitive dissonance lurking in the questions. Try this experiment at home: when you get back from the movie, pick up any recent leadership book—and compare its advice to what you just took in with Steve Jobs.

Chances are you’ll see major disconnect between the film and the book in your hand. Most leadership lore today (including some of my own)—advocates behaviors we would admire in a personal relationship. The great leaders, you read, are trusting and authentic. They’re fundamentally honest. They’re good at listening. They care about you and not just themselves.

Now Steve Jobs, in the film and beyond: a visionary and genius but also an anti-Christ of today’s best practice canons for leadership development. The guru of Apple could be deceitful, secretive, and dismissive of employee concerns. Narcissistic on and off stage, and self-absorbed with strange personal habits that he forced others to cater to. He rode his people hard, often refusing to even acknowledge their contributions. He knew the value of a talented team, but only rarely let subordinates change his mind. Jobs scorned corporate philanthropy and social responsibility.

He was tolerated for all this because he created dazzling products and a sense of elite and “techno-change-the-world-cool” around him. Chosen followers were granted membership in a special club. Part of what made the club so valuable was that anyone could be thrown out without warning.

In Praise Of Bruising Self-Interest

Of course leadership founded simply on taking advantage of others does not automatically result in “denting the universe.”  But looking out for yourself, sometimes manipulating the truth or other people’s trust, and playing inauthentic roles to achieve a goal can all be helpful to your success—because that’s the real world of power and leadership.

Such in any case is the challenge of  a new book by Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer, who  argues vigorously, almost defiantly, for this world view. In Leadership BS, as the title suggests, Pfeffer dismisses the ideology of the current “leadership industry” and its “romantic and lay preaching” of feel-good, authentic behaviors for would-be leaders. Pfeffer remind us that so many otherwise esteemed leaders—Abraham Lincoln, Henry Kissinger, Jack Welch, Bill Gates—can all be cited in their careers for manipulative behavior, trust-destroying lies, and look-out-for-me moments. Steve Jobs is a frequent case example in the book.

Leadership BS makes a detailed, compelling argument for why modesty, authenticity, truthfulness, and caring for subordinates can actually undermine leader success. And therefore that such behaviors shouldn’t always be put on a pedestal. For Pfeffer, the  most certain shrine belongs to the real and big leaders whom we  admire for accomplishment and power, with all their warts, quirks, and HR-incorrect behavior.

Yes But…

Pfeffer’s perspective is a valuable antidote to the wishful thinking in many leadership narratives today. But let’s not push our moral pendulums all the way back to Hobbes and Machiavelli. Brutish and manipulative leadership will always have its place. But there’s plenty of evidence that helping others and building trust across an organization also drives individual success. Should we really dismiss the many leadership memoirs that avow trading early career cunning for the wisdom of reciprocity and people development later in life? Great leaders do grow and change along the way. Even Steve Jobs, as his cancer closed in, conceded how much he had learned from others in his earlier life.

But Are The Times A-Changing?

Finally, acknowledging the value of a more selfish, power-centric leadership model may simply reflect the high water mark of a paradigm superbly adapted to the still  current world of hierarchical organizations. What about future organizational models for future kinds of work? When the creation of value depends more and more on cross-boundary networks and problem-solving, trust-building and collaborative governance will become more imperative. Forward thinking, many successful leaders are already embracing open-style, democratic and people-honoring principles—and behaviors to nurture performance communities among people who in no way “report up” to an ego-serving, high-handed master. Today’s emphasis on leaders who emphasize higher purpose and authenticity may be less wishful thinking than next-horizon adaptation.If so, consider how another film might portray Steve Jobs in some imaginary, future reincarnation, say  in the year 2025—what leadership values and approach would be needed to reinvent Apple then?

Originally published on Forbes.com