It’s Not About You. And It’s All About You.
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Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.
Viktor Frankl
A CEO sat across from me last week, shoulders slumped, and said, "I feel like I'm failing my people. The pace is relentless, change is constant, and I can see everyone burning out. Including me. What am I doing wrong?"
You've probably had a version of this conversation yourself - whether out loud or in your own head. The constancy of change, the taxing complexity we're facing, and how we're running on fumes, burning out and sometimes even crashing completely.
Here’s the thing: this problem is not about you.
In their book ‘Mastering Leadership’, leadership scholars Bob Anderson and Bill Adams wrote a memorable line: “Structural forces are more powerful than individual commitment.” This stopped me in my tracks. When you think about it, it’s true.
Structural forces include the organisation design, culture, and the pervading societal drivers (for example, a capitalist economy, or a democratic system of government). Because these forces are so large, we don’t have a hope of making a dent when we try to change them, at least by ourselves. It’s like trying to swim upstream in a fast flowing river. No chance of making progress.
So when I'm working with leaders in this context, I'm unsurprised when I hear stories of fumes, burnout and crashing. I have a lot of empathy. I've been there myself - working 70-hour weeks, convinced that if I just pushed harder, I could somehow bend the organisational reality to my will. Spoiler alert: it didn't work.
When we discuss their challenges, and we begin to explore the immensity of the structural forces against them, there’s usually an audible ‘breathe out’. Something like, “Ah. This isn’t about me. I’m not useless after all.”
Well, no, it’s not about you. You’re not someone who needs fixing. You’re a human doing the best you can in challenging circumstances.
But let’s not let ourselves off the hook too fast. Because structural forces can also live inside us. Those types of structural forces include what makes us us: our values, assumptions, belief systems, and the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works and the way we need to show up in it.
So, while it’s not about you, it’s also all about you.
Or, more specifically, it’s about the choices you make. And the ones you don’t make.
When you’re swimming against the current, you’ve still got choices. You can keep swimming against the flow (“I’ll just grit it out.”) You can stop trying, and let the river take you where it takes you (“It’s all too hard, I give up.”) Or, you can look more widely towards alternative ways of reaching your destination - walking upstream along the riverbank for example - and find ways to get there (“What might be a different way of approaching this?”)
You’ve always got choices.
Yet when we’re in the thick of it, we often don’t see those choices. Or make the best ones.
In essence, the part that is all about you is your ability to remember that you’ve got choices, and your ability to exercise them wisely.
Sometimes those choices might be hard. Really hard. But does that make them any less important to make?
When you make deliberate choices, you begin to become an agent of change, rather than merely subject to it.
And that’s when true leadership begins.
What I'm noticing is that the leaders who navigate this well have learned to do a couple of things well:
First, they step back and ask themselves some different questions:
What's the real destination I'm trying to reach here?
What assumptions am I making about how I need to get there?
What would it look like to find the riverbank instead of staying in the current?
They also ask for help. They might ask for another person’s perspective. Or to partner up so they can share the load and navigate the complexities together.
What choices can you make today?
