Ready to take on 2025? Try “surrender” instead.
As leaders, we’re often conditioned to believe the fallacy that we are in control. “I’m the leader, so all these things that are happening are because of me.” “I can control how other people feel and what they do.” These are blatant distortions of reality that leaders are frequently invited to embrace. We’re told that great leaders take responsibility for everything and everyone … they decide what’s going to happen and then make it happen. Essentially, we’re told - though never in so many words - that great leaders play god. And for most of my career, I was all too ready to hear it. That’s often what my ego wanted to believe anyways.
But abundant research shows that the most effective leaders don’t operate that way. They don’t try to control the universe. They surrender to it. “Surrender” does not mean, “I give up - nothing about my team or organization is going to change.” Surrender means: “I humbly acknowledge that there are greater forces at play, and I seek to harness those forces for positive change.”
As just one source of research, take the 80,000 manager interviews conducted by Gallup over a 25 year period that resulted in the book First, Break all the Rules. The first conclusion of that research was that the most effective managers don’t try to change the people working for them. They get to know their people and deeply understand where they excel vs. don’t, and then make decisions to capitalize on their strengths and limit the impact of their weaknesses. They read the tea leaves, and then build their roles and strategy around their people. When we surrender, we naturally take a stance of listening and curiosity, because we know that we are not the wind, just the sail. And we need to understand which way the wind is blowing.
But “surrender” doesn’t mean we avoid saying the hard things. The opposite: when we surrender, we say our honest truth and let go of control about what happens next.
As a leader, when I was trying to control the universe, I had all kinds of ways of trying to “influence,” “control the narrative,” and move the chess pieces to where I thought they should be. But being a leader doesn’t mean you have to try and control how people think and feel. When we can slow down enough to be truly honest with the people we work with – without trying to overly control how they take it or what will happen next - we put the universe in the driver seat. When we’re honest and vulnerable, more often than not, the people we truly want to be doing this work (or spending our lives) with will come even closer. And the people we don’t actually want to be spending our limited time with, will tend to go away (one way or another).
So if you’ve already decided what you want to be different in 2025, I invite you to put that aside for a moment. Instead of asking, “What do I want to change in 2025?” ask yourself a slightly different question: what is the change that wants to happen in 2025? If you really look at your team - or your life - and listen to what it’s telling you, then you might see where the winds are blowing this year.
It might feel scary to start your year with some version of, “Okay, I surrender, this is all bigger than me and I’m not in control of it.” But if you can, you might be in store for your most powerful year of leadership yet.
