Leadership richness and reach
I’ll never forget the feeling I had, many years ago, when a senior leader spoke to me about an employee who had just been let go. This leader must have felt obliged to acknowledge the situation, since the employee had been a friend of mine. The leader commiserated by describing the termination as ... “a bummer.” Those words stuck with me, and not in a good way. The phrase seemed bloodless, lame, and utterly devoid of humanity.
I’ve noticed executive leadership often involves a trade-off between richness and reach. As leaders become more senior, increasing the scale of their communications, they sometimes lose emotional richness in their one-on-one interactions, especially with those who are layers beneath them in the hierarchy. It seems to be a common casualty of their increased preoccupation with a broader constituency.
It doesn't have to be this way. By way of contrast, think of Bill Clinton’s fabled interpersonal mastery. Stories abound of his extraordinary ability to make you feel like the only person in the room, seemingly absorbed in every syllable you have to say.
Great leaders master depth and breadth. They minimize the typical trade-off between richness and reach by cultivating the capacity for undistracted focus on the audience, whether it’s one person or many.