The SeX of Leadership – 3 Characteristics for Future Ready Leaders of Significance

By Christopher Lo
CEO & Founder of  iAdD Pte Ltd

Got your attention?!

A chance to share about leadership with a cohort of 17-year-old student leaders came up recently. As I pondered how to hook my young audience with leadership lessons that stuck, the dots connected. I would talk about the “SeX” of Leadership.  

the SeX of Leadership: inspiring Service forSignificance, feeling empathy, & delivering eXcellence.

The Context That Shaped My Leadership Experience

I used to believe that leadership and discipline were twins. Since age 13, I had always subjugated myself to discipline. I grew up loving the conformity, structure, and precision of drills serving in a uniform youth organisation. Even as a citizen soldier conscripting in the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), I relished the discipline and the self-imposed deprivation of my “freedoms”. Receiving the West Point experience deepened my desire to lead in the profession of arms. Duty, Honour, Country became my motto. My almost quarter century relationship with the military was thus born.

Yet, serving in Afghanistan 2012 made me realise at age 41, I was not meant to be in the military. The very disciplined structure that I loved, suppressed the nonconforming maverick inside me. I decided to retire from the SAF in 2013, after almost three decades of exercising leadership in uniformed organisations to pursue the path of entrepreneurship.

“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” John C. Maxwell

Future Ready Leadership for the Digitalization Age

The tough part of my transition was learning to unlearn and relearn the operating rules of the unfamiliar business jungle from the accustomed and familiar military jungle. What I found even tougher, was rewiring my mindset and embracing new habits to thrive in my present environment. Five years of hard knocks walking the entrepreneur path shapes you to change, adapt, and learn to see leadership in a new perspective.

I believe leadership remains a human endeavour.

The acceleration of technology adoption is intensifying. In her wake, smart technology is redefining the relationship between human connections. I acknowledge that the operating environment, context and structures between the military and the corporate world are opposites. These differences, in turn, impacts the motivational buttons of human behaviour. Despite the differences in context and physicality, the two environments are similar. They involve people. To be effective, the leader needs to understand how humans behave, think, and get motivated at different levels in the P&L world versus in the military/government. I feel urgency to define what future ready leaders ought to be to stay relevant for the world they shall inherit. 

The SeX of Leadership

Having experienced both contexts, I believe growing future ready leaders to lead well in the digitalization age is about the SeX of Leadership: inspiring Service for Significance, feeling empathy, and delivering eXcellence.

The role of leadership in the present is about delivering results. Empowered by the authority bestowed upon him by his title in an organisation, the leader, foremost, exercises leadership to mobilise his team to deliver eXcellence. This bottom line is a non-negotiable responsibility of the leader in the present. At the corporate level, this refers to the business’s P&L.

eXcellence is Delivering Results in the Present. Significance is Creating Meaning for the Future that Impacts.

Nurturing two teenage daughters, coupled with my decade-long volunteerism convinces me that the millennial generation possesses a strong sense of community on local and global scales. Compared to previous generations, millennials focus on larger societal needs rather than individual needs. Millennials are potentially the most socially conscious generation to date. My touchpoints validate that people in this new millennium gravitate to causes that matter. I am convinced future ready leaders must learn to lead with purpose and clarity as well as to link how leadership acts in Service for Significance. 

Leadership for millennials is not just about knowing or going the way; it is all about showing the way. The millennial leader must demonstrate leadership that provides the glue to show how the outcome contributes to some larger social significance. Creating meaning is the new bottom line that remains a non-negotiable responsibility of the leader for the future. At the corporate level, this refers to the triple bottom line of People, Profits, Planet.  

Empathy – The Missing Leadership Link

I observe that the gap exists to bridge Service for Significance with eXcellence. This link is about drawing out our awareness for empathy, both individually and collectively. Empathy is about being able to feel and relate to someone by feeling their pain just as you would being in their shoes. Empathy is the experience of understanding another person's condition from their perspective.

Advances in smart technology will continually redefine the relationship between human connections. To make social more human in the digital age, constant reminders are necessary to put the human in the centre of our solutioning. We can learn by walking similar pathways to gain the individual’s perspective. Such a method is, however, too slow and painful for most to receive the experience. I believe the better way is to embed the design thinking process for thinking about empathy in our structures, such as our education or learning systems. 

Design Thinking for Empathy

For starters, we could apply the 3P’s for human-centred strategy formulation to frame how to embed the process for thinking about empathy in our education or learning systems.

First, tweak our policies so that the learning of empathy is a fundamental academic requirement. Next, translate policies into a set of metrics and procedures to teach design thinking into academic curricula. Finally, design and grade projects based on the application of design thinking to promote constant practice of such disciplined thinking, with its upfront emphasis on empathy. The continuous reinforcement of such a rewards and recognition structure into the education process eventually promotes human-centric thinking as a habit over time.

Why should SeX for Leadership Matter?

I believe SeX for Leadership matters because these three critical ingredients could better focus HOW and WHAT we need to do individually and collectively to groom our leaders for tomorrow. It also proposes how the education systems could consider to provide the structure to socially engineer future ready leaders for tomorrow. Just as people remain the constant centre of change, sex remains the constant subject that generates excitement in and amongst people.

So when you think sex the next time, think of the SeX of leadership.