Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude

by Raymond M. Kethledge

Solitude has been instrumental to the effectiveness of leaders throughout history, but now they (along with everyone else) are losing it with hardly any awareness of the fact. Before the Information Age—which one could also call the Input Age—leaders naturally found solitude anytime they were physically alone, or when walking from one place to another, or while standing in line. Like a great wave that saturates everything in its path, however, handheld devices deliver immeasurable quantities of information and entertainment that now have virtually everyone instead staring down at their phones. Society did not make a considered choice to surrender the bulk of its time for reflection in favor of time spent reading tweets or texts.

And leaders in particular—whose actions by definition affect not only themselves—have more than a choice. They have an obligation. A leader has not only permission, but a responsibility, to seek out periods of solitude. What follows are some ways to find it, and then use it productively.

But events comprising birthday cake and banter usually fail that test.

Reset expectations—expressly. Subordinates are entitled to clarity about not only what a leader expects of them, but what they can expect of their leader. A leader’s accessibility is no exception. The assumption, unless the leader says otherwise, is that she is constantly accessible—if not in person, then electronically. But the task of changing that assumption requires only an act of will. A leader can designate a certain number of workdays per month as no-meeting days, as Nate Fick does. A leader can mark off sixty or ninety minutes on his calendar each day for time to think. A leader can make it known that he does not text, and checks his e-mail only intermittently or at certain points in the day. (One really has to wonder what leaders who make a point of responding to e-mails within minutes are otherwise doing with their time.) A leader can designate weekends as periods for no work-related e-mails to be sent at all, as Wendy Kopp has done at Teach for America. Or better yet, a leader can do all these things. There is of course a certain price to be paid for changes like these. E-mails will go unanswered for hours rather than minutes, subordinates might have to wait sixty minutes to speak to a leader rather than do so immediately, and meetings about whatever the office tends to meet about might get pushed back a day.

Find space for solitude. This task is admittedly difficult for anyone without an office door, yet there are ways to do it. If you do have an office door, have the courage to close it when you have reason to; that’s what the door is for. If your workplace has a library, find reasons to go there; like a medieval church, its walls protect a culture often absent outside. An empty conference room could also serve, particularly if you spread lots of papers across the table. Both of these places, moreover, get you away from your computer and all the distractions that go with it. Lunchtime is also an occasion to seek time alone; if there are places where you can eat lunch outside—a park bench, a fountain square, almost anywhere that has a place to sit—go to them.

Eating alone in a restaurant is fine too; bring along some documents if you are worried about looking foolish. But leave your phone behind.

For analytical thinking or intuition, any activity that does not itself require focused attention will do: walking, running, early-morning rituals. One can also think with remarkable clarity while lying in bed in the minutes after awakening. Alternatively, one can engage in an activity that itself drives analysis, like journaling or memos to self. Other activities help clear out one’s mind (which is the same kind of quietude one has upon awakening): meditation and Peter Crawford’s night runs (“just focusing on my gait”) are examples.

Physical exercise also releases nervous energy, and can thereby help to restore emotional balance. The same is true of meditation. Heading outdoors to hike or sit on a rock can restore perspective and cut one’s problems down to size. To release excess emotion, one can also go to an empty room, or write a letter to a person one is upset with—and then not send it. And of course the outdoors can provide spiritual inspiration in countless ways. One can also find the same inspiration while sitting in an empty church.

Percolate beforehand. If you plan to use solitude to think about a specific issue, you should identify that issue in advance and briefly review any materials you think especially relevant. That will get your mind processing the issue beforehand, which often allows insights—sometimes analytical, sometimes intuitive—to come more quickly when you do think about it. Then you can spend your time in solitude thinking productively, rather than wasting time figuring out what, exactly, you should be thinking about. Moreover, if you’re doing analytical thinking and are not making progress, turn to something else and then circle back with a more open, intuitive approach later. Frequently you’ll find that your original analysis treated the issue as more complex than it actually is.

Prepare emotionally. Solitude routinely yields insights a leader does not expect, which is one of the principal reasons for seeking it. Even when a leader is thinking about some issue involving a subordinate or the organization as a whole, however, those insights are often about the leader himself: the realization that his own actions contributed to an employee’s mistake, or that he has been focused only on his own problems, or that he has neglected some area of responsibility. Solitude brings one closer to the truth, and sometimes the truth is discomfiting. For a leader who is already humble, these insights are not devastating. And for any leader, they are opportunities to improve. Embrace them.

Extroverts will be fine. Extroverts gain energy from interaction with others, while introverts lose it. And introverts gain energy from solitude, while extroverts lose it. (For a definitive explanation of the differences between introverts and extroverts, see Susan Cain’s Quiet.) But these energy transfers have little to do with how extroverts and introverts actually perform in these settings. Introverts can excel in social settings; extroverts can excel at thinking alone. The l...

Indeed extroverts will find that, when they make insights in solitude, the insights themselves will energize them. They will appreciate solitude even more as they experience its other benefits: creativity, emotional balance, and moral courage.

some quarters there is a “fear of missing out”: a fear that, if one unplugs from e-mail or news services or social media even for a few hours, they’ll be less current (a few hours less, to be exact) than their peers. And indeed that is true. But tracking all these inputs is surrender to the Lilliputians. One simply cannot engage in anything more than superficial thought when cycling back and forth between these tweets and work.

Embrace hard thinking. Even during time alone, it is easy for a leader to fool himself and everyone else into believing that he is doing substantive work when in fact he is merely reviewing superficial correspondence or performing functions that are almost ministerial. A leader should use solitude to identify his highest-value functions and then to do them.

Identify your first principles and stay connected with them. A leader’s first principles are the wellspring of all the benefits that solitude provides: clarity, creativity, emotional balance, and moral courage. A leader out of touch with his first principles will eventually run short of all these things. With a lack of direction internally, he will become directed externally. He will find himself governed by optics. He will have an uneasy awareness of a gap between what he thinks he believes and what he in fact chooses to do.

And when others see the gap—when they say he is phony or hypocritical, and discount his leadership accordingly—he will have nothing to draw upon inside.

Find a higher purpose for your leadership, and share it with your followers. The most inspiring leaders are ones who find some transcendent meaning in the enterprise they lead. That meaning might spring from shared first principles, as it could for any organization that shares them in earnest. It might spring from a sense of shared injustice, or the realization that suffering confers dignity, or an awareness that honest labor does as well. Or it might spring from the devotion that a group’s members share for one another. A transcendent meaning is one that by definition stands apart from the specific goals at hand. To find it, therefore, usually requires reflection. The leaders who do find it are the ones we honor most.