Sometimes you are the person in the room saying, “We can do this,” while quietly thinking, can we though? You still say it. Because everyone is looking at you.
You find the next step. You remind people why the work matters. You bring the energy back into the room. You convince everyone that the problem in front of you is solvable, or at least survivable, and eventually people start moving again. And most of the time, that is part of the job.
But there is a question we do not ask leaders nearly enough.
Who is doing that for you?
We spend an extraordinary amount of time talking about how leaders should inspire their teams and almost none talking about what keeps the leader inspired. Because at some point, your own enthusiasm needs feeding too.
Dentists have dentists. Hairdressers have hairdressers. Leaders need somewhere to go. And it’s not another leadership course.
We have been circling this idea through a couple of conversations recently. First, the Scandal version of leadership, the kind that creates enough trust and shared purpose that somebody might describe their loyalty as “over a cliff”. Then the less glamorous reality that inspiration only lasts when there is some execution underneath it.
But there is something sitting at the heart of both of those ideas.
Belief has to come from somewhere.
You cannot pour from an empty cup forever.
And perhaps one of the mistakes we make is assuming that whatever refills a leader has to look serious enough to count as professional development. Sometimes it will. But inspiration is much less orderly than that.
It can be a book you cannot stop talking about. Travel that reminds you that your version of normal is only one version. A conference where you scribble something in the margin and keep thinking about it six months later. A friend who works in an entirely different field and asks why you do something the way you do it.
An article you accidentally find at midnight. A conversation that follows you home. Someone younger than you asking a question you cannot answer. Someone older than you calmly reminding you that whatever currently feels unprecedented has, in some form, probably happened before.
Inspiration is wonderfully unreliable in where it chooses to appear. And perhaps that is the point.
We believe leaders need their own sources of wonder.
Wonder is not a word that appears very often in conversations about leadership. We are much more comfortable talking about performance, capability, resilience, efficiency, strategy and growth. All useful things.
But wonder?
Wonder feels slightly indulgent. It does not fit neatly into a quarterly plan. It is difficult to measure. Nobody is putting “encounter three ideas that completely rearrange the way you see the world” into your KPIs.
But maybe they should.
Because if your entire working life becomes strategy meetings, budgets, board papers, risk registers, performance conversations and dealing with whatever has become urgent that particular week, eventually your thinking begins to reflect the rooms you spend your life sitting in.
And those rooms can get very small.
You need things that interrupt them.
You need people who make you curious. Places that remind you the world is bigger than the problem currently sitting in your inbox. Ideas that send you down a rabbit hole. Conversations with people who have never read your strategy and do not particularly care about your organisational chart.
There is a danger, particularly as people become more senior, of every room starting to look increasingly similar. The same industries. The same conferences. The same people sitting on the same panels talking to each other about the same problems.
That cannot be the whole diet.
You need rooms where you are not the most accomplished person there. You need conversations where you have nothing particularly useful to add for a while. You need people whose work has absolutely nothing to do with yours. You need to encounter things with no immediate business case attached to them.
Because sometimes the best thing an idea can do is make you curious.
Imagine what we could do with that.
That sentence is probably one of the most useful forms of energy a leader can bring back to a team. Not certainty. Possibility.
The sense that there might be another way to solve this. Another person to learn from. Another question worth asking.
That is why maintaining your own curiosity is not some nice extra, sitting outside the serious work of leadership. It is part of the serious work.
Because if you are responsible for creating possibility for other people, you need to keep encountering possibility yourself.
You need things in your life that make you look up from the immediate problem. Things that remind you there is more to learn, more to see and likely more than one way to do almost anything.
Maybe that is what wonder gives us.
Not answers, necessarily.
Perspective.
A little more imagination. A little more energy. A reminder that the world is much bigger than the room you have been sitting in all week.
And maybe that is enough to send you back into that room seeing things slightly differently.
We spend a lot of time asking leaders what they are working on, what they are trying to achieve and what they are going to do next.
Maybe we should also be asking what they are reading. Where they are going. Who they are talking to. What they have seen recently that made them stop and think.
What is making them curious?
What is making their world bigger?
What are they encountering that has absolutely nothing to do with this quarter’s priorities but might change the way they think about the next five years?
Because you cannot keep asking other people to imagine what is possible if you have stopped looking for possibility yourself.
So perhaps the question is much simpler.
What is inspiring you right now?