It’s widely understood that leadership is hard, and for many reasons. One of the most obvious yet overlooked aspects is that as the leader, you’re always in the game. Given quick thought, doing otherwise wouldn’t appear to be an option. Indeed, such immersion, such constant closeness, is assumed to be the very thing that heightens a leader’s ability to perceive threats and seize opportunities that would otherwise be missed. But what if the opposite is true? What if it’s walking away that matters more?
In researching my first book, A Deliberate Pause, I interviewed one of the hundreds of leading entrepreneurs, Richard Tait. For a significant portion of his career, Richard was relatively unknown, at least outside of Microsoft. Within the tech giant, he was a legend, one of the key movers in establishing 13 different businesses, including Expedia. (A lesser-known fact: it was Tait who hired current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.) Within the company, Tate was given unusual freedom to move from idea to idea. To some, Tait had a certain sense. Rather than a sense, he credited a habit: the habit of walking away. He knew its power, and he knew one more thing. Walking away is simpler and far less dramatic than we assume. His insight is one of the most important to the success of any leader.
The power of walking away
Were you to look across the businesses Tait helped launch at Microsoft, it would be hard to discern a pattern. At least on the surface, each new one appeared to have had little to do with the ones that came before. It’s an unexpected finding. Very often we assume that leadership success comes from staying locked into sameness – the same space, topic and even way of leading.
Tait knew it was less the pattern in the business and far more the ones in the leader and their personal practice that held the key. He believed that practice included the habit of walking away. By walking away, Tait said, he could always see something more. Not just see extensions of his immediate success, but see whole new worlds where the challenges he loved of solving a problem or reaping untapped value could be newly fused with the creativity he became known for. It’s a belief that helps explain what many find difficult to comprehend. After decades of success, Richard Tait walked away to found Cranium.
Misunderstanding what walking away means
What baffled his peers was that when Tait left Microsoft, the tech titan dominated its market. By contrast, Cranium was a poorly funded startup in a marketplace that most considered dead as a doornail. That market was board games. Think Monopoly, Sorry and Chutes & Ladders. But Tait saw what others had buried in their long-established business models and set ways of leading that were missed. He saw some very important things missing in the board game sector, among them creativity, challenge and the thrill of charting your own path, and perhaps most ironically of all, fun. Though not obvious to others, they were the very ingredients Tait had seen and pursued in the other businesses he’d helped launch. It was something he believed he could only see by walking away – not professionally, at least not at first.
Richard Tait had the habit of walking away in other ways. He didn’t do it only when he hit a wall. That’s how most of us think of walking away – as something done under duress or pressure, as an occasional thing. Such conditions are rarely conducive to clear thinking or effective leadership. Tait’s way was much simpler and far more regular. His habit was to insert walking away into his daily routine – including, as it turns out, going to lunch.
The simple practice any leader can develop
Tait realized that the simple act of getting up from his desk and walking away from his workspace to go get lunch each day offered a natural and potent shake-up in his thinking. The habit of others, Tait saw, was to stay put. To prove leadership by never leaving your post. Tait found enormous benefits in ignoring that familiar model, among them clear-headedness, objectivity and the ability to reflect.
What he saw was that accruing such benefits didn’t require much change on his part. In fact, he quickly realized that the benefits could be easily enhanced and could even be enjoyable. More than just getting up, changing his surroundings and going to lunch, Tait began to walk a different way to lunch every day. Sometimes he’d walk a different block. Other times, he’d do something as simple as walking left around a tree rather than right. Such simple things, he said, shifted his view, sometimes just a little, but over time massively so.
For a while, he practiced alone. Then he upped his game. Each time he walked, he challenged himself to talk to someone he didn’t know. Simply saying “hi” counted. Sometimes he’d ask someone for directions even when he knew a route well. Other times, he’d comment on the weather, the menu or the slowness of a lunch line. Tait said he never knew what it might yield back. His words had little to do with it. What mattered was walking away from the known.
When Tait sold Cranium, it was worth nearly $80 million. Even more, it had revived an industry and given it new value. People often look at Tait’s record of success with other ventures and label him a genius, someone with an implied uncopiable sense that others lack. Tait said it was simpler. He just learned to make walking away central to his leadership. You can too. Think about it over lunch today.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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