The Russian Hero Who Cost Me a Girlfriend

I nearly once married a Russian girl from Tula.

That was a long … long time ago…

She was fascinating, beautiful, smart, challenging, exotic, with a personality of her own…

For a few months, we were fascinated by each other…

We held hands, looked into each other’s eyes when we spoke, and watched each other’s movements with admiration.

Everything seemed to work…at first … until it didn't.

In effect, the cultural gap between us had an extraordinary ability

to turn perfectly innocent conversations into big misunderstandings,

… sometimes at astonishing speed.

I vividly remember one evening, The Evening that would become legendary between us…

trying rather foolishly to impress her with my supposedly broad cultural knowledge,

(Needless to say, during our courtship, I read every Russian book I could get my hands on…for obvious reasons!!)

I asked her about Ilya Muromets; I asked if she knew the story…

Of one of the great heroes of the Russian mythology,

Muromets … that legendary warrior of medieval Russia.

Well…she looked at me blankly.

And said that she had never heard of him.

I then made the big mistake of explaining who he was.

In my mind, I was sharing something interesting.

In hers, apparently, I was demonstrating that I knew something she didn't.

What I intended as intellectual flirtation sounded like intellectual arrogance.

That evening I discovered that knowledge,

like money,

has a strange property:

its value depends enormously on how you use it.

The story of Ilya Muromets nevertheless stayed with me ever since.

As I grew older and gained more experience in life,

I came to realise that his story is less a story about a hero than a story about transformation.

According to the byliny, the old East Slavic epic tradition, (although the historical identification remains debated).

Ilya begins life in almost complete helplessness.

For around thirty years, he is unable to walk and cannot use his arms or legs.

He remains at home while others work and live their lives.

Then two wandering pilgrims arrive.

In the traditional story, they heal him, and suddenly

the man who could do almost nothing discovers an extraordinary physical strength.

And this is where the story becomes interesting.

Ilya does not simply go from weakness to strength.

He goes through a whole sequence of identities.

First, he is the helpless child.

Then he becomes the extraordinarily powerful young man.

Then the warrior.

Then the protector of the land.

Then, according to the tradition,

…the wounded veteran who eventually lays down his weapons and

enters the monastery!

To me…

The real story is not:

weak man becomes strong.

It is:

From weakness to strength to competence to power to responsibility to renunciation.

And that last step is the one we often forget.

How do we define success then?

Most stories of success stop at power.

a)    The poor man becomes rich.

b)    The outsider becomes the boss.

c)     The weak becomes the strongest.

d)    The talented employee becomes the CEO.

But Ilya's story, at least in its later tradition, asks a more difficult question:

What happens after you have acquired power?

Because acquiring power is one thing.

Learning what to do with it is another.

A Swift look inside Organisations?

Ilya's transformation therefore reminds me

of something we often get wrong in organisations. And perhaps there is a lesson here for business.

Generally, organisations tend to promote people because they are good at something:

The engineer becomes a manager because she is technically brilliant.

The salesman becomes a director because he delivers numbers.

The analyst becomes a leader because he understands the data.

But competence and leadership are not the same thing.

A person can know more than everybody else in the room and

still be incapable of leading the room.

Worse, expertise can become a form of power.

Knowledge creates hierarchy.

The expert knows; the others don't.

And if that knowledge is displayed without sensitivity,

it can produce exactly what I accidentally

produced with my Russian girlfriend: distance instead of admiration.

The strongest person in the room eventually has to learn

that strength is not the same as authority,

and authority is not the same as leadership.

So, what does renunciation actually look like?

Outside a monastery…
It rarely means walking away.
More often, it looks smaller than that.

The engineer who could fix the bug in two minutes…
but doesn't.
Who lets the junior struggle a little longer,
because the struggle is the point.

The CEO who stops sitting in every meeting.
Not because she/he has lost interest.
But because her presence answers questions
before anyone dares ask them.

The expert who says nothing…
when he could easily be right.
Because being right, in that moment,
matters less than someone else becoming right on their own.

Renunciation, then, is not giving up ability.
It is withholding it.
On purpose.
So that others have room to grow into their own strength.

Perhaps that is the closest thing
organisations have…
to laying down one's weapons.

Lessons for Businesses…

a)    Intelligence impresses.

b)    Knowledge differentiates.

c)    But the ability to make another person feel intelligent is leadership.

This is one of the most difficult transitions in leadership:

from proving that you can exercise power to

creating an environment in which you don't have to exercise it all the time.

That is where competence begins to become leadership.

And perhaps that is also where my conversation with the Russian girlfriend went wrong.

I was trying to demonstrate what I knew.

I should probably have been more interested in what she knew.

Sources

1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Muromets