I stunted my career.

Many moons ago, I listened to terrible advice and it’s likely my career trajectory will never fully recuperate.

Back in the day, I was the IT support guy. It’s easy to be a fly on the wall in that role. I  was innocuous, silently cajoling printer drivers or software updates. Eventually, as an IT person you just blend into the background. The point is, people get on with their work around you. People take calls, they continue with their meetings…you get the idea.

One day I’d overheard a respected manager briefing a group recently promoted to leadership positions.

“Today, I’m going to teach you how to learn to be OK with being an asshole.”

While the message wasn’t meant for me, I’d heard and internalized those words all the same: I have no desire to be an asshole, at least not on purpose — therefore, I must not be leadership material.

Worse still, there’s no shortage of evidence that validated this advice. I suspect anyone reading this has no trouble thinking of “leaders” that will occasionally, or frequently, behave like assholes.

Now that I’m fairly older and barely wiser, I know differently. But it would take me decades to finally find the courage to question that deeply flawed advice, and to find the grace to better understand those “assholes,” too.

I’m absurdly privileged.

I get to work for G Adventures, in case you haven’t had the pleasure of reading my ridiculous bio on LinkedIn yet. How I landed here is a whole other story, but suffice it to say, working here has not only given me the opportunity to see the world, it’s given me the opportunity to grow in ways I’d literally never imagined, as well as do some really meaningful work.

As I write this, I’m enjoying a Vietnamese egg coffee in a tiny cafe, on a tiny stool, on a busy street in Hanoi. The server politely corrected me on how to give it a good stir after watching me try to sip it like an amateur.

I’ve just wrapped up helping to deliver one of our week-long Leadership Camps here in Vietnam. These personal development events are insanely special and, without question, one of the favourite parts of my role. Since we’re a company that specializes in changing lives through travel, it’s fitting that we choose to hold leadership camps in a different destination each time. We invite 12 of our awesome people who are committed to starting the next chapter of their leadership journeys, wherever it takes them next.

One of those participants — whom I’ve known for over 20 years — told me something this week that inspired me to write these thoughts down. She works on enormous projects, and says the best way to tackle them is to just start because progress creates progress. It’ll be garbage at first, but it gets better.

It’s advice I’ve heard many times before. Like when Lennon and McCartney tell Harrison to just write words until it makes sense. So it occurred to me, as I sipped my freshly stirred egg coffee, that this time I can hear the advice because I too have been freshly stirred. So it’s time for some overdue real talk.

“Leadership” is weird.

Most people are looking for more of it. Many people are looking to demonstrate it. Some people demand to own it. But few people can define it.

The problem isn’t so much that the term is elusive. It’s that “leadership” is a term so overused, it has lost any useful meaning.

These days, people may use the word “leader” to describe an impressive person, someone powerful or with significant authority, someone famous, a hero, an expert—the list goes on.

It gets worse when we think of all the lousy analogies that are often used when discussing leaders: the pro athlete, the movie star, the billionaire CEO, the star pupil, the thought leader. Maybe some of those people are actively demonstrating leadership. More likely, though, they’re demonstrating no leadership, or worse, they’re demonstrating terrible leadership skills alongside the unrelated proficiencies we’re busy admiring.

So it’s no wonder that the status quo convinces people like I used to be that they have no place in the leadership conversation.

It’s no wonder that if you walk into a room full of people and ask, “Who here wants to be the best leader you can be?”, you’ll see some people shoot their hand straight up, some people ever-so-tentatively raise their hand, and others that will thrust their hands deep into their pockets so as not to inadvertently signal any inkling of an affirmative. They’re the ones I prefer to think of as our reluctant leaders.

I was a reluctant leader for most of my career.

For well over a decade, I’d dodged, sidestepped, and turned down opportunities because I’d convinced myself I wasn’t leadership material. In fact, I even went so far as to tell my managers that I’d never want to be considered for a management role. I may have said, “I never want to be a manager,” but what I meant was, “I never want to be forced to be an asshole.”

To be clear, you don’t need to be a manager in order to be a leader. Everyone has leadership potential. And anyone can lean into that potential whenever they choose, at any level of the organization. But if you’re going to be a manager, you absolutely have to try to get the leadership stuff right. People are being paid to follow your lead. If you’re setting a shitty example, expect them to follow that too. But I hadn’t figured that part out yet either.

Sadly, I wasted many years of my career following that lousy leadership advice. I couldn’t tell you why my goofball pretzel-brain allowed me to believe it for so long. I finally found the courage to challenge it about 10 years ago, but waiting so long to do so—it’s definitely closed a lot of doors that will never be open to me again. And I’ve been coming to terms with that.

I’ve also come to terms that all those “assholes” aren’t actually assholes—at least not most of them. They’re just one more link in a whole chain of people that followed bad advice too, and got good results. Seth Godin has a brilliant post titled The Jerk Fallacy that speaks to this (you can find it here). Briefly, there’s no shortage of evidence that demonstrates being a jerk can get results. So I can’t fault those people that see those results as confirmation they’re on the right course, and therefore never bother to test the alternatives. But any garden variety authoritarian can get results from threats, personal attacks, and empty bluster. It’s the truly exemplary leaders that take the harder, more compassionate path: to get the same results without behaving like an asshole.

It’s not about being “nice”. Amy Edmondson, Kim Scott, Liane Davey, and Stephen Shedletzky all have plenty of awesome material about how this works. It’s about attacking problems and performance, not people. Attacking people isn’t just wrong, it’s lazy. Anyone with authority can do it. Many try not to. Those that chose the old-school path need to try harder if they want to stand out as exemplary.

Ironically, today I find myself leading a team that develops and delivers kick-ass leadership camps, and all the content that supports it. We teach things like: how to have more courage to push the difficult conversations; how to develop better emotional intelligence; how to be more curious about not just your own role but about everything going on around you; how to bring out the best in others; how to listen to ideas with which you may not agree; how to recognize when the situation calls for you to step up or step back; etc. We have some secret sauce in there too, but these fundamentals are what most organizations would identify as “leadership skills”. After practicing them, you quickly realize these skills can be used in all aspects of life. They’re really just human skills.

It’s all about learning to be a better human.

Now what occurs to me is that if I was to walk into that same hypothetical room full of people and ask, “Who here wants to be the best human you can be?”, odds are much better that I’ll see 100% of those hands go up. Who doesn’t think of themselves as human, and who doesn’t want to get better?

So to my fellow reluctant leaders, I say, “screw leadership!” It’s a weird term that’s lost all meaning. The terms “leader” and “leadership” come along with so much baggage and bad advice, I don’t blame you for passing it up.

Instead, consider humanship. Just focus on being a better human. Put in the effort to show up for the humans around you, and lean into those same human skills — the ones we’re so often told are “leadership” skills. The truth is, you don’t need a title to practice them. In fact, from my experience, they have far more impact when you practice them before they’re the expected norm. Titles often catch up to the people who punch above their weight.

Before long I’ll be able to tap you on the shoulder and point out all the people in line behind you that have chosen to follow your lead. Even better, you may be able to convince those who’ve chosen the jerk path to consider the alternatives!

And let’s face it, the world needs all our reluctant leaders, right now.

I have stunted my career, and I’m doing what I can to make up for lost time. But my hope is that this finds other reluctant leaders out there that are still in their early days, and can learn from my mistakes so they can make way cooler ones of their own.

If you ever get the chance to attend something like our Leadership Camp at G Adventures, I hope you take it. It’s built for everyone including people like us—the ones who never saw ourselves as leaders until we were already leading.