Leadership: The Family Business
The leadership pedigree that gave rise to Conscience-Driven Leadership.
My fourth-great-grandfather rigged the convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln.
My teenage great-grandmother took notes from the Senate gallery for her father before women had the right to vote.
My father was named in TIME Magazine when he was seven.
I was raised in a circus.
Growing up in a family like ours teaches you not to take obstacles at face value. And when you carry the “maverick” gene, that perspective matures into a kind of allergy to constraint. And eventually, swimming in the same lane as your parents becomes an unbearable constraint.
So we leave.
Why we leave
Leadership has been the family trade for a century and a half: six generations of us raised inside the halls of power. What sets us apart from the Rockefellers or Vanderbilts is that, at least in my line, no one was content to do the job they inherited. I’m the latest in that line of mavericks.
Leadership is the family business, but leaving is how my family does it. When I walked away from the circus, I wasn't breaking from the legacy. I was fulfilling it.
I don't think leadership is a birthright (I’d be out of a job if I did!). But I was born into a family where the expectation of leadership was the baseline. And I won’t lie – it creates a lot of pressure, and it’s not always easy to deal with.
As you can imagine based on our deep independent streak, my family is not much for talking about what came before. I’d been raised with a few highlights, and my aunt wrote a biography of her grandmother, but I was too young to appreciate it until much later.
And folks tend to have one of two opposing reactions when you mention this kind of relationship to power: they’re awestruck or they want nothing to do with you. It’s not a great opener for a new relationship. So in my youth I learned to distance myself from the legacy. After all, I had my own path to forge!
But when I started studying leadership in earnest, I realized I needed to study my family’s relationship to leadership, too. And I discovered more visceral lessons from them – disappointment in some of the choices they made, and echoes of my own leadership conscience.
What follows is a personal reckoning of the lessons I’ve taken from the greatest mavericks among my ancestors.