Imagine yourself observing a pond where ducks and Canadian geese are going about their business. Suddenly a pair of swans lands on the pond. They stand out starkly and magnificently in their whiteness and nobility. Your eye is drawn immediately to them. Even if you love other water fowl, the swans capture and keep your attention. If you are distracted, even for a moment, your gaze automatically returns to the swans. The swans invariably become the focal point of your gaze, over and over. Meanwhile, the motley smattering of ducks and geese, there all along, hunker down, glad to be suddenly invisible and unobserved.

As a woman who has worked in leadership roles, I actively recruit other women to consider promotional opportunities. Typically, their responses evoke the swan and geese. Here’s what they say:

I don’t see myself as “out front.” I prefer to be behind the scenes.

I’m not ready to be the Leader – people wouldn’t accept me in that role.

I am uncomfortable with the thought that everything I do will come under a magnifying glass if I am the Leader. I don’t want that kind of scrutiny.

My designation of Leader as a proper noun above says a lot about the underlying problem. For people who have been historically treated as inferior – for gender, ethnicity, race, or some combination, the Leader is on a pedestal. With no experience to the contrary, it’s inconceivable to picture someone who looks like them in a leadership role. Furthermore, in a culture of camouflage and understatement, where survival is the name of the game, it’s hard to imagine being a swan. Sure, the admiration is nice, but the exposure is brutal. People are always watching you. Forget trying to hide or blend in. Cringing at the thought of all those rifle sights pointed at them, and all those potential bullet holes, they choose not to stick their necks up. Leadership becomes a hard sell. How can we make it a more palatable, and even attractive endeavor?

For too long, we have expected our leaders to be swans – always in the spotlight, always refined and elegant, always large and impressive. And, oh yes…mostly white.

Think of the performance pressure! It’s daunting to be the one everyone turns to for wisdom, direction, decision-making. How can one leader be capable of genius in all circumstances? Yet this is what our culture expects of its leaders – that they are in their swan suits 24/7, and that they must be infallible, or at least right most of the time. Even worse, some leaders actually believe the hype. They think they are blessed and know best, and that they deserve deferential status and treatment. Once we give them authority and allegiance, our culture presses us to support them. Instead of mere leaders, these people become LEADERS. To criticize or undermine the LEADER is considered risky or, in the case of government LEADERS, unpatriotic. Consider Hitler. How can we normalize leadership, and take away its god-like status?

It’s a clear fact of biology that swans beget other swans. Historically, the leadership cycle is similar. Privilege begets privilege. Those with privilege – wealth, education, culture, professional networks, dominant race – assume they and their progeny are destined to lead, either by force of personality (confidence and entitlement), family background, or the ability to buy a leadership position outright, by grossly outspending an opponent. Consider North Korea’s former President Kim Jong-il and his son and current President, Kim Jong-un. Consider Donald Trump. And even though the myth of a Horatio Alger persists, where a (white) man can shape his own destiny in America, despite his origins, the reality is that there are few leaders who begin in Horatio’s middle class shoes and circumstances. Leadership has, historically, been the province of the white upper classes, with notable American exceptions like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomajor. In each of these examples, however, the persistence of their opponents’ drive to make them fail shows just how much the status quo feels threatened by the difference their leadership embodies. Regardless of one extraordinary man’s, or one extraordinary woman’s incredible and inspiring wager against the odds, the leadership path for most women and people of color remains difficult, discouraging, and for many, inaccessible.

There is something terribly wrong with the leadership farm team. The system reinforces the Peter Principle, where the usual suspects (privileged people) ascend to their level of incompetence, and the establishment (their peers) keeps them in place. Across all levels of society, we replicate the horror of emperors with no clothes. We draw a small and tight circle around who is eligible for swan status. In doing so, we intimidate and exclude whole populations of prospective leaders who, by gender, race, language, or socioeconomic circumstance, deem themselves unworthy or unqualified to enter the circle. What a missed opportunity!

So what is the answer for an increasingly diverse society that needs leaders with different and creative solutions to the problems we face? I am not advocating that we transform ducks and geese into swans. We don’t need a pond full of swans! But what if we could develop a leadership path that creates a huge cadre of part-time swans – children and adults who represent the diversity of this nation, and who have the potential and power to spark much needed new thinking? These sometime swans need to find their voice and develop leadership skills, attitudes, and strategies for episodic leadership – those moments when they step into leadership roles and wear some swan feathers. And since we don’t know who the right people are for these times ahead in our families, communities, public and private institutions, and government, it means that we must enable everyone to be leaders in training.

I don’t believe in “born” leaders or naturally creative people. Rather, I think we each are endowed with seeds of leadership and creativity. We develop these seeds (or let them shrivel), depending on our circumstances, our experiences, the feedback we get, and the way we use that feedback to grow and develop along a continuum of leadership and creativity. Some of us will never stand or step up. But some of us will step forward sometimes, when the need calls and we have the right combination of skills attitudes, encouragement and resolve to make something happen. My interest is to shift the balance for the whole population toward “sometimes.”

Growing leaders who have the opportunity to be swans some but not all of the time requires a lower case but strategic effort to prepare “birds” who can courageously enter the fray ad hoc, then return to the safety and normalcy of duck or goose business. Sure, some sometimes swans will find that they are good at leadership, and comfortably take on more and more swan characteristics as part of their leadership regimen.

My hope is that these developmental swans will not look like the privileged people who previously felt entitled to wear the feathers. Meanwhile, the more self-absorbed LEADERS – those remaining birds who have made a career out of being puffed up all the time – need to evolve, lest they become extinct.

So, the task is monumental. But there is a starting point. It begins with creating enough dissatisfaction to motivate lots of people to think differently. In fact, something that is useful to consider is the Dissatisfaction formula – the brain-child of Richard _______, who conceived it as additive, and ______Dannemiller, who morphed it into a multiplicative formula so she could maximize the impact of a “zero” response. Here’s the formula:

Dissatisfaction x Vision x Next Steps > Resistance

If one person is dissatisfied, we won’t get very far. If many are dissatisfied with the status quo of mostly privileged white leaders, well, do the math. If we can agree on a Vision to prepare a vibrant, multi-faceted group of diverse people capable of taking leadership roles (some of whom would be willing and able to step into greater and greater responsibility as leaders over time), we are on the same page. I will propose Next Steps in a series of eight essays to appear in this blog.  Some are easier and faster than others. Any combination will advance the Vision. All of them together will accelerate impact.

So let’s talk about Resistance. The biggest obstacle is time. You can’t change the status quo (or the farm team) overnight. This is a generational project that needs to create and maintain focus and momentum over time.

That brings us full circle back to Dissatisfaction. We need LOTS of dissatisfied people, with some staying power. A critical mass of people (parents, educators, mentors, and potential leaders) must recognize the problem, accept the challenge, learn new skills and awareness, and use these to change both the culture and the future.