Listen to this post:
In many ways, I am a naive person. I’ve been told as much.
The word “naive” has many definitions that I won’t bore you with now—the current word’s first usage is documented as the very late 16th or early 17th century—but let’s just say that one meaning I invest in the word “naive” is “belief,” especially in the sense that people are who they say they are and mean what they say. I’m sure you can already see the problem. Knowing what we know about people and the world, such belief leads to your being taken advantage of, and I confess to allowing this to happen, even now.
Without trying to get too fancy about this, there’s a paradox in this situation—I am clearly aware of “being naive” as a character trait yet willingly accept its negative consequences. These consequences are often painful, so there must be an upside, right? A benefit that outweighs the negative scale of this interesting word and state of being?
There is a benefit: the willingness to try things that others who are not so “naive” would immediately assume will end in failure.
As I have written previously, I worked in a higher education leadership position for several years. During that time, being naive led me to trust hundreds of people to help build or execute many plans and projects. These projects often shared one interesting commonality: they had been tried previously and failed. In terms of non-proof-of-concept, this is often enough to deter people from taking another bite at the apple—in this sense, the opposite of “naive” is “safe.” Here, a good dose of naivety works in your favor: just because something didn’t work before doesn’t mean it wasn’t the right idea. As we all know, there are many reasons why something might not work at a given time. Dare I say, it is naive to assume that whatever has been attempted previously was done so in a proper or competent manner?
For example, our institution had tried to create a couple of degree programs in the past and failed; this led people to believe that it couldn’t be done, the goal could never be achieved, and we shouldn’t try again. I’d offer that here is where being naive—having a simple, uncomplicated belief that doesn’t extend that far beyond “let’s do our absolute best and give it another go”—can work in your favor. I embraced this quality in myself and, frankly, it worked. Those programs now exist.
To be clear, it is not “I” that created them. Being naive in this sense applies as a leadership quality that returns us to belief and trust: I believed in others that we could, simply by trying again, succeed (even writing that sounds naive! “If at first you don’t succeed…”). The results of this naivety continue to bear fruit.
This sounds startlingly simple (or “naive”), but I’d say that’s just the one-two punch of denotation and connotation doing their work. What’s important in terms of leadership, and deeply ironic (this is where things always get interesting), is when a leader adopts the opposite mindset. Antonyms for naive include “sophisticated,” “knowing,” and “experienced.” We often tacitly admit the flaws of not possessing a bit of naivety when we “bring in someone from the outside” or need “fresh eyes” to a situation—this is another way of saying, “let’s inject a level of inexperience into this experience, just to see.”
More importantly, belief in your own sophistication and “knowingness” can be your own undoing, and thus that of the body you are entrusted to lead. Why? Because it largely locates belief in success within yourself rather than in others; in other words, you are above everyone. Remember, to locate belief in others is to take a significant risk because, well, you must in some ways commit to being naive. This is partly why Plato felt that the “philosopher king,” or leader, should always be someone who didn’t desire, at all, their leadership position—again, an ironic doubting of the value of one’s own expertise or “knowing.” For Plato, to be elite is to not be of the elite.
But what are you setting yourself up for in many cases? What awaits those who lead through “naivety” or “innocence” (because we don’t like the negative connotations of the word “naive,” we often call this “servant leadership”)? The answers vary, largely depending on the size of the group you lead. But here’s what often awaits: you will lean into naivety as a strength (let’s call this one side of the scale), and as time passes you will be taken advantage of enough (the other side of the scale) to the point where eventually the scales will even out or tip. This is, again ironically, also good—the hope is that over that time the amount of successes, which are located in others, outweigh the setbacks or blows you had to take along the way (i.e. accountability), which is located in yourself. And thus this is the true virtue of naivety in leadership: communal success, which requires trusting others, is always more desirable than any personal result, even if negative. Naively, you give yourself over to this, knowing you have a window of time in which to empower others to succeed, and you use that belief in others to fuel that effort.
As a teacher, I always tell my writing students, “never begin anything you write by quoting the dictionary.” I have bravely followed my own rule, but I never say anything about ending with a quotation! This, of course, takes me to one of the world’s greatest creations, The Oxford English Dictionary. In Old English, “naive” is a variant of “nave,” which can be defined as “the central part or block of a (usually spoked) wheel, into which the end of the axle is inserted, and from which the spokes radiate; a hub.”
If you dig deep enough into the soil of a word you will find, in some capacity, its opposite. And isn’t this “nave” exactly what we seek in leadership? Just one part of many that can only be defined as succeeding if all the parts that surround it are trusted to move the whole?
Beautiful post! I love the idea of naive leadership. I also tend to trust others easily and have had my share of misadventures that you would except. But I’ve also had even more wonderful experiences and connections because I was willing to trust. Now you have me thinking about naive leadership as a parent and entrepreneur.