A Lesson for Leaders from an 8-foot Bride

I’ve always argued that relationships trump skills. Eye-opening evidence for this comes from a street performer, the 8-foot Bride, turned rock star Amanda Palmer. Her brand of wildly creative and courageous intimacy trumps business as usual and provides a lesson for leaders.

In the music business, “business as usual” means getting good, getting known, and getting lined up with a label. Amanda Palmer blew that business-as-usual model out the window. She went for intimacy with her audience instead of working with a label and keeping her fans at a distance.

Choosing Intimacy

Early in her musical career, Amanda chose to drop her record label, give away her music, and ask her fans for support—direct, financial support as well as more intimate assistance such as couchsurfing, that is, asking for a place to crash.

Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance, but the Internet and the content that we’re freely able to share on it are taking us back. It’s about a few people loving you up close and about those people being enough.

It will always be true that things are a lot different today than they were not so long ago. As a leader you can choose to lead the old way—at a professional distance—or the new way—with Leadership Intimacy.

Amanda chose the new way and reaped greater financial rewards than she expected.

I turned to crowdfunding, and I fell into those thousands of connections that I’d made, and I asked my crowd to catch me. And the goal was 100,000 dollars. My fans backed me at nearly 1.2 million, which was the biggest music crowdfunding project to date.

Your Choice

Leadership Intimacy, the intimate and accurate understanding of self and others, is the new way. It throws out command and control. And I say that unless you and your leaders become acutely intimate with themselves and their colleagues, they will never be able to consistently give you their best performance and get the best out of their teams.

Would you like to learn how to put Leadership Intimacy into practice in your workplace? If so, I strongly recommend our CoachQuest Leader-as-Coach Program.

Learn more about CoachQuest.
View Amanda Palmer’s TED Talk The Art of Asking

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