Summary: Imagine walking into a room and saying, “I have an idea for a Broadway musical about Alexander Hamilton.” That alone might get you some raised eyebrows. Then add, “It will use hip-hop and rap, the Founding Fathers will be played by a diverse cast, and audiences will pay hundreds of dollars to watch it.” At some point, a sensible person in the room probably should have said, “Lin, maybe get some sleep.” Fortunately, Lin-Manuel Miranda kept going. And we are all the better for it.
Here is the core leadership lesson in Miranda’s story. It’s not that he is creative or talented (he is), and it’s not even that he created Hamilton, an amazing and long-lasting musical. It’s that he could see a connection where everyone else saw a contradiction. That is an increasingly important leadership skill.
Great Leaders Don’t Always Choose Between Opposites
We are trained to think in either/or terms. Be confident or humble. Move quickly or listen carefully. Focus on results or relationships. Honor tradition or disrupt it. Lead from your head or your heart.
Miranda’s work refuses those choices. Hamilton is both historical and contemporary, intellectual and emotional, serious and funny, and blends traditional theater with hip-hop. Most importantly, the past and the present occupy the same stage. Miranda didn’t resolve the contradictions; he used them.
That is something today’s leaders desperately need to learn. Too many organizations waste energy arguing about which side is right when the breakthrough may be sitting somewhere between them.
The Most Dangerous Sentence in the Workplace
There is a sentence I have heard in organizations for decades: “That won’t work here.”
Sometimes it’s dressed up to sound more sophisticated:
- “This isn’t consistent with our culture.”
- “Our industry is different.”
- “Senior leadership won’t support it.”
- “We tried something like that before.”
Different words. Same pattern. We protect what we already know. That’s human. Our brains like familiar territory because familiar feels safer, even when familiar isn’t working particularly well. Then along comes someone who asks, “Why couldn’t these two things exist together?”
That question can change a company. It certainly changed Broadway.
Miranda Didn’t Throw Away the Past; He Reimagined It
This is the part of his leadership story I find most compelling. Innovation is often described as destroying the old and replacing it with something new. Miranda did something subtler. He went backward to move forward.
He took people who had been dead for two centuries and made young audiences care about their ambitions, rivalries, mistakes, loves, egos, and fears. The history remained, yet the way we experienced it changed. There is an important distinction here for leaders: Transformation doesn’t abandon the past. It requires seeing it differently.
The same is true of human behavior. We all carry patterns we learned long before we entered the workplace. Perhaps you learned to achieve, please, avoid conflict, take care of everyone, challenge authority, stay quiet, be perfect, or always win. Those behaviors may have helped you succeed, until one day they stop helping you and start holding you back.
The goal isn’t to erase your history (you couldn’t if you tried). The goal is to understand it well enough that it stops writing every scene.
Now Think About Your Leadership Team
Imagine two executives disagreeing. One says, “We need to move. We’re losing time.” The other says, “We’re moving too fast. We don’t have our people with us.” Which one is right? Possibly both. That’s the Miranda question.
The first leader may be signaling urgency. Yet the second may be signaling risk.
A less self-aware team chooses sides while a more self-aware team gets curious. They ask, “What are we missing? Who can see what the other isn’t?” Or even better, “What happens if we stop trying to win the argument and start listening for the signal underneath it?”
That’s where something interesting happens. A trigger can become a GLIMMER, and the disagreement that normally sends everyone into their predictable patterns becomes information.
Your Pattern Wants to Finish the Script
Here’s the catch: When tension rises, most of us don’t become more creative. We become more predictable. For example, Super Achievers take over, Pleasers give in, Avoiders disappear, Persecutors push harder, and Rescuers try to make everybody happy.
Different people. Different patterns. Same problem. Pattern awareness interrupts the script. There is a fraction of a moment when you can notice, “There I go again.” That moment matters because once you can see the pattern, you are no longer completely trapped inside it. You have a choice. That is where the GLIMMERS Effect™ lives(opens in new tab).
Maybe Leadership Is More Like Writing a Musical Than We Think
A great musical isn’t made from one note. It needs tension. Contrast. Silence. Rhythm. Different voices entering at different moments.
Leadership isn’t so different. Your job isn’t to make everyone think alike, nor to eliminate tension. And it certainly isn’t to be the smartest voice onstage. Your job is to recognize what each voice contributes and know when the old arrangement needs to change. Lin-Manuel Miranda looked at American history and heard music nobody else had heard yet. That’s what exceptional leaders do. They notice what others dismiss and connect what others separate. In fact, they question what everyone else has accepted. And sometimes they look at something very old and discover something completely new hiding inside it.
So here is the question I would take into work this week: What have you labeled a contradiction that might actually be a possibility? Look again. There may be a GLIMMER hiding there.
To your success,
Sylvia Lafair
P.S. I am delighted to announce that GLIMMERS at WORK: The Self-Aware Leader’s Advantage will be available in October. Take my GLIMMERS Self-Awareness Check to see where you stand. Who knows, maybe the next Broadway hit will be yours.
