Here is the foregoing post as a slideshow with narration. You can select the “HD” setting for better resolution in full screen, but it’s not right yet — the full screen image should be crisp — and I have a ticket in with WordPress Support. However, for now, this version (via the “Download Video” link under “Share”) seems to provide the best resolution. I hope you enjoy it and would appreciate your comments.

[Updated July 21, 2010. Per Chuck Craytor's suggestion in the comments, I have added music for intro, outro and some transitions. The song is "Carry Me Away" by Govi, which you can find here. Although, as you can read from the first link, Govi's music is eclectic, it also so happens that I was on the freeway between Albuquerque and Santa Fe when I first heard one of his songs, and so I associate his music with the mystical qualities of the New Mexico landscape. I do find New Mexico a spiritual space, perhaps because of the strong light, broad sky, and rich colors of the earth -- and places like Acoma that are accessible at one level but also intentionally carry a profound and private Native American presence. I am deeply aware of the temptation to try to find in such places and traditions, no matter how you might otherwise think about them and how many "souvenirs" you endeavor to take away, something that can only be found within.]

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Recently, I was reading a beautiful document by Karen Tse, describing the basis for her work, and I was struck again by the image of the desert which she references, about the necessity of “going to the desert” in order to “discover what it means to draw upon the vast well of our spiritual resources and wisdom” and to connect “our outer work with our inner lives.” Her words refer specifically to human rights work, but they could as well refer to many kinds of leadership challenges. I found her words particularly helpful because right now, metaphorically speaking, many of us are in the desert and for any number of reasons, but particularly because times are hard financially. Whether it is a question of being out of work, or working very, very hard in order to maintain position or just hanging on in the most basic ways to make ends meet, the pressure cannot be underestimated, and it drives us down into the search for inner resources and inner connections to outer realities.

We usually don’t have to hunt for the desert. It just comes to us, and often unbidden, perhaps a necessary part of a search for meaning in our work and our lives, but difficult nevertheless. The desert is here, right here in front of us. And it can be felt as an emptiness, just space, just time, dry and hot, or dry and cold, and we can be wanderers searching for the knowledge of what we should do and how to do it; how, in effect, to go on.

It is good to remember that there are many who have been here before us, and who have found a home. It is an ancient part of being human. Yesterday, I visited Acoma, a pueblo atop a mesa west of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and listened to the story of the ancestors who migrated to this remarkable desert place, who would know home when they found it because of the echo that would come back to them, because it was a place that had been prepared for them. In fact, that is what their name, Haak’u, means. Acoma is an anglicized version of the word for a place prepared or made ready.

There is an obvious symbolism to be found in the notion of finding one’s home in an echo and knowing this place as the one destined. There is an obvious symbolism in the desert itself, and how it turns out to be a place of abundance, not scarcity. What is abundant about the desert is life itself, real life, real meaning, as opposed to an abundance of outer things. This is not to say there is no pain, no dryness, no sense of what is parched and needs water. It is just that this is also the place of visions, dreams, and appreciation for the stunning mythic shapes of a landscape, outer and inner, that are so much larger that our minds must bend and bow to receive that landscape as it is. Then, it shows up through our hands as art, as music, painting, writing, as images and stories, as a path, as a place to call home.

There is suffering in the desert, but there is also space that is without dimension, and time without dimension, and these qualities lead us to think, reflect, and prepare, to follow a greater Self, to both find the center and carefully consider the peripheries of consciousness and what they tell us. Things behind us come forward into knowing. In a desert time, people find each other and learn to stick together. We learn to respect everyone’s talents and right to a life, inner and outer. In the desert, we learn about being, more than just surviving.

In terms of corporate life, I think it means we discover that leading is something much larger than our organizations, our “households.” There is so much nonsense out there right now about leadership and leadership development that is divorced from the soul; an artificial, rationalized form of programming people that is simply designed to serve corporations and other kinds of institutions. Leading to serve something but that something may not be good for people in the end at all; leading to serve, for example, the right of stakeholders or stock holders to make money, but not necessarily to benefit the community of humankind. We have forgotten, perhaps, that organizations of all kinds are only projects of a true leader’s heart and values and desires for positive change and the sustenance of community over time. In the desert, it seems to me, it is very clear that following Self is premised on finding a destined home outside of the false promises and illusions of safety that our traditional corporate cultures seem to offer.

I don’t need to tell you where to look in the news for good or bad examples. You already know. All I am saying is that outside of our fantasies, a desert waits, and within that magnificent desert, under the sun and moon and stars and clouds, free of servitude to a false self, so does your own vision and your own most telling wisdom.

And, well, I think at last it also comes back full circle to Karen Tse, repeating the words of her own spiritual teachers, reminding us “that whatever you focus on will grow.”

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Many years ago I worked with a public agency, improving communications within one of the departments. I had an in-house departmental contact person coordinating some of my activities who, like me, was passionate about positive organizational change. At some point after the completion of my work, I learned there had been problems again in the department and she had lost her job. I didn’t know all the circumstances, but clearly she had been blamed for “stirring the pot” in her organization and became at odds with the leadership. I was not too surprised for I knew the top person in the department and he seemed very easily hijacked by his emotions and judgments. It was some time after that, maybe a year, that I ran into my contact again. After her separation, she had gone on a long trip to Indonesia. She told me about her interest in psychic matters and their relationship to workplace culture, including what she described as “organizational vortices of positive and negative energies.” While on her trip she had even asked a healer to tell her whether she appeared to have any psychic power herself. He took her by the hand, and after a few minutes she was overcome by waves of heat coursing through her body. She broke into a big sweat. “You have plenty of power,” the healer said.

I tell this story because it reflects two sides of life from which we can learn: mistakes and vision. Clearly something had happened. There had been problems in her relationships at work, and she had been blamed and held at fault. But there was also another energy, the energy of her vision for organizations, and that vision took her to an entirely new place where she might awaken more deeply to her own power. We don’t even have to be talking in literal terms about psychic power, just the power to be ourselves, to follow our paths and trust them, to do what we need to do as we move through experience. That there is blame and fault is tremendously painful, but to also see this blame and fault fall away and the “good medicine” return is the breath of inspiration. It would be wonderful if we could only focus on what is positive and good, if events never turned out badly, if positive energies would always prevail, if there was a universal alternative to dealing with too many snakes on a narrow road. But that is a fantasy. Sometimes we must go through the challenge, deal with the venom just as it is, and hold on, trusting that no matter what we face or which way we turn, in the end wisdom will find us.

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“Be prepared for the loneliness of leadership. It is worse and more difficult than you may have thought it would be, for it is not a thought; it is real.”

– Peter Koestenbaum

Yesterday as I writing my last post I forgot something — from the conversation I was having with a friend about her destiny. As we continued to talk, what also came out was the sense that those who honor and follow their unique paths may also have to endure considerable loneliness and a sense that they are misfits. There is no certain glory, at least not right way, in tending toward unique ideas and perspectives, or if you are in the marketplace, unique work. It may take some time for your leadership to catch fire. And all along that way, you may hold the nagging question of whether you have gone too far, are not just beyond the edge of a comfort zone but totally over it, and that there is no one now who can understand you.

It may be popular these days to celebrate the heretics — when they are successful. An individualist culture may applaud an Einstein or even as beautiful and frenetic a renegade as Abbie Hoffman of Steal This Book fame, but overall, societies do not place as much value on those at the edge as those at the center. A Jack Welch, for all his imperfections and attendant loss of stature, no doubt has had a much broader impact on how business is actually conducted in this country than say a true thought leader like Peter Senge. But, of course, what societies do and who they support is not necessarily a measure of anything except the energy of self-perpetuation. Luckily there are values that transcend human institutions and cultural norms. If those values did not exist as social forces — values such as freedom, justice, compassion, truth, integrity, democracy, humanism — regimentation and totalitarian control might soon paint our globe as the human condition. And there are different kinds of intelligence, always ready to break through at the boundaries of what is known and believed.

But this post is not about society, nor conformity really. It is about you, and the degree to which you see yourself as “different” in some important way. Koestenbaum in the book cited above exhorts people to value their misfit qualities as being the source of their leadership — what they see in themselves that makes them unique can be a great gift to the world. But he is also quite right that the path of the individual may subject a person to feelings of loneliness, and perhaps terrifyingly so. This shows up, of course, less in the successes than in the failures and blocks and challenges that naturally come along. Sometimes heretics are simply lost people, and forgotten. There is that risk.

The question is what the failures do to us, and how we move through them; whether we continue to trust in the patterns of the universe or give up and go back to trusting the patterns and norms of a current and conventional society. Many people today are frightened by the economy and there has been a generally more conservative tilt in the organizations I’ve touched. People are more careful and quieter, less willing to risk, and also sometimes it seems, less likely to think for themselves or honor their unique paths. The tilt is toward protection of what gains have been made and not to stand out. No one, after all, wants to face the loneliness of long unemployment if they don’t have to. Like Yossarian in the classic novel, Catch-22, we have been faced with the dictum, “All you have to do is like us.” Never mind what you plainly see, what’s happening, what’s actually going on.

Lt. Col. Korn, XO: [speaking to Yossarian] All you have to do is be our pal.
Colonel Cathcart: Say nice things about us.
Lt. Col. Korn, XO: Tell the folks at home what a good job we’re doing. Take our offer Yossarian.
Colonel Cathcart: Either that or a court-martial for desertion.

It’s entirely possible that once behavior changes, thoughts change to line up behind it. Get people to shift their conduct, at some point they agree with and support the conduct in order to avoid cognitive dissonance.

But if you don’t resolve the cognitive dissonance, where are you? In a state of tension is where, and the issue then is what you will do with you. It’s one thing, and it’s easy to say, “Well, just think for yourself.” Have you tried it? And then did you find yourself in conflict with others? And what did you do with that conflict?

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I did an inventory the other day of the kinds of issues clients have brought me over time. Here are some of them:

• Survival in the role of leader
• Effectiveness in working with others, particularly troublesome personalities, other people who are in denial, and those who have more power
• Living in high control, high risk cultures
• Trying to shift these cultures through personal actions and modeling; being a change agent
• Feeling good about oneself in a role and job, whether it involves leading or not
• Getting things done against the tide of others’ agendas and lack of resources
• Living out personal potentials in a particular way (becoming an entrepreneur, a manager, a writer or artist, a social activist, etc…)
• Overcoming self-esteem or self-confidence barriers
• Rebuilding damaged or challenged credibility
• Getting through the life ‘funnels” (big decisions), wake-up calls and life shocks
• Addressing shadow issues such as negative feedback, mysterious relationships, disconnections, lack of attention, being treated impersonally, not having personal power; misuse of personal power

What struck me as I looked back over the list was this: they are all issues of a person, a leader in distress — issues related to the ego we are all given, issues of the hubris and self-doubt or self-criticism that attends the ego — and the need to move outside that ego completely. Essentially these are the issues given to us so that we can learn how to fully take on the emotional challenges of living who we are, of living ourselves well, and of finding out in a very personal way what it means to lead toward a vision for a better world.

In this work, although we often wish it were not so, there are few real guides. We mostly learn from experience, and from coming to trust in our own unique paths as individuals, especially as individuals who have assumed a mantle of responsibility. “Our own unique paths as individuals” is an important phrase because it testifies to the need for deep diligence and awareness in spite of the difficulties that might come our way. The natural thing is to run and hide, for example through denial or projection of our dilemmas and problems onto others, but honoring a unique life path demands something more.

I was speaking with a friend a few days ago, and I asked her, “Where do you see your path taking you? In the end, what do you think is your destiny?” She was thoughtful for a moment with this big question, while I sipped my coffee. “I don’t know exactly,” she said, “but it is someplace spiritual. And it is something I cannot not do. I am on that path, and no matter what I do, it seems to further it.” This reminds me so much of William Stafford’s poem, The Way It Is, and how he says that we really cannot let go of our individual threads as we get older and pass through experience after experience. Without knowing too much about Buddhism, I might say that this is the actual Zen of leading — being a follower along the path right in front of us.

This is no new thought. People have known it forever. But it bears repeating, doesn’t it, especially when that path is difficult or scary, when we find ourselves facing something very challenging in our lives and our work? We have to remember how to come down to the ground of being, of mere being, in order to keep going. We have to remember that this is exactly what is meant by leadership, this willingness to follow the path, to go around or through the obstacles as we must, to learn from them as we go, and to approach it all without pretense, with an open mind and heart, even when the path seems to end in a rock wall, or we must ford a treacherous river, or it turns sideways and goes beyond the edge of the cliff. That makes every challenge essential and the most creative edge of our work.

Five years ago in a post I concluded:

What is the problem? self.
What is the answer? Self.

Today, going back to read these words (which also show up on my leadership poster), the meaning keeps revealing itself. (Was I so smart? No. The words appeared — they were given to me — and I wrote them down. I’ll probably be trying to understand them for the rest of my life.)

And although we will always want to know what the steps are — as if a numbered list of tips and techniques would do — the real lesson, hearing those words again, is in acceptance of the path and listening for the wisdom that comes from a place well beyond ego. For whatever reasons the path I have followed has asked me and allowed me to help people by facilitating a small part of their journeys, and I’ll tell you something, I feel quite humbled by this charge. And if I feel challenged in my own path from time to time, well, what they say is that you can’t help anyone else with a disease you haven’t already been ill with yourself.

And, oh boy, looking back over the inventory list I started from today, do I know what that means!

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It’s a question I’ve been asking others lately and also of myself. If leadership involves helping fulfill a felt need, then what is the need and who are those who have it? Aung San Suu Kyi, locked up in her house or in prison for most of the last twenty years, nevertheless speaks for those in her country and everywhere who need freedom and security. Karen Tse speaks for men, women, and children lost in jails around the world. Martin Luther King, Jr spoke for all who yearn for equality and justice. Who do you speak for? What is their desire? Their need?

Earlier this year, Dick Richards posted four towering conclusions about leadership, one of which was that “a compelling insight about the needs or aspirations of a group of people is far more important to inspiring commitment than is a vision.” He makes the point that vision isn’t the thing — it’s the insight into the needs of others that enables leadership. This speaks directly to the question. Who is this group of people — for you? What are their needs and aspirations? What is your insight?

Simple question, but more challenging to answer. Maybe it sounds like just another version of “What do you stand for?” Except that framed in this way the question requires us to put real faces next to the abstract value statements that might seem to be an answer. It requires us to think about the histories and experiences of specific people we know and their counterparts with whom we are as yet unacquainted, and not in some abstract way but the most concrete way possible, as if in a quiet moment we had listened to them all, their truths, and then decided what leading might actually mean.

As managers, we may feel we do not have the luxury of asking such a question — or that it is too complex to answer given all the competing needs of our constituencies. And, after all, we have work to get done or we will be called to task by other managers, who can also be called to task if they fail. So who do we speak for, really?

In every kind of workplace role, we may see ourselves as trying simply to get through the day, the week or month, as trying to provide value in a way that protects us from the misfortunes of criticism, loss of reputation, unwelcome assignments, or job loss; that protects us from becoming victims. Who do we speak for? Or do we speak for anyone at all?

It seems to me the domain of leadership is found precisely in voicing something felt, something needed by many, something perhaps that has not been effectively articulated. In that there is always a choice: to draw on the worst and most self-interested and self-protective of aspirations, or to call for the best that we human beings have to offer. The great leaders, the ones who inspire and who last, choose the best. It’s not about them versus us. Not about management versus labor. Liberals and conservatives. Power-less versus power-ful. It’s about a felt need that waits beneath the differences for an opportunity to rise, an opportunity to make itself known through the voice or actions of someone who others judge to be leading.

I am sure I’ve told the story before — about a classful of supervisors from a government agency, the National Park Service. Half-way through the class, which was on basic topics such as coaching, meeting design, and facilitation, there was a bit of a mutiny. Someone said that the class was all well and good but nobody had the time or resources to do any of the things I was training them on. There was an audible rumble of agreement. Yes, others said, that’s right. We can’t use any of this stuff because we don’t have the time or resources. Obviously, a nerve had been touched. So I asked if they thought it would be better to close the class and simply send everyone back to work. Well, that wasn’t quite what they were expecting to hear, either. I wanted to test the mutiny, probe it, not run from it. “I bet you have some resources,” I said. “What do you have?” After a long silence, someone said, “the mission.” And then he repeated it out loud, from memory.

“…to promote and regulate the use of the…national parks…which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Bureaucratic words, I thought, but a silence ensued. I thought maybe someone would say, cynically, “Oh come on, now.” But no one did. Instead a thoughtful mood descended on the group. Bless that guy for repeating the mission. It wasn’t about the mission or vision, really. It was about his insight into the needs of the group. He was speaking for that whole room, and everybody who worked for those who were in the room, too. Someone then added, “The other thing we have is great people.” And this brought another rumble to the crowd, this time a rumble of assent and conviction. And while this moment certainly didn’t take all the supervisors’ frustrations away, it certainly touched them and reminded them of why they were there, the fulfillment of the deeper need, what was best about them and what was also much bigger than anyone alone. Needless to say, the workshop went on, but infused with a different kind of energy.

My own answer to the question of who I speak for is that I always want to use my voice on behalf of those who most strongly feel their itch to grow as people, as individuals who serve something greater and better, who choose to do their inner work and learning so that their outer impact means something, and is real. Looking back, I see that it is to these people (and to that part of everyone) that I have devoted the very best aspects of my work, and maybe my life, too.

PS. If you enjoyed the link to Karen Tse’s incredible work, you might also wish to download this pdf, in which she shares some of her own personal and compelling leadership journey.

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If there’s a silver lining to tough economic times, it is that we have to rethink what we’ve always done.

If we need to learn and grow as leaders, now more than ever we must initiate that learning on our own.

We cannot wait for organizations to “give us opportunities.” We must take on the challenge for ourselves.

In this regard I am offering two public workshops.

Following SELF: How leaders can stop defending and start living their own higher cause.

This inexpensive one-day public workshop, graciously sponsored by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, focuses on the journey from defensive leadership to an open, participative, grounded leadership style suited to the times. The workshop will be highly participative and also offer opportunities for reflective learning. The workshop is described in detail below. In addition, here is a paper by the same name that summarizes the workshop content and gives some idea of the exercises we will work on together. I’d very much like to invite you to the workshop and to enlist your help in sharing this invitation with others who might be interested. I am offering the workshop at a seriously discounted rate as a way to both reinforce work I’ve done with past clients and introduce myself to new ones. If you are interested, please give me a call or send me an email at your earliest convenience as I am limiting participation to approximately 20 people.

Beyond the Edge: Affirming your destiny as a leader

In addition, I am happy to announce that a powerful workshop I co-facilitated in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for about ten years is now being reborn in the Pacific Northwest. Beyond the Edge is in a formative stage, with projected offering dates targeted for late fall, 2010/early spring, 2011. Barb Hummel, Jay Howell and I are in the process of looking for a new home for our four-day premier leadership learning experience. Please take a look at our new website. If you are interested – or know of others who would benefit from attending — please let me know, and I’ll be sure to share updates about our progress, potential dates, and the fee for participation (which will largely depend on site selection). We believe there is no better time than now to do the deeper work of leadership self-inquiry and self-mastery.

Thanks and I’ll look forward to hearing from you!

Many best wishes

Dan

PS: If you’d like to forward this announcement as a pdf, you can find the pdf here.

Leaders who acknowledge mistakes, take personal responsibility and act swiftly to make corrections are generally regarded as heroic. Their willingness to open the door to new information – however uncomfortable that may be – gains credibility for themselves and their organizations. Yet to become genuinely open and accessible, to overcome defensiveness and claim a true leadership presence is no small task. It takes a certain level of self-knowledge, empathy, and strength of character. How can this be achieved?

Spend a day working with Dan Oestreich that focuses on building these qualities, mastering the transition from defensiveness to solid, creative action. Dan’s approach is open, interactive, and based on the best principles of thoughtful, reflective learning. This class is appropriate for anyone, regardless of their formal position (supervisory or non-supervisory), who wants to use personal potentials to make a positive difference. From corporate guidance to influencing social change, from developing your art to the self-leadership of simply living the life you want (and were meant) to live, this is an opportunity to use your own natural process of self-inquiry, with the support of others, to help you achieve important personal and professional goals.

Outcomes include:

· Better knowledge of your self-assessed leadership strengths and weaknesses

· Understanding of your defensive styles and how they operate to protect your self-image, including what you defend and how you do it

· Understanding of your impacts on others, including impacts that may unconsciously interfere with achieving your own goals

· Development of specific strategies to interrupt defensive reactions and cycles

· Definition of the differences in your world you would most like to make

· Development of essential self-inquiries and a path of positive learning

· Methods to build a stronger sense of teamwork and community into the organizations in which you participate

We will use a combination of individual work, small group exercises and dialogues to accomplish these outcomes. You will leave with a record of your work and learning, as well as a “vital few” key action steps to help you follow-through. This event is limited to approximately 20 participants.

Dan Oestreich is an experienced leadership and organization development practitioner with over 20 years of experience helping people as individuals and groups find and fulfill their potentials. He is co-author of two books on organizational culture and leadership, Driving Fear Out of the Workplace and The Courageous Messenger. Dan’s work is at every level of organizations, helping others through assessment, feedback, coaching, and facilitation of change. You can find out more about Dan from his website.

Workshop Details

Date: Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Registration: 8:00 AM

On-Time Start/Finish: 8:30 AM – 4:30 PM. Lunch 12:00 – 1:00; breaks as needed. Break beverages and snacks provided. Lunch is on your own. (Location has an inexpensive, healthy foods cafeteria)

Workshop Cost: $79 in advance*, $99 at the door. *When you confirm your interest in attending, I’ll give you a PayPal link or you can forward a check.

Location: Room J2-515, Yale Building (This is a secure location. Participants must be escorted to the room from the Yale Building Lobby)

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
1100 Fairview Ave N.
Seattle, WA 98109-4433

Driving directions: Please see this map.

Parking: See the map link above. Pay lots are available adjacent to the Yale Building.

This is a public event sponsored by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Donations to the Center are welcomed. Please donate here.

Please contact Dan directly to sign up for this workshop.

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Discernment refers to opening up one’s eyes and one’s mind, considering a situation carefully, and reflecting to find insight more than express judgment. Of the many qualities of leaders, it is one of those we most watch for as we evaluate the skills and capabilities of a leader. Does this person show a capacity for insight, and use that insight as the basis for effective decisions and actions?

Of the many easy targets these days for lack of discernment is British Petroleum’s CEO, Tony Hayward. He’s been reviled as “the most hated — and most clueless — man in America,” and is regarded as a poster child for “What not to say when your company is ruining the world.” Surely, BP’s Board, unless they are “asleep at the switch,” according to Rosabeth Moss Kanter, must be considering a successor. He’s in a horrible spot, and he’s made the absolute worst of it, no doubt.

For that reason, it is easy to look at him and see someone out of touch with reality, and therefore, unlike ourselves. Now even the President has said Tony Hayward’s gaffs would have caused him to be fired, if he were part of the Administration. As I say, he’s an easy target. And we could ask, focusing on the wrong question, how someone like Tony Hayward ever got so high in terms of position and power. Didn’t anybody notice his insensitivity, his lack of self-knowledge, his weakness of character? If we make these judgments and hate him, then we hate him for one reason: he is altogether too much like ourselves.

Spring Maples

By the way, I’m only suggesting empathy, not sympathy for Mr. Hayward. His personal leadership path brought him to this point of painful exposure, and he does appear to have invited it into his life. That’s something he will probably spend the rest of his life trying to figure out. How could something like this have happened to him? In fact, he’s quoted as asking his executive colleagues, “What the hell did we do to deserve this?” Indeed, it is a good question for him to ask about himself. If he’s smart, he’ll ask this question in terms of his invitation, because surely what occurred is something he helped manifest, not only in terms of the spill itself and the abysmal failure of leadership in his company and industry, but also in terms of how his own behavior at the moment of truth invited the scorn of the world.

My little computer dictionary defines the word, hubris, as “excessive pride or self-confidence,” and further, echoing the word’s use in Greek tragedy, “excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis.” Nemesis, in turn, means “the inescapable agent of someone’s downfall.” In this case, a really bad problem with an oil well 5,000 feet down.

We all have the choice every day, discernment or hubris; hubris and the nemesis that it invites. We all want something better — the best — from our leaders. But we cannot accuse them unless we are willing to notice that the things that disappoint us most about them are also forces ready to be at work in ourselves. Me too, my friends, me too.

Which makes discernment pretty darned important; a lot more important than just a nice word for the good leaders we wish for somewhere out there in the world, a word waiting in a dictionary for somebody else to look up.

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In a comment on my last post, Flor Fernandez Barrios talked about medicine wheels:

“Native-Americans have the concept of the medicine Wheel, the great circle of life based on the cardinal directions. Every posiition has equal power and unique teachings. The essence of life is movement and as we move through the wheel we learn and unfold….Every stone has a teaching and a valued vision of the world and life. Each stone is a sister or a brother ready to mirror back a part of ourselves. There is no judgment involved in this process. I think adopting this circular concept in leadership is esssential if we are to continue growing and evolving with equality. A system where every one’s voice is heard and no one is discriminated.”

Bighorn Medicine Wheel — National Park Service Photo via Wikipedia

What strikes me most deeply is that line about each stone as a sister or brother ready to mirror back a part of ourselves.

That would mean we might well do an inventory of our “sisters” and “brothers.” We might think of everyone we know and have known and let them come into us, to hear their story, their teaching, their vision, and see also the parts of ourselves they reflect. This is no easy task, for while there are many that we like to attend to there are undoubtedly others, perhaps only a few, perhaps more, that we would like to ignore. In my mind’s eye I sit at the center of the circle with some stones behind me, out of sight, facing those I appreciate the most, facing away from those I appreciate the least.

Flor’s comment touches directly on the problem of discrimination, the voices that are heard and those we are conditioned (have conditioned ourselves) to discredit and discount. And there are always a million good reasons to discredit and discount them. It seems to me the power and beauty of the wheel is in the reconsideration of who we think we know — and therefore what we think we know about ourselves. Do we look at those, for example, with whom we have our gravest conflicts or who inspire our greatest fears and see in them an aspect of ourselves? Or do we create a palatable distance? It’s easy to look if we are acknowledging the good, but how about the darkness and dare I say it, our belief in others’ evil?

I once used to think that evil was an outmoded concept; that our undefiled natures were spontaneously good, and I still do believe this in a way. But I no longer hold to such a rose-colored view with simplicity. And this is why the medicine wheel is so important, precisely because within its circuit we cannot claim to see evil in others without knowing that in some way it is also a part of ourselves. Which is to say I note its presence in my own soul as well as feel its presence in my world.

It is only our private and unique forms of denial, our persistent blind spots, our satisfied unconsciousness — in effect our belief that we can face one way only in the circle — that keeps us blaming others for what we ourselves are doing or participating in or avoiding.

This is very hard because we can be quite sure we know what evil is — in others. We can be quite sure we know it when we see it. But, don’t you know, it slips away as soon as it is named, slips out of the noose of our concepts and judgments, transformed again by our own hidden processes?

Milton got as close as possible in Paradise Lost, defining evil with one statement from a fallen angel, “Myself am Hell.” This is a statement that tells, at least, where evil comes from, and how it spreads: insofar as I am hell to myself therefore my attempt will be to stamp out the evil in you. And maybe taking it a step farther, because I can’t stamp out what is in you, I simply try to stamp you out instead. In any event, if you buy in, if I am able to trigger in some way your own inner pain, the cycle continues.

And do we all have a side of ourselves that can be awful to us? You bet. We can all be hell to ourselves, just as we all can be good. Therefore we must sit in this medicine wheel awhile longer, talking with the stones, with our brothers and sisters. We must share our suffering, letting the afternoon sun come down to warm our backs and remind us of the healing that is available. We must find our own self-forgiveness and forgiveness of others, our “growing and evolving with equality,” as Flor says. And we must use our warrior selves to stop at every turn the belief that there’s an “it” out there somewhere, an evil that wants to get at us or destroy us, especially as we believe it is embodied in others. Because in truth, that “it” is no one but ourselves, translated through the interstices of a crystalline world in which every vibration we send out comes back to us tenfold and perhaps in frightening disguise.

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“We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends.”
– Tao Te Ching

There is a whole tradition in the definition of leadership that has to do with what leaders do not do themselves. The Tao Te Ching is full of that tradition — expressing the very foundations of a philosophy and aesthetics that depend on an expected interplay between absence and presence, an object such as a pot and the spaces that surround it. We do have our correlates in the West. For example, it to often said that the job of a leader is to set a vision, direction, or major strategic goals while it is up to others to determine how these things will be achieved. But this perspective and the logic behind it are often deadeningly linear, mechanical, and expediently focused on the end it mind. They may have little to do with a real appreciation for the balance and interplay of universal forces — or of people. They may be based on notions of superiority and dominance.

I am always impressed when I observe leaders who are effective precisely because they:

• do not fill up much airtime
• do not see themselves as necessarily having the best or smartest answers
• do not need to be totally in control
• do not believe they are the only ones who feel responsible
• know they do not understand everything

When I talk with leaders about participation and equity, I also sometimes hear them blame others for what seems like a lack of reciprocity:

“I give team members lots of chances of participate, but they just go quiet.”
“People don’t seem to want to take any risks.”
“They tell me its my job to make the decisions, so they wait for my answers.”

Feelings like these at one time or another seem to haunt those who want to be seen as open, supportive leaders. And they may take it personally, even though on another level they also know that such behavior is simply the inheritance of old cultural norms. They want a more balanced view, an escape from old styles of supervision and management. They want the real exchange, a genuine team.

Getting it right can be a true art. I remember an exercise I facilitated some time ago with a small organization made up of the founder, a four person executive group, and forty or so key staff. I asked the founder and executives not to talk while the rest of the room discussed the organization’s culture. It was revelatory for the founder as he listened to his organization because he could see that being quiet himself encouraged people to start their own real dialogue. They were willing to be quite realistic about some major resource questions and were beginning on their own to address conflicts he had assumed he would have to handle alone.

This example of the power of absence in turn reminds me of what is known as the “critical friends process,” based originally, as I understand it, on Quaker principles. This simple process involves small groups helping individuals by using a highly structured problem-solving format. The “absence” part comes as the person who is seeking solutions intentionally is quiet while others share their ideas for how he or she could best address the problem that person has presented to the team. In essence, a “leader” is momentarily pushed out of the group in order to better listen and also to give explicit freedom to others to share their ideas. In the critical friends process, the individual literally pushes his or her chair back from the group. When I have facilitated the process, I have encouraged people to talk about the person temporarily removed in third person only, “he or she,” not “you,” to further remove the individual psychologically. It’s almost as if the person is being talked about behind his or her back, except the person, a short distance away, is still actually there and is hearing everything.

The critical friends process focuses on an absence that changes speaking and interacting into listening and receiving. No big surprises there. But it can also provide an opportunity for something quite magical to happen — depending on the circumstances, individual and problem. And this is to give a person a chance to really surrender, to listen without having to solve. This, in turn, may open up pathways to insight and new understanding. Our own absence, our own silence can unstop our ears. Then, if we are really open, it can change our minds.

And if that can happen, equity, balance, real exchange and dialogue can be reborn among people, including the leader.

This all seems too simple to write down, and yet it is not so simple at all. We are clogged with our needs to remain who we are, to justify and defend. To surrender depends on listening to our own absence in a particular way, so that whether we end up listening in that silence to others’ actual words, to the sound of a mountain stream, to the noise of traffic beyond a hotel window, or within ourselves very deeply to emptiness itself, what comes in to us involves acceptance of our level of agency and its real limits. We can only do — we can only be — so much. And then we must turn it over. The very word, surrender, comes from roots that mean “to give it back.”

A good question, then, to ask ourselves next time we are stuck might be about what we must “give back”: a particular ambition, a need to be right, a desire to influence or change someone else, an illusion, a desire to be perfect or perfectly congruent?

It seems to me that could be the secret and this, then, could be the mantra:

I am the pot and I would do better to empty myself for the time being. Then I might listen, appreciating the space that surrounds me and that could fill me up — if I let it. I surrender, and in so doing, carry my hopes of discovering a different, better way.

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I visited my 98-year old mother yesterday. She lives in a nursing home and is very well cared for. She has a lovely room to herself with pictures and books and memorabilia to surround her. When we arrived she was napping and when she saw it was me she said after a few moments, “Get me out of this place.” According to the nurses, it is something she says everyday.

Despite the strokes and problems with her speech and the forgetfulness natural to her age, she is present as always, sweet and loving, wanting to smile and poke fun. My wife and I, attempting to comply with her wish, took her in her wheelchair outside to a small courtyard filled with rhododendrons and transplanted mountain spruce. Nobody else came by, and there was only the sound of a door opening somewhere and the occasional talk of the nearby kitchen crew preparing dinner to briefly interrupt the quiet. “This is a nice place,” she said to me. “I’ve never been here before.”

The air was thick with new scents, bright and clear. She touched her face to feel the sun on it and pointed with her finger at the swallows darting above us against the white clouds and hazy blue sky. There was a circle around the sun. I plucked a pink blossom from one of the rhododendrons and gave it to her to smell. She put it up to her face and smiled for the camera just as a cloud came by.

It was an honor to sit with her there, enjoying the Spring together. The air was empty and sweet. It was good to see that warm light in her eyes and to hold her hand.

[I can't believe I posted this and forgot this part: As we were wheeling my mother down the hallway toward the door to the courtyard another resident passed by.

"Is that your mother?" she asked. I nodded. And as we passed: "She's beautiful!"]

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[Update for June 3, 2010: Based on feedback, I have significantly revised this paper. The material is largely the same, but it has been re-ordered to an extent, cut in some places, amplified in others. It is now titled: "Following Self: How Leaders Can Stop Defending and Start Living Their Own Higher Cause." The link below now fetches the new paper. It's virtually in the land of "mini-books" at 50 pages, double-spaced.

I want to thank all those who provided feedback (you know who you are), but especially Dick Richards, whose advice as a writer was particularly detailed and insightful. And I certainly continue to invite your feedback. I absolutely want any and all additional thoughts and observations about how this paper can be made most useful to you.]

Original Post

As a way to summarize some of my thoughts and learning over the last fifteen years about the topic of defensiveness, I have written a short paper called, The Power of Accessible Leadership “Following Self: How Leaders Can Stop Defending and Start Living Their Own Higher Cause”. Feel free to download the pdf version by clicking on the link.

A couple of things:

1) I have built in an exercise at the front end of the paper — one I’ve been using for years in various forms — to help you determine your own “defensive strategy.” This is not meant to be all-inclusive, but simply a good start in evaluating your own behavior. If you get stuck trying to figure it out from my directions, please shoot me an email and I’ll do my best to be of help.

2) The way I am currently using this exercise is slightly different from the way I’ve used it in the past, so if you have seen it before, know that it has been intentionally altered to directly link to defensive behavior.

3) Some of the stories and examples have been used on this blog before.

4) If you like this stuff, please feel free to share it.

5) I’m deeply interested in your feedback in order to improve the model and the paper. What works for you? What does not? Where would you like to see clarification or more detail.

Thanks for taking the time to take a look. I hope you find this material of value to you personally in your own leadership journey.

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Every once in awhile a message from some unknown source comes to me. This one appeared in a dream, one strong enough to wake me up, almost with a gasp. The dream narrative itself is muddled. All I can recall of it is that at the end some powerful presence seemed to come near me. It “read” me, and then said this: “The cause of all your pain is unused potential.”

That was it.

I lay awake for a few moments still listening to the words. It seemed at first too simple. And yet there was also a resonance that could not be put aside. And it has made me want to go look at my potentials, whatever they might be, just to see if I can draw the connections with pain. There’s something there, without a doubt. Perhaps because I believe in potentials so much and have always been a believer in the work to go beyond my own known edges.

I was talking today with a colleague about the dream and he asked me, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” And I replied rather automatically “I don’t know. The dream is only a month old!” And so it is. Only a month old. Maybe the dream of an infant. Maybe the dream of an old man for whom a month is nothing. Maybe it’s just a shadow, a blackbird.

Have I been at fault for not doing more? Is that the pain? Were there paths I should have taken and chose not to take because it kept me safe or comfortable or ignorant? The shadows gather into a skein of dark threads, a jumble it has become my obligation to sort out and somehow weave into a lighter cloth. Is this merely a dream about the unfulfilled expectations that I have placed on myself?

Farmacia de Dios

The questions come, but also, and this is a surprise, a sense of equanimity. So that was what the pain was for, to remind me of who I could be, whether or not I chose to live it in that moment. I believe it was Marie Louise von Franz who said that we do much better bearing our sufferings if we know why we have them. It is when we don’t yet know that they are unbearable to us.

So perhaps, for now, that is enough. That presence, that being, whatever it was that came close to me, gave me the reason for pain in a way I might be able to understand it and to connect it to all my work and to my life in this world.

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It so happens that I’m participating in Weight Watchers these days. So far I have lost about 26 pounds, and intend to lose more. I attend the meetings with my wife every Saturday morning. When we first started attending, I thought I would be bored.

I have been anything but. What I have been fascinated by is the community of people who with such persistence address the matched problems of eating too much and eating the wrong stuff (and also not moving the body sufficiently to burn the calories being consumed). The people who come, about forty or so to the session, are pretty inspiring. Last week a woman reached her “goal weight” after five years (five years!) of effort to lose, count ‘em, 105 pounds. Another woman last week talked about facing her past marriage and how it had kept her in a negative cycle of conflicts and reconciliations, with the reconciliation part always associated with being given food by her ex-husband. Talk about control. I’ve found the WW process to be only superficially one of counting points and attending sessions. In reality, it is one of patience and insight. As the leader of the group mentioned, “we didn’t come here because of the food alone.” We came here to address the inner and external factors that led to the poor eating habits as much as to change the habits themselves.

Street Scene

I find myself thinking this is one of the better personal development environments I’ve participated in, and how aligned it is, at least metaphorically, with the disciplines of personal leadership development, as well. People talk about “emotional eating,” meaning eating to avoid dealing with how they feel. They talk about “small wins.” They discuss the need for boundaries, with themselves and with others. They share their strategies for helping one another, build on one another’s stories and examples. Oh sure, there are some hokey elements: awarding “stars” and keychains and so on for different levels of accomplishment and there is always applause for the individuals who speak up. But there is also an underlying thing that is happening that is not hokey at all. It involves identifying with one another, respecting each other’s separate challenges and journeys, accepting inevitable set backs and failures, experiencing equality and humility, and being there to affirm each other in the more or less universal process of learning to lead ourselves.

The other metaphor that has surfaced for me is the notion of fat itself, which like the debilitating shadow of consumption that it is, can also represent every interpersonal bad habit, form of denial, coping mechanism, self-indulgence, and self-permitted escape route under the sun; self-sustenance taken so far it becomes a fantasy and a symbol for our wish to avoid ever confronting ourselves. But either now or later the confrontation does come — and in the harshest of places: in the mirror, on the scales, in our ill-fitting, awkward clothes, in our own faces. The whole process gets at a core leadership question: can we in fact change ourselves?

Well, as it turns out, following the WW model there’s a horde of evidence that says yes we certainly can. A community of like-minded people is certainly helpful, and so is a scorecard, and so is the notion that this is not a temporary hiatus from old ways but a permanent shift in lifestyle. Even more telling is the fact that this is not an overnight process, such as all the ones you might see advertised in supermarket magazines. The real process of “losing fat” and “keeping it off” — code here for gaining awareness, self knowledge and confidence — is a slow and gradual one, a “pound or two” a week, for many weeks, months, years.

In much of the work I’ve done with leaders to help them gather and process feedback, the path is identical. It is one of slow and methodical absorption of data, integration of perspectives, gaining support from others, reducing defensiveness in order to see how their own behaviors affect others; small changes over time. Some have an easier time than others. Some, for all the attention from outside, nevertheless remain addicted.

Balloons

So what is it that separates those who embrace the shift and those who don’t? What is it that enables some people to persist and eventually to prevail? Is it a quality of inner will? Are they simply able to get past the sense of unfairness — that others “get to eat” what they want but I don’t?

Every week at the meeting people in a way try to answer that question, no matter what the specific topic might be. Here, I guess, would be my own answer: there is new love in the heart for the one who comes, for the creature who weighs in and keeps weighing in over time, even when the pound has been gained rather than lost; new love for the person for whom victory might be as sad and funny as simply being able to button one’s pants before bending over to tie one’s shoes rather than having to do those oh-so-simple tasks in the reverse order. That’s fat for you. It just gets in the way.

Love, acceptance, care for that creature, for ourselves. It seems to me that is what finally makes denial no longer necessary.

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A person may be said to be “solid at the core” if he or she is able to endure stress, challenges, shocks, even failure, without being demolished. Difficult events penetrate, perhaps even wound, but they are also inevitably a source of growth and permanent learning. Someone with core strength steps into power gracefully, with a genuine sense of openness toward others, not dominance, and with as much a capacity for vulnerability as for holding firm.

My sense is that such strength exists in varying degrees in all of us, the product of every variable in life and experience. Those who truly have it don’t flaunt it. It is felt simply as part of an interpersonal presence. The best leaders I’ve known have all had it.

And this is a dangerous thing because to highlight this quality can take us back to a notion of leading that implies personality as the central issue and a “some have it, some don’t” bipolar perspective that reinforces dependency by followers and arrogance in those named the leaders. And neither dependence or arrogance have to do with being solid at the core.

Yet, it is also impossible to ignore exactly the factors that are associated with central, centering strength — the ability to decide in the midst of chaos, to be influenced by others on the basis of what is true more than what is self-protective, to care for others and willingly sacrifice ego to vision and the genuine needs of followers. The ability to acknowledge mistakes.

I was sitting in a room of about a hundred people recently when one of the executives in the room described the cost of his own failure to speak up about an important staffing decision. The scenario involved “the tide of the organization going a certain way” and his feeling of not being able to buck that tide. The consequences of that decision, as he explained them, turned out to be disastrous for the organization, causing many people pain, embarrassment, frustration and anger, and ultimately resulting in the high level separation of another executive, who of course had also suffered. There were many costs to his decision not to speak up, not the least of which was a cost to his own sense of integrity. Only someone with a certain strength at the core could have shared so openly and been so vulnerable about dropping a very important ball, and without show or artificiality of any kind. You could have heard a pin drop as he explained his role. If we all felt stronger as a result of his reflections in front of the group it was because, I believe, we recognized ourselves in him and because we admired the courage and honesty he exemplified in that moment. You wouldn’t think that a story about a mistake could be inspiring, but that is exactly what it was.

To say, “solid at the core” tells us nothing of how he was able to stand up and so openly share his story. Nor does it tell us how we might become more solid ourselves.

Recently I’ve been reading Gabor Maté‘s beautiful book about addiction, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. One might wonder what a book about life-threatening addiction to drugs has to do with being “solid at the core.” Well, to begin with, the title of the book expresses the very opposite quality. And Maté, in his own way, also exemplifies someone who is willing to share a deep vulnerability, his own mistakes and triumphs, his own addictions, and in doing so also expresses central strength. He knows well the “hungry ghost” side of himself. He does not place himself above the people — hard core drug users in Vancouver, Canada — who he serves so well. Instead he sees their humanity, and by extension, in the way one mirror reflects another, he also sees and expresses his own.

Man at the Gate/Morelia

It’s a curious paradox, isn’t it, that vulnerability is strength. We tend to see things in reverse: we view our strengths as our vulnerabilities — and so we’ve learned to hide them. Rightfully so, perhaps, because our strengths do open us to attack, and once our strengths are attacked we can be most deeply hurt. But the irony is not complete without seeing things from the other side as well; that it is our soft stuff that actually makes us strong.

Once that has been deeply experienced, I sense that a certain affirmation comes forward, an affirmation like a sword that may cut all the way to the heart of a life. Wordless, maybe not something that can be taught. Something that just comes because we are it and it is truly of our nature.

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I don’t think I immediately realized the can of worms I was opening for myself in my last post, On Appreciation, including the conversation with Joe McCarthy in the comments. I love Joe’s perspectives and challenges. In this case, however, the real trouble began as question after question came forward for me internally. How is self-appreciation different from self-esteem? Does the concept of self-appreciation help us overcome the age-old debate over whether someone can have too much of a good thing, floating away as a result into mere egotism? How is self-appreciation different from reflective thinking? Or self-appraisal? As I reviewed what’s available on the net, it was clear that these fields all relating to the self-esteem literature have been well tilled — yet it also seemed like nothing much was actually growing there. On one hand, self-esteem is thought to bridge into some form of New Age mysticism, apparently attractive to people who lack confidence, and on another hand is also about sociopaths whose problem is that they have too much self-regard. I also learned that the idea of overweening pride as a compensation for lack of self-esteem doesn’t explain egotism (because there are too many cases where, as with the sociopaths, that just isn’t so). All these questions were rattling around in me, even before getting to the larger cultural issues, such as the topic of self-promotion and gender that Joe and I found ourselves discussing. Perhaps writing out some ideas here will help my own process of clarification.

First, going back to a point I made the last post’s comment thread, self-appreciation is a process, not a quantity. Self-esteem is often expressed as a quantity, and this by itself creates a problem because then feelings of self-worth are addressed globally as a commodity, a thing that can be bought, sold, and accumulated, most often in the form of books and seminars that purport to teach us how to get it.

I could say that self-appreciation is a method for gaining self-esteem, but given the questions about self-esteem as a construct, what I’d really like to do is throw the construct out altogether, and go back to ground zero, also known as Beginner’s Mind.

Then, here is where I want to go. Appreciation is the key word. Appreciation refers to a sensitive understanding of the value of something. If the term is self-appreciation, that means that I sensitively understand the value of who and what I am and what I do. This is so different from the notion of what fills a bucket. If I am searching only for good feelings or feelings of worthiness in order to hold onto them, as if they were things, essentially possessions or a form of psychological money, my process is flawed for sure.

Bird and Crumbs

By contrast, self-appreciation leads me to recognize and value self from a broader standpoint, spiritual, social, and perhaps even aesthetic in nature. Self-appreciation is about sensitivity to what is. To what is real, good or bad. It may be that self-appreciation reflects an awareness that I have never given some parts of who I am enough credit, but it just as certainly will reflect the parts I have given too much credit. I may see the value of the hard challenges I’ve faced, and also the selfishness of some of my choices. And yet, for all that, it is not simply reflective thinking, which may be abstracted from the true grit of who I am nor is it only self-appraisal, which too often has a moral tone to it and leads to fixed views of oneself. I believe we get closer by including terms like “meeting oneself” and even “confronting oneself.” Self-appreciation — in line with the whole purpose of this weblog — is about self-knowledge, appreciating that knowledge and understanding, and ultimately acting upon it. If I were to contrast self-appreciation with anything, it would be contrasted to ignorance or emptiness. A highly egocentric person may have little self-appreciation because he or she does not yet recognize or value the negative realities of his or her impact on others. An overly submissive person may also have little self-appreciation because he or she does not yet see the positive possibilities for personal influence. Each of these situations is about understanding the value, the importance or preciousness, of self-knowledge.

Self-Appreciation and Defensiveness

In my work as a coach, I often find, for example, that a person may actually have some self-knowledge of a personal strength or weakness but have no idea how to gauge the value of that self-knowledge. He/She may see the trait, but not understand what it is doing or what it’s impact is. That comes through a process of attention and observation. A perfect example of this is around defensive behavior. Suppose, for example, I see myself as someone who is not especially good at writing (or “strategic planning” or “being in touch with others’ potentials”) or some other area that I judge to be a weakness. If someone gives me negative feedback about this area, it may be momentarily painful, but if I judge the comments to be accurate, I am probably able to hear them fairly well. I may even ask for advice on how to improve. But suppose the opposite is true — I believe I’m especially good at these areas. Then, if I receive feedback, I am much more likely to become defensive and to exhibit negative, maybe even retaliatory behaviors.

How dare you criticize my writing! After all, without my strengths, what am I?

A fraud.

The role of self-appreciation is to attend to this dynamic and to offer a compassionate understanding of self and how vulnerable I am around that strength that experienced the criticism. Perhaps, indeed my writing is an important gift and I can appreciate why the criticism hurt, but maybe there is something to learn. So, self-appreciation supports me, soothes me, and I can slow down, listen, perhaps even be bemused for a moment but also connect and self-correct. Without self-appreciation, I may try to rebuild myself around my writing too quickly, and in the very effort to do so, attempting (unsuccessfully) to tell myself and others why in fact I’m good at this, I act defensively. Have you seen any of the episodes of American Idol? Sometimes the contestants receive feedback about their singing quite graciously, but sometimes, especially in the early try-out phase, people become enraged. And that’s because when our strengths are under attack we have an especially long way to fall, but such events have nothing to do with our capacity for self-appreciation. Those who only attend to good stuff about themselves or only attend to bad stuff are limiting the span of their attention, the result of which is arrogant or compulsively critical self-absorption.

What I like about the notion of self-appreciation is real release from this absorption and all the confusion and complexity and drama around the notion of self-esteem, the focus on its definitions, rules and exceptions. I like the idea of throwing open all the windows and doors to see the whole messy reality of the self, and appreciating that, along with the ability to explore without fear the territory of what it means to be in this world. We are given signals everyday, from outside and from inside, and it is our job to notice them and see what they mean, as if we are in fact listening to the passages of a powerful piece of music, full of patterns, emotions, mysteries, dark moments, and light-filled discoveries. That sense of wonder is so much closer to the notion of self-appreciation.

One day I may be a fierce passage from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring:

Play Rite of Spring Passage

And the next day I may be the theme from Peter and the Wolf:

Play Peter and the Wolf Passage

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Would it be too much to say that all growth emerges from appreciation? You or I take a class, for example, in “music appreciation.” We find ourselves becoming sensitive in new ways to the aesthetic value of music. Or we recognize one day what a parent or mentor did for us and we feel appreciative — grateful for their gifts, sometimes very unappreciated at the time. I try my hand at cooking and soon have a new understanding of what it takes to learn to cook well, to become more than a cook, but a chef who can bring together unique and arresting combinations of ingredients that surprise with their pure deliciousness. Perhaps this notion of appreciation answers a question that all self-reflective people (and hopefully all leaders) ask themselves: how do I grow? By what method do I become more of who I am meant to be? As soon as we appreciate, we take something into ourselves and begin to let it transform us, our understandings and ultimately how we behave. In turn this influences the essence of all our relationships.

Having this awareness that growth comes from appreciation, suddenly there is so much to appreciate: new experiences, perspectives, insights, people, events, history. I even notice the artful flight of the crow outside my window. I see the calmness of the lake’s waters behind the crow, and beyond that I notice the feat of creating the city on the other side of the lake. If I throw open the doors and windows of this little cabin of being called the self, I am flooded by a universe that begs for appreciation. I see into both the day and the night, good times and poor ones, appreciate what joy brings, and what sadness and suffering can bring as well. I become attuned to the vibrations of my environment: a crowded store, a tense room of executives, the sense of relief once a hardship is over. Suddenly my eyesight, my hearing are better, as if I’ve transformed to an entirely new kind of cat.

And among all the things I might appreciate, one comes forward that holds a special key, and that is self-appreciation. Not egotism or overweening pride, but surely more than just self-acceptance, bowing to a small portion of life, a fate. Self-appreciation is foundational, my fundamental belief in and capacity to trust my own judgments, to follow the threads that genuinely and uniquely belong to me, without denials and without deceptions. To appreciate everything I am, all the successes and failures, good moments and bad ones, great relationships and ones that need work, all those talents and all those opportunities, the whole kit and caboodle. With such a key you or I might unlock the world!

Chloé

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In my last post, I opened the question of business models that help us transcend a mindset of “disposable workers.” It’s a tough question because it calls for discernment — the ability to judge well. And judgment, you know, is a notorious source of projection, misinterpretation, bias, and many other follies. I prefer to think that the discernment that is required is really based on a deeply felt and deeply understood vision of what an enterprise and enterprise community can be.

One step toward a better business model must be a better evaluation of the skills of management against that vision. Gary Hamel’s recent, widely linked and tweeted article, Management’s Dirty Little Secret, summarizes the situation: employee engagement, essential for financial success, is far from what it needs to be and this is directly tied to “the legacy management practices found in most companies.”

One of those legacy practices has to do with the protection of managers. I do not mean to say they often feel protected. But in many organizations the truth is that it is pretty difficult to get fired once a certain level has been reached or time period has passed. The fact is that when layoffs come it is not the managers who are nearly as carefully reviewed as front-line, non-supervisory staff. There is an unspoken privilege given, and this is especially true if the manager has been in the system for a long time. Yet, it is also the case in such organizations that people at all levels know and talk about specific managers whose performance is deemed a problem. Within conversations among senior managers these names get passed around — as long as they are in someone else’s department. The folks within a senior manager’s domain may be recognized as a problem, but no crucial interventions seem to be necessary.

For example, a few years ago, I worked with a senior manager who himself absolutely knew that one of his immediate reports had ineffective people management skills — the report talked constantly and in patronizing ways, as if he understood situations and people without asking a single question of anybody. His own reports saw him as totally ineffectual, a joke. But this manager also had been around for twenty years, was a “good lieutenant” to the senior manager and believed one day he’d actually take the senior manager’s place. My client did not have the plain courage needed to tell him the truth — that he would never succeed into the senior role. He allowed the report to believe in a fantasy future and maintained his very high rate of pay by virtue of his supervisory responsibilities. His appraisals were glowing, with only the slightest hint that there might be an issue here or there. But, as I’m sure you can see, it wasn’t only the report who was living in denial — it was the senior manager, as well. And together they formed an organizational block that was hard to break. The senior manager accepted mediocrity in return for not having to deal with a messy emotional responsibility. He lacked (or had given up) the essential discernment and vision that might have led him into the right kind of action. He was not thinking of what is in the best interest of the organization or his employees. Heck, he wasn’t even thinking of what might be in the best interests of his report. This is such a standard story.

It seems to me, in its simplest form, the evaluation of a manager ought to proceed along two essential paths: 1) the manager’s business results, including ongoing, strategic and creative work; and 2) how the manager achieves these results. And I hope you see that when I use the word, “evaluation” here I am not referring to the formal annual appraisal process. I am referring to the process of performance judgment and communication that is happening constantly between people. I believe it is the responsibility of an organization’s top leaders to make sure this evaluation is real and complete for both criteria, and that action is taken — person by person — to intervene when one or both of these elements is failing. To do otherwise is to grant immunity and privilege to people because of their positions and tenure. Intervene means offer feedback, coaching, support, mentoring, guidance and facilitation of personal change; and if no change occurs to either move the person into a job he/she really can do or to humanely separate the individual. This is where an enormous breakthrough could occur.

As the example above shows, evaluation and the action that follows really means a breakthrough in the fabric of illusion in an organization, the fabric that leaders hold on to and want to believe in. One of these illusions is that leadership involves being a spectator to what others are doing, seeing how they work things out over time, “holding the space for” outcomes that never actually materialize, no matter how long one waits. Another is that we are all too busy to see and act on what is really happening. Another is the top leader knowing that if the process of discernment were also applied personally it might mean a significant revision to his or her own self-image. Please do not hear disrespect. These are traps, and it is easy to fall into them.

And it is not that we don’t try to get at this evaluative data and with some objectivity. We do have “360 degree” procedures. We have training programs, often big expensive, generic ones. We have organization development consultants, internal and external. We have descriptions of leadership “competencies” galore. We have the so-called annual or bi-annual appraisal process. But really, none of this is effective without the fundamental discernment I mentioned earlier. These tools just become forms within processes and systems, sometimes becoming more artificial and ineffective the more objective and impersonal they attempt to sound. The real evaluation stuff I am talking about is more at the level of the “secrets that everyone knows,” the performance issues of specific managers that are not being addressed because of the conflicts and interpersonal stresses that it would cause. It’s a matter of addressing the default system of the company, the stuff that is simply accepted, that has given some managers apparent immunity for their performance failures. This often results from factors that have nothing to do with the ultimate success of the enterprise. Among these factors are having to face someone with a strong personality, placing technical over interpersonal skills (despite the organization’s stated values), negative views and dismissals of employees who complain, over-estimates of the knowledge drain involved in losing someone, high level friendships and unspoken pacts, fear of lawsuits, bad advice, the desire to avoid grief, guilt or criticism, and the simple longevity of incumbents who seem to know the company way. Any of these things can be used to rationalize and therefore excuse the leader from leading.

The responsibility I am describing is nothing new. But it may be the hardest one of all to master in a demanding economy because it is so personal. There’s no “instrumentality” here to protect the leader. There are no layers to go through, no program or counsel from a consultant to protect the leader from ownership. Discernment and responsibility do not come from others inside or outside the organization. They are based on a deeply private judgment, with all the attendant exposures and risks, a judgment that must cut through so many layers of fog in order to genuinely see the situation. They are based on the recognition that unless action is taken, person by person, the enterprise will never realize its capabilities and potentials, not just for technical performance and customer relations, but for the creation of an internal community, as well.

You see, if we are to have integrity about this search for a better workplace, a more humane and inclusive business model that is also a high performance one, we have to look in a more profound way into ourselves and ask the telling question, “How am I colluding in the problem I say I want to solve?” The failure to address obvious and well-known issues, including the protection of managers (and executives, too) is one of the ways in which this collusion most easily happens. But the trick is really in the discernment that comes from that underlying, guiding vision. For me this vision would never be about short-term returns and disposable workers, disposable people of any kind. I can think of it only as an inspiring beacon. It must offer the hope and the responsibility of co-creation. It must offer a chance to contribute to something much larger than oneself. It must offer opportunities for people to release their full potentials. It must be something we believe in, founded in truth and care, something as equals we are genuinely willing to act on together.

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A recent article on “The Disposable Worker” (thank you, Rosa) has me ruminating about our culture. Especially after learning that Walmart and Kelly Services are the two largest employers in the United States beyond the Federal Government. Walmart alone has 1.8 million employees, and has been subject to considerable controversy regarding its business practices. Kelly services, of course, is all about temporary workers. So it is this notion of what is happening to people and to the American Dream, or should I say, the American Illusion, that I have been thinking about.

Entwined with the fundamental philosophy of individualism, the belief that anyone can rise to meet a personal dream with enough hard work, are darker threads, including this one: that people increasingly have become commodities, economic objects — the very opposite of what individualism originally stood for. “Commodity” means something that can be bought and sold, merchandise on the retailer’s shelf. The recession has only worsened the trend. People do what they are told, work long hours without benefits or fair compensation, live with the increasingly fearful prospects of unemployment, while the separation of the very wealthy from the bulk of wage-earners continues its appalling rise. The notion that we all end up as millions of “Brand You” individualists, a term coined in 1999 or before by Tom Peters, represents a powerful, scary, and also appalling prediction of where, in fact, we are today. Appalling because Peters’ book celebrated the glorious independence of the contract worker — the death of an entitlement mindset no one needed — but completely missed the people-as-disposable-commodity part, which appears now as the biggest shadow-side to the American Dream. Shadows, by their nature, are not something that fit with our optimist ethic. We don’t like to look at them, but we need to. If we don’t, anger and further polarization are likely, the sort that given enough gestation time and continued wounding leads down the path to violence. I’m not kidding.

Before we get that far, it would be great to identify an alternative business model or two, since many employers (noting the first article cited), are apparently thriving on the shadow trend rather than attempting to disrupt it. But how do we get to that alternative model? We can’t go backward in time. We are not going to recapture the dream of “permanent” employment. That’s the past. And on the future side, we don’t have answers either. Social media and globalization, while encouraging different forms of organizational life and structure, can create a similarly illusionary, romanticized version of groups or communities formed around the notion that somehow people will be naturally collaborative in electronically connected settings — if only they are allowed to have their own wikis and blogs, and mobile devices of their own choosing. It’s a yearning for an electronic utopian democracy in a world where the best ideas always prevail through open debate rather than hierarchical power. But, to be honest, this version is also chock full of shadows. People are people, vertically or horizontally. Behavior is not necessarily better over the net than around a table. There are electronic arguments, retributions and blackmails, certainly destructive talk behind one another’s backs, and not so nicely, either, not to mention sadistic attacks and many other lesser forms of human abuse through everyday snarky comments and other troll-like behavior.

So let’s go a step further and acknowledge a fundamental principle of any business model.

Human creations all have shadow-sides. Hierarchy won’t cure it and neither will Enterprise 2.0. There is no such thing as the perfect organizational design or economic system. Power and status and the distribution of resources and rewards will always be issues. Technologies, no matter how equalizing will not save us from our own propensities to need intangible, psychological things and sometimes go after them in highly dysfunctional, if not violent ways. The question is what we do with our designs, how we behave within them, whether we adhere to an ethical vision of humanness; how we structure our actual relationships more than how we structure the company. Can we recognize the frailties of our humanness without learning patterns of exploitation? How much self-knowledge do we actually have, especially in our impact on others, and do we care about that impact? What do we do about conflicts, especially deep-seated conflicts in values? What is meant by wealth, really? What is the social responsibility of a corporate entity and how does it come about? How much double-think and denial and hypocrisy and exclusion are a hidden part of the systems we build? And what is that caused by? Obviously, people have been searching a long, long time to figure these things out, this elusive set of discoveries that might be the underpinnings of first a culture that nourishes the best parts of the human spirit and then the organizational form of a better workplace. If we are going to find a better model then I think we will all need to start working on the answers to these and other questions in earnest, because, given the trends, time is probably running out.

I genuinely wish I had better answers. Some days ninety-nine percent of what I do seems to be a compensation for bad organizational models. Other days, a similar percent is due to lack of meaningful models at all. But insofar as we create these models out of ourselves and our own ideals, what I do know is that they all contain our incompleteness and our own flaws. And so, if we want to change things, we have to touch those flaws, get to know them well in order to confront our real values and character and soul. Right now Walmart is a symbol. It appears to be us. It is what is becoming of the American Dream. Bunkers of commoditized goods where the only market differentiator is cost. Bunkers of cheap merchandize to fill the holes in the illusion of who we thought we should be. Stark lights. Vast warehouse. Of goods? Or of people? Let us hope, in the effort to find a deal, a bargain, a close-out, we do not look up to find ourselves on those shelves, too. I think of the slogan, “Save money. Live Better.” Live better? Live better?! Are you kidding me?

I’m interested in your views of what we can and should do. What do you think?

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Thanks to the December Leadership Development Carnival at Inflexion Point and a great post by Wally Bock, I came across this article from Chief Learning Officer and this report from the venerable Center for Creative Leadership (CCL).

The report, titled “The Leadership Gap” describes results of a survey given to 2,200 managers in 2006 and 2007 regarding needs for specific areas of leadership skill now and over the next five years. The report concludes:

“1. Seven leadership skills are consistently viewed as most important now and in the future. They are: leading employees, strategic planning, inspiring commitment, managing change, resourcefulness, being a quick learner, and doing whatever it takes.”

“2. Leaders lack the skills they need to be effective today. Of the ‘top five’ needs — inspiring commitment, strategic planning, leading people, resourcefulness, and employee development — only resourcefulness is considered be a ‘top ten’ skill. This is what CCL calls ‘the current leadership deficit.’”

“3. Leaders are not adequately prepared for the future. Today’s leadership capacity is insufficient to meet future leadership requirements. The four most important future skills — leading people, strategic planning, inspiring commitment, and managing change — are among the weakest competencies for today’s leaders. The leadership gap, then, appears notably in high-priority, high-stakes areas. Other areas where there is a significant gap between the needed and existing skill levels are: employee development, balancing personal life and work, and decisiveness.”

The report also concludes that there are several areas that, while leadership strengths, do not require further attention:

“Conversely, these data show that many leaders’ strengths are not in areas that are most important for success. Organizations report greater bench strength in areas of building and mending relationships, compassion and sensitivity, cultural adaptability, respecting individual differences, composure, and self-awareness. In organizations where this is the case, sufficient skill-level has been established in these areas and further large-scale efforts to boost these areas are unnecessary. These are mapped in the charts below as ‘over-investments.’”

You mean to say leadership development programs don’t need to focus on these areas, particularly areas that affect diversity and creating inclusive workplaces where people are well-treated? Really?

Here’s my view. I think that’s offensive.

And I think it’s a perfect example of leadership development baloney, where we are supposed to trust to the science of the survey as an absolute in order to purchase something, in this case, more surveys for your own organization. I mean this data from the report might be an interesting discussion starter, but in any area that involves people and their perceptions, there’s no “truth” to be found. This is about perceptions, beliefs and biases, not some sort of objective reality, as I mentioned in my last post. And certainly perceptions do need to be addressed, but good grief, the findings here are simplistic and remarkably superficial. For example, in describing what is meant by this dimension, “Leading People,” we find:

“Leading people. Leaders who have good skills in directing and motivating people know how to interact with staff in ways that motivate them. They delegate to employees effectively, broaden employee opportunities, act with fairness toward direct reports, and hire talented people for their teams. To develop this skill in your organization you will want to:
• Communicate the specific behaviors and skills that are related to managing others well. Be sure managers know them and understand them in context of their roles.
• Assess leaders on the key behaviors and skills. Use consistent assessment practices; 360-degree leadership development assessment tools are often most detailed and helpful.
• Create training programs and developmental assignments. Arrange for training and facilitation by reputable leadership development organizations.
• Develop internal groups to share experiences. Use forums and discussion groups to share lessons learned and best practices related to handling teams.
• Foster a feedback-rich environment. Develop mentoring programs and train management in ways to give feedback effectively.”

Yup, that first line is certainly true: “Leaders who have good skills in directing and motivating people know how to interact with staff in ways that motivate them.” Can’t argue with that but it begs the question of whether anyone proofread the report before it went out. And the rest of it? How is this different from other forms of management training going back many, many years? Is there anything new here? If so, what?

All of this looks to me like such a self-serving marketing piece rather than anything remotely meaningful in terms of actual survey research. Yes, I personally do use surveys (e.g. my Team Trust Survey) and, yes, I even give my survey tool away free in part as a form of marketing, but what I wouldn’t do is tell you it’s a survey of reality rather than a survey of perceptions. What worries me about this stuff is that it actively reinforces belief sets that may actually undermine the true work that needs to be done — especially the tough leadership development work that has a lot to do with relationships, sensitivity, respecting differences, and yes, self-awareness. If CCL had concluded something, anything, about the perceptions they report, I’d have been happier. What do these perceptions mean after all? What are the real needs behind them? But they apparently didn’t take on that evaluation. What it appears they are doing is using them to bolster their business lines.

Here’s another example from the report, this one having to do with what an organization can do to help leaders “inspire commitment.”

“Inspiring commitment. Managers who recognize and reward employees’ achievements are able to inspire commitment from their subordinates. Such managers publicly praise others for their performance, understand what motivates other people to perform at their best, and provide tangible rewards for significant organizational achievements. Organizations can strengthen this skill by:
• Clarifying the vision. Describe how it connects with employees’ roles and talk about the responsibility each person has for realizing the organization’s vision.
• Passing it on. Help managers effectively and consistently communicate a clear vision and direction.
• Raising standards. Encourage managers to expect high standards of performance and interpersonal competence.
• Reinforcing success. Develop recognition opportunities for managers to publicly acknowledge their employees.”

If you’ve followed me this far, dear reader, search your own heart. Do applying these very old school conservative ideas actually inspire commitment? I don’t mean to say they are totally bad ideas, but do they really do the job? Do they foster authentic engagement? Or are they implicitly a defense of managers and a criticism of employees? Think about it. Each of these suggestions is about something done externally, not something within the leader’s own being, passion, purposes or presence at all. This seems more about layering on shallow techniques to fix those uncommitted employees than about being honest, real, or genuine — not to mention personally committed — as a means to inspire others. Are these techniques what CCL calls “skills”?

Over the years I have heard many good things about the Center for Creative Leadership. This material seems far outside that norm and seems to come with less understanding of how organizational beliefs operate, what they mean, and their connection to the core of what leadership is.

Am I being wacky here or have I called out some nonsense for what it is?

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Along with posting a new page on this site, A Place to Reflect, I want to share a few thoughts about inner work. By inner work, I mean any self-inquiry in which your aim is to tap wisdom from a personal, intuitive source. This may be about the largest questions that face us, such as “who am I?” or may be about incidents, reactions, relationships, patterns in behavior or circumstances that create important questions for you. Sometimes called soul searching, inner work is about finding insight based on exploration of our inner, subjective world, including feelings, thoughts, motives, impressions, dreams, images, fantasies, intuitions and sense of spiritual connection. In practical terms, self-reflection can be deeply satisfying or deeply disturbing. On any particular day, it can yield much or little in terms of understanding, a glimpse of eternity or simply an escape from the harsh realities of the world. Self-reflection is both the “hard look in the mirror” that reveals uncomfortable facets of personality and the discovery of vast reaches of beauty, awareness, and mystery that we hold within us.

We are all endowed with the capability to reflect, but we cannot do so without interrupting the flow of daily activities and discourses and make a turn inward. Our conditioning deeply colors whether and how that inward turn is made. I recall a woman asking me a question during a presentation at a university. She said, “I think I understand what you mean, but whenever I look inside the truth is I don’t find anything there! What am I supposed to do?” I suggested to her that perhaps what was there had been “numbed out” by her own conditioning. If you were raised to believe that the inner world has nothing to offer, that because it is not “verifiable,” or that it is “just feelings” or that it is only “navel-gazing,” then, sure, why would you find anything when you looked? I sense that many people have a skepticism about the existence or value of their inner worlds. But, of course, that very reaction comes from where? An inner world.

The art of self-reflection is simply about being open internally, allowing messages to come forward. A message could be a phrase, a feeling, an image — or an event that is unexpected and meaningful, such as a chance encounter. Here’s an example. I was sitting on a hill one day thinking about the nature of my work in the world. Suddenly, I seemed to fall backwards deep into the earth itself and when I “returned,” I felt a strong sense of kinship with the large rocks, the waving grasses, the blue sky and clouds that surrounded me. As I continued to gaze down the hill, I imagined a figure, a medicine man of some kind. He held two feathers. I closed my eyes again and asked what the two feathers symbolized. Right away an impression came to me. One was called, “inner strength;” the other, “psychic understanding of the world.” Those terms surprised me. I hadn’t been thinking about either inner strength or psychic understanding, and yet they felt vital to the questions I was holding about my work.

Okay, so what? Well, these two “feathers” continued to have a great attraction for me. Not long after my hill experience, I went to a local store and found two beautiful turkey feathers with leather loops attached to them. They have hung for many years on a wall in my apartment, along with a small medicine bag that was given to me by a colleague. These artifacts are a source of solace to me. They remind me that not all things come logically or even consciously. They lead me to argue less and accept more, traits that benefit me in my work and in my life. I suppose I could be judged by people who believe this is all poppycock, but I choose to believe I received a boon that day on the hill.

The art is in allowing meaningful messages to come, which is often a form of imaginative listening and seeing (and maybe tapping other imaginative senses, as well). Sitting by the ocean, words or music may form in the sound of the waves, or perhaps I see a shape on the stony beach that interrupts my other thinking. Is that seaweed or some strange sign? I could say, skeptically, “well, it’s all nonsense” or I could say with more openness, “how interesting, I wonder what that means?” I often think this is a matter of practice — a practice of illogical association that upon reflection has a deeper logic to it, if only I will give it a chance to emerge.

Technorati Tag: Reflective Leadership

Richard Stine might best be described as a “visual philosopher.” His canny representations of the human condition are great stimulants to self-awareness. This one, for example, has always been a favorite of mine. Stine has a gift for combining whimsical drawings with deep reflections. I happened to be reading his fabulous book, The World of Richard Stine the other day and found the following passage about defensiveness. It’s a gem:

How do you objectify fear once you’re so involved in a situation that it goes psychologically out of control?

How does one step back from the self-protection mechanism that injects complicated situations with an overabundance of emotion?

Sometimes willing yourself to be courageous through it all does not work. The emotions well up and overtake one’s good intentions so much that having control never gets past being just a good idea.

My experiment right now is to attempt to lessen the emotional complications by communicating as simply as I can–to try not to feel that I have to attack or be on the defensive when I have to deal with a tough situation. Just express the truth as I see it, and then let things develop the way they will, without trying to force them one way or another.

Technorati Tag: Openness

PS. A last thought…I just put up the page to the left, A Place to Reflect, and would appreciate your feedback.

My father died last Saturday at the age of 96. He had been coping with a series of small strokes that affected his hand movements, hearing, and speaking. He had been a master carpenter most of his life, so his senses and eye/hand coordination were his most fundamental tools. The losses had added up a little too quickly. He communicated frustration and depression. And so he did the most logical thing to cope anyone could do: he went to sleep. He stopped eating; he spiraled down; he started receiving morphine and a few days ago he simply didn’t wake up anymore. I saw him a few hours before he died and it was so clear his spirit had already departed a lingering body.

What homage can a son pay? Perhaps only to tell the story.

My father, Kurt Karl Oestreich, was a strong man. He had to be. He grew up between the World Wars in Germany. In 1937, to save his family from harm by the Nazi Storm Troopers that were harassing his village, he escaped Germany to become one of the thousands of refugees on the road. The Storm Troopers rode into town spraying gunfire. They tortured leaders of opposition parties (which included my father) and their families. Everyone was watched. Over the next three years, after crossing the border, he really only had himself to depend on. He knew hunger and fear and learned to keep his wits about him as he traveled from country to country. He accepted help from good people along the way; saw others abandon their principles and sometimes abandon their lives.

Eventually he was able to emigrate to the United States. But here he also had to defend himself against those who thought he might be a communist or a fascist. He learned the language, and did so without formal training. He became a citizen and enlisted in the military, where he was given the choice to go back to Germany as a translator or go the front lines in the Philippines. He chose the latter. He was soon stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington State and through mutual friends met my mother. He went off to war without marrying her in case something happened to him. He was lucky and they spent their honeymoon at a lodge on Vancouver Island, a place he could fish, his most important hobby.

They were both a little old for marrying in those days, 34. They didn’t have a lot of money. They bought an aging farmhouse on a hill and twelve acres, half in pasture and orchard, half in woods. The farmhouse had only one piece of indoor plumbing, a single cold-water tap that ran from a storage tank in the forest behind the house. They fixed the place up, and they had gardens and animals — ducks, rabbits, and sheep. They had kids, my older brother and me. My dad rebuilt the house, put in the plumbing, built the garage, reshingled the whole thing from scaffolds he built himself. After what my dad had been through, I’m guessing this was pretty close to heaven. It was a dream — of stability, self-sufficiency, and a family that lived without fear.

My father had the kind of intelligence that is forged, not inherited or particularly nurtured. He was practical because he had to be. He was a perfectionist because of the price of mistakes in his world. As a result, he also sympathized with the underdog, whoever that underdog might be. And as a consequence, my brother and I learned empathy for those without money or power, for those who had been tortured or discriminated against for things they couldn’t help, like the color of one’s skin. He hated guns and violence. On the farm, he might take out his .22 caliber rifle to shoot at crows stealing cherries or the feral cats that stole the neighbor’s chickens. One night, hearing strange sounds outside our house, I remember he left it sitting next to the door. But weapons in general and wars on any scale, fighting — they were all anathema. He had known the stench of dead bodies, though he never talked of it, never told boastful stories over a beer. No, what my father was was the classic immigrant who worked his behind off every single day so that his children could have something better than he’d had, so that his wife didn’t worry. How many nights did he come home from his work only to go out in the darkness to care for the animals, get wood for the stove? How many weekends were given to shoring up the foundation of the house with new cedar posts or haying the fields in preparation for the winter? There was one value that was more important to him than all the others, easy to name: duty.

He was not, for as sensitive a child as I was, the easiest person for me to grow up with as a father. He could be cool and distant and frankly a little scary. I identified and connected with my mother (who survives him, by the way, also 96). He saw me as that younger son, “Danny-el Karl” he would say, who “always had his nose in a book.” My brother, the incipient engineer, was more comprehensible. My father didn’t seem to enjoy the conversations about relationships and psychology that were natural to my mother and me. Chances were, as those conversations happened at the kitchen table he was on the couch in the living room reading and napping beneath his beloved newspaper. There were years when the truth was that I was angry with him because I felt so misunderstood and distant. And yet…and yet…he was also the man who paid the bill when I went to the fancy Ivy League college. He was the man who told me to pursue my talents. “These are fantastic ideas,” he said to me one day when I was thirty or so. “You must do something with them.” He was the man who whispered, “You can do more than you think you can.” His perfectionism, over the years, drove me crazy and demanded that I use my talents, make a “contribution to the world,” his definition of manhood. When I wrote my first book his only comment was to point out a misprinted word on page 37. No praise. No recognition. It brought back all the horrendous memories of those nights we brought home our report cards. “Why is this subject an A-? Why not an A?” An interrogation. Although he had only achieved an 8th grade school education, there was no question that every grade he’d ever received in school was an A — oh, forgive me, not just an an A, an A+.

And yet, and yet. There are so many fine memories — him digging in his garden after he had retired, finding the hidden potatoes. Fishing on the ocean or in a stream or lake. My father knew how to sit in silence for hours, waiting, knowing the fish were there. He had never brooked silliness or tangled lines from bored sons. Fishing was serious business. We did our best to wait for the pole to tip, learning to set the hook just so. The dark waters of the lake could last all day, all night if necessary for him. He could be there, watching the tip of the rod the same way I now find myself waiting for understanding of what is beneath the surface in the organizations I work with. My father would have said his downfall was his impatience, his lack of “temper.” But he was, of course, a man who had been tempered more than most. I find myself aspiring to the same.

I’m the kid in the back tossing his hay

Of the many gifts he gave me I want to mention one of the most valuable. When I was eleven, he gave me my first camera. I learned to take black and whites by his hand, understand f-stops, shutter speed, and focusing, things that matter but are easily lost to automation. By then, he had personally progressed to the saturated beauty of Kodachrome, a slide film popular many years ago. Kodachrome made the colors of any life rich. The reds were glorious, incomparable. They had passion written all over them. My brother and I lay on the floor of our living room, our mom barely in the chair having just finished washing the dishes, as he carefully inserted, one by one, the slides into his projector. A vacation, perhaps, or Christmas. There was always a critique, some of it funny — what captions could we come up with? — and some of it a disappointment in exposure or composition. I learned something there of my father’s true soul.

It would be easy to dismiss this carpenter. He kept a low profile. His humor was in puns, not ribald jokes. His beauty was in the formal wood carvings of flowers he did by hand with his knives and his lathe turnings of vases and plates done in the basement. He could be good at a community meeting where you needed the voice of reason spoken in a tactful and unassuming way. He didn’t want to stand out. He worked for 30 years for one company and then he retired, having survived it all, the economic ups and downs, the years of rising at 5:15 AM, the mountains of his favorite breakfast, Raisin Bran. In his heart, he accepted life as a contest between good and evil and he knew exactly what it was that the good looked like. It didn’t make waves. It was quietly courageous. It was an example. It fought for the underdog. It was smart. It survived.

He was a gracious, hard, imperfect, demanding and sweet man who knew how to adhere to rules of faith and duty that are all but forgotten. I have no longing for that older world. His life was born from things we have little understanding of today, but should never forget.

I wish your spirit well, Dad.

You earned your keep, my father. And now I hope to do the same.

Technorati Tag: Love

Yesterday, as I do a few times a year, I walked a labyrinth located near where I live. I have posted before about using this ancient tool for reflection. It was a cool day, gray overhead, but I found it as easy as ever to engage the path to the center, meditate for awhile there, and then return — out the way I came in. I was not holding any particular question in my mind, but rather simply observing the nature of reflection itself. Come with me on that walk.

I have noticed lately a major jump in hits to this site from keyword searches for “reflective leadership” or similar terms. I posted a definition not too long ago. In this post, I want to come at this definition from some other angles. In a sense, this definition is never done. Reflective leadership is always extending and revising itself because the very process of reflective leadership demands that. For instance, it seems clear that some people use the term to mean simply “leaders thinking about things” rather than doing all the time.

At this level, questions such as “What key decisions are coming up?” or “How do we spark more innovation on the ABC project?” are examples of reflective leadership.

At another end of the spectrum, however, the questions are much deeper, perhaps including such personal inquiries as “What are my insecurities and how shall I address them? How are they reflected in this organization? What are my real motivations? What are my shadows and blindspots?”

And from yet another angle, the questions that drive reflection may be as deep but more externally focused, such as “What is the change in the world I want to make? How can I best use my gifts to build community? What will genuinely bring us together around [a particular] issue?”

All of these directions get lumped into the bucket of reflective leadership. What unifies them, even at the level of the thinking versus doing, is the notion of stopping and making a subjective inner turn to look in the mirror of what is happening. In this sense, reflective leadership depends on a person moving to a “meta” level — reflecting on their work and themselves. All forms are legitimate, and I would say typically people will move as they grow from the thinking/doing dilemma to the larger issues of meaning. Left-brain consideration gives way to right-brain intuitive, even symbolic thought.

Four Types of Reflective Experience

Some years ago, the insight came to me that the real change agents in the world were not people, certainly not me. The real change agents were the reflective experiences that go on inside people, and the best I could do would be to provide opportunities for those reflections to occur. Have I followed this notion in all my work? I wish I had, but the truth is I still spend way too much time advising and not enough helping others focus on the wisdom they can find within themselves.

So what are these reflective experiences? Are there key ones? I would say there are four that are particularly powerful — and all found at the deeper end of the pool. Some are obviously more important than others depending on the person, but each makes a contribution to the wholeness of the individual. They are all about “what comes up” in the presence of certain aspects of life and the world that touch our subjectivity. They bear on twin aspects of who we are: our sensitivity to reality and our inner strength. They are fundamental sources of inner work and directly affect how we lead. They are about who we are in the presence of:

1. Silence. What comes to mind in the presence of real silence is a powerful indicator of who we are. Silence, when it shows up, can be an enormous gift. Whatever is in the background of our thinking, feeling, and intuition comes forward. Anytime there is silence, the mirror is present but sometimes more dramatically than others. I remember a participant at a “silent breakfast.” A silent breakfast means people come, eat, and reflect individually while they eat together, but they don’t engage in conversation. After the breakfast in question, when others had left, the participant broke into tears. He turned to one of the facilitators of the breakfast. “What I realized this morning is that I have been having a silent breakfast with my family for twenty years!” All that stuff about his family was waiting in there for silence to catch up with him — the beginning of a journey for this man.

I remember a very different experience of silence at the Grand Canyon. You could call it silence but it wasn’t a dead silence at all, but one simply devoid of human noise. The silence was not different than the sound of the wind and flit of insects, the occasional chirp of nearby birds. A colleague turned to me. “It feels like whatever energy you put out there,” she said with a nod to the vast emptiness of the Canyon, “will come back to you ten times over.”

Silence occurs in other places, too, including poetry. There’s a great line at the end of the poem, “The Invitation” by Oriah Mountain Dreamer.

“I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.”

This line alone might be a definition of reflective leadership. The challenge of silence is that it fills with whatever needs to be emptied out of a person. Silence brings it all forward. For some people this brings a sense of peace and joy. For others, there is fear, regret, or anger. Silence is a primary means by which we “download our own stuff” (to use a phrase a friend of mine invented.) Those who cannot sustain the download often try to run or hide from themselves. Effective leadership demands precisely that we do not avoid who we are and what is in us.

2. Beauty. What happens when we are in the presence of beauty? Whether it is an elegant painting or a mountain vista or looking into the face of a child, beauty has a way of powerfully communicating our connection to life. Do we see our actions as the brushstrokes of our lives? Do we see our own beauty as individuals?

I remember working with a client who seemed to be operating a little superficially in terms of her vision. It was too rose-colored, and at the same time she seemed to communicate a underlying despair. One day, after a walk down a long hill a memory came to her of her ex-husband and how he had told her he thought she was physically ugly. This was the bottom point of her walk and of a memory that was getting in her way. She turned and walked back up the hill. She left the damage her ex-husband had done at the bottom and grounded her vision in her full and real experience rather than a fantasy. She created a different stand vis a vis her own beauty and the beauty of the world she wanted to create.

Something about beauty causes us to see whether we are truly in life or out of it, whether we have experienced our potentials or drifted away from them. In Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous poem, Archaic Torso of Apollo” it is not us who see beauty, but rather it is beauty who sees us:

“…there is no place/ that does not see you. You must change your life.”

Indeed, once we have been seen by beauty, we cannot go back to a conventional view of achievement, success, and self-interest. Beauty causes us to attend to our incompleteness, our wounds, our compassion — and also to find and honor our own gifts. Frankly, in my view, we have little chance of a true moral compass without beauty. Our corporations, filled as they are with greed and competitiveness, have no beauty in them at all. (And you can’t substitute expensive art on the walls). Beauty means the beauty of an enterprise, its products, the way it gives service, the relationships of trust internally and externally, and especially the beauty of the people who make it up.

3. Timelessness. Peter Koestenbaum, the great leadership teacher, talks about managers who live in and are constantly bounded by time as distinct from those for whom time is a flow. If individuals feels trapped in time Koestenbaum would say that they not “living their meanings” as individuals and they may have difficult decisions to make about what to do with their life and work.

The experience of “timelessness” is often about “the flow” when time no longer seems to matter, but it can also include a strong sense of the transience of things and their cyclical nature — the circles of life, as it were. In the most immediate terms, do we choose to live and work in full, rich ways or do we wait for that to happen at some unnamed point? Are we waiting for some future to arrive, for “our ship to come in.” Or do we live in the past and our regrets? This is another way we run away, especially when we suggest we are victims of not having sufficient time. Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day asks if we know how to be “idle and blessed” and also asks a question born from pure timelessness:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?”

Answering such questions gives leaders a sense of their own depth and inner resources, enabling strength and calmness and flexibility.

4. Community. This is the powerful medicine of looking into our own relationships. Faced with people, a broad group of people with different perspectives, backgrounds, cultures, and voices, how do I operate with authenticity? What do I see about the community that it does not see about itself? What does the community see about me that I do not see about myself? How do we share that information? What is my role in empowering others and guiding action? What does it mean to provide vision as opposed to awakening it? What is the change I want to be devoted to that is larger than myself?

These questions take any of us toward the greater reaches of understanding ourselves, especially our own conditioning — our history, family, culture, social circumstances and personal experiences — in effect, how we were made, who we are, and what our leadership is about. These rich questions, unlimited in number, press for constant understanding and ever more learning. When people wall them out, failing to take a reflective stance, their leadership becomes a closed matter, ceasing to grow, and deadening to others. Facing community brings up all the questions of influence, impact, values, conflict and collaboration. Who would we be if we simply chose not to listen to these questions?

When there is listening, dialogue and understanding, a certain mutuality grows up and we become truly for each other in new ways. In William Stafford’s rich poem about this mutuality, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other,” he warns us about the risks of not reflecting.

“For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.”

And in this statement, I believe Stafford nails down for us exactly why reflective leadership is so important — why we can trust nothing less in others or in ourselves. The darkness can be deep. My father’s recent death certainly has caused me to reflect a great deal on the times between the World Wars in which he grew up and on the risks he faced. We would be naive to think that such times could never come again. It’s all a matter of consciousness.

So by way of an evolving definition, reflective leadership is the capacity of a leader to actively invite in and stand in the presence of silence, beauty, timelessness, and community. This is the fuel for constant learning and growth. That’s a simple definition, but with a certain “dimensionality” to it. You can keep exploring forever, enriching your sense of the value of each of these qualities and how they have changed you and can change our society. They are an antidote to noise, ugliness, stress, and personal isolation.

I have to tell you that as I walked the labyrinth yesterday, all of these thoughts and more came into me. It was as I reached the center of the labyrinth, the place of deepest connection, that this notion of “what comes up for a person” around the four areas emerged with the greatest force. Then, suddenly, realizing I had walked to the center, I looked down. There before me was a big pot, and out of it was emerging a cluster of deep green stems from the bulbs below. So it “came up for me” in a double sense, you see, which is often the path of reflection — a metaphor or an image suddenly surfaces, not some lifeless chain of logic to be studiously played out in the dark.

Experiment

Some people say they learn best through exercises. I would say I learn through experiments. Here’s one that may assist you with your own experience of reflective leadership. Read Step 1 and do it before reading or moving on to Step 2, located beneath the photograph of two men and a cat.

1. Take a few moments to write down a time when you have observed someone in a leadership role fail to reflect effectively. Identify any situation in which the leader did not stop, turn inward, and fully consider what was happening — and you believe he or she should have done so. What do you think caused the leader’s behavior? Ultimately, what were the impacts on others and on the problem being solved?

2. Now draw a line. Underneath it, identify at least one specific time when you acted in the same or a very similar way. (If you can’t think of a time, perhaps you are exemplifying a non-reflective approach!) What did you personally experience that kept you from reflection in your own situation? What did it feel like? And how does thinking about your circumstance and your own reactions influence how you now see the leader in your example above the line?

Finally, allow every aspect of the situation you named for yourself to deeply sink in. Remember it in every detail. Allow whatever thoughts, emotions, or images to emerge and record them.

Then ask yourself, “What am I learning?”

Please share your own views of what reflective leadership is about and your reactions to this post. Since I would say no one really knows that much about the topic, this could be a great place to start a helpful dialogue for us all.

Technorati Tags: Reflective Leadership

Barry Schwartz does a wonderful job of reminding us how practical and necessary wisdom is in our daily lives and how it’s constant application creates a better society for all. Thanks to Tara at horsepigcow for posting this great talk. (If you haven’t already done so, go visit her site — it’s great.)

In particular, what Schwartz does so well is remind us that a positive shift in society is an “inside job,” not the application of external measures, such as more rules or more incentives. I can’t think of a better follow-up to recent posts on reflective leadership. This is the applied stuff, beautifully done.

Technorati Tags: Changing the World, Reflective Leadership

Every day people from all over the world come to this site looking for leadership poems. On their behalf, you are invited to send your original poetry about leadership to this site. Up to three poems will be chosen each month to be posted and permanently displayed in the Favorite Leadership Poems pages of this site. One poem will be awarded $50.00.

Please submit no more than three poems in any month that have not been published or submitted elsewhere. Poems may be of any length and should either be about a specific leader the poet admires or about specific qualities of leadership (e.g., courage). The definition of leader is broad and ranges from well-known figures to anyone who inspires us to fulfill our true potentials. Top poems will be selected based on their capacity to inspire and move readers and to reveal the best qualities of leadership.

If selected for publication, the poet must forward a personal photograph plus a brief biography statement, including a line or two about the making of the poem. More information about this will be provided if your poem is selected.

By submitting your poem you grant Oestreich Associates first serial and second serial world-wide rights of publication in any media format (electronic, print, etc.) without further compensation, including subsequent reprinting on the Oestreich Associates website, Unfolding Leadership weblog, or as part of other writings and compilations by Daniel K. Oestreich, such as future books. However, this is not meant to restrict your use or publication of the poem in other venues once the poem has been published on the Unfolding Leadership weblog. You retain full rights to your work as previously published writing.

You will learn if your poetry has been accepted for publication within the first week of the month following the month of submission.

Please send all submissions and questions regarding this contest to this address.

Good luck!

[This page will be permanently available in the left sidebar of this site].

Technorati Tags: Reflections and Poems

There is no term that communicates quite so much irrevocable dismissal by managers in the business world than labeling an action or activity, “touchy-feely.” It is the most prevalent way of discarding information about people. The term suggests all those really icky “hygiene” demands of employees, dealing with the stuff of relationships in the workplace and God knows what else that is aimed at making people feel good but doesn’t actually have anything to do with getting the work done effectively and efficiently. There’s often a patronizing tone of opprobrium that goes with this universal label for things that have to do with…oh no…feelings.

In presentations sometimes when clients ask me if my material is going to be “too touchy-feely,” I often joke back: “Oh, it’s a lot worse than that. This is about your personal healing as a leader.” Usually I get a laugh out of that. Little do they know, I’m serious.

Surely, there are more hurtful, ignorant forms of labeling, but the one around “touchy-feely” I find to be code for the disastrous underlying damage to people in the business world, the stuff that Studs Terkel in his famous book, Working called “the daily humiliation” of work,” the “violence to the spirit as well as the body.”

Let’s examine some of the things that are ruled out of discussion by concerns about what is too”touchy-feely.”

• Personal feelings
• Spirituality, Soulfulness
• Community and connection
• Self-disclosure
• Background experiences and conditioning from the past, especially childhood
• Arts, including poetry, music, painting, etc.
• Appreciation for differences of temperament, style, or culture
• Rituals of any kind, indigenous wisdom
• Managing personal pain and woundedness
• Life journeys
• Levels of self-esteem
• Building warm, supportive relationships
• Appreciation for human failings
• Working with shadow issues, everything from power and manipulation to self-destructive behavior
• Open relationships; trust-building

It’s kind of a long list and if you are sympathetic to this posting, I bet you’ll have even more to add. I suspect the whole fearsome list is triggered in some peoples’ minds at the moment someone uses one of the code words, like “wound” or “journey.” A friend who does the same work I do was criticized in one of her proposals. The clients said her words were “too round.” Interesting. We can now add “round words” to the list of what is officially off the list as too “touchy-feely.”

One day I was having a lively discussion with a number of other people in my field about this label. It was a polite discussion where we were trying to communicate in overtly tempered and mature ways — a solid “dialogue” (oops, there’s another of those words) to evaluate and understand — but in our hearts was a deeply nagging frustration. We decided that the term actually referred to anything that had to do with the subjectivity of people, their thoughts and feelings and sense of identity as people, what was inside them that might be disclosed (a risky proposition) and that had to do with whatever they considered their personal rather than their professional presence to be. This was interesting to me. It reminds me, of course, that there is an organizational iceberg and that the human side of things is often shunted below the water-line while the public face of business appears to be the business of business above it. There is that whole process of “hiding,” you know; that whole process of pretending we can live together in an impersonal world 8 or 10 or 12 hours a day.

Can I tell you something? When people suggest that my work might be too touchy-feely, it hurts me. Yup, after all this time, though I can joke about it with people, I still take it personally. Like I said, there are much worse labels for people, but it is another form of destructive ridicule, the way the phrase, “Can’t you take a joke?” used to be the way you knew that sexual harassment was alive and well. So I’ve learned to play the game. I can describe anything I do in strictly behavioral terms. I know how to talk about performance management and development plans for people and all the rest of it, knowing that when I or anybody who consults gets in there to find out what’s really happening, the truth is often very messy, complex, and emotional, having everything to do with background conditioning, systems of defense and denial, ego, life journeys, soulfulness, human wholeness, the art of being alive to a network of diverse relationships, self-disclosure, connections, trust — and so on. It causes me pain to watch business culture try to obscure its most wounded parts.

I have to tell myself — well, this is the starting point, not the end-point, and I try not get angry or frustrated by the ignorance that use of the term reveals, often a studied, macho kind of business snobbery from people who think they know the answer, are highly self-protective in an unremittingly positive way while being quite skilled at subtle put-downs, ridicule, and other forms of civilized ruthlessness.

To be fair, of course, I have noticed times when a “touchy-feely” approach does seem out of context and does not match the level of defensive behavior that characterizes an audience, say an executive team. I remember being hired by principals of a small high-tech firm to facilitate a retreat. Members of the team boastfully told the story of the previous facilitator who had tried to use a “talking stick” to get the group to open up, how one of them, ridiculing the entire “touchy-feely” process, threw it on the ground and broke it, how the facilitator was so humiliated he didn’t bother to send a bill for his time. Now I certainly judged this audience differently than the first facilitator and did not use a talking stick or any similar device. I didn’t read them any poetry. I didn’t talk about the quest for human wholeness. Instead I smiled, and when it came up, I told them I would charge them more when they tried to use abusive language with me. Instead of team dynamics, I took them through a standard process of multi-voting on their priorities and making project assignments.

Over the years that I have continued to work with this firm, I’ve gotten to know the people and they are truly wonderful as individuals, but they are not very good as a group in handling issues that require interpersonal openness. They don’t have the temperament for it, they complain, being technically oriented. Maybe so, but I tend to think that’s pretty much an excuse from wealthy clients who’d simply rather not. They’ve certainly suffered for it from a business standpoint, paying major amounts of cash to circumvent dealing with their lack of openness — to people who they can’t confront about performance, to programs that cost many times what they should in order to be executed, for mistakes about how to handle relationship problems. But change any of that through their own behavior — hell, no — they’d pay almost anything to avoid it. The money to circumvent these problems is simply considered a cost of doing what? Oh, yeah, a cost of doing “business.” The whole event with the talking stick, well, silly as it still is to them, actually hits them in their softest, most insecure place, their inability to talk openly and directly to one another about … oh, no, not that! … their feelings toward each another.

Was the talking stick too touchy-feely? Oh, yes, for this group, definitely. And quite simply, way too threatening.

At fifty-eight, I find myself getting really tired of the smugness of business people who want people like me to figure out how to help them solve their human problems without direct human means — and then ridicule my profession. What clever strategy can I come up with to deal with a problem of leadership or team dynamics without actually dealing with the problem of leadership or team dynamics? Please, they might as well say, don’t take us anyplace we don’t feel good, anyplace we are scared and vulnerable as individuals or as a group. Please don’t make us share our subjective stuff so somebody else can see how incomplete and untogether we are, where we have to show up as ourselves with actual feelings, actual anger, actual anxiety! In this sense, those who complain the loudest about not wanting to do something too touchy-feely often really just want to maintain the power of their personal feel-good mask. God knows, we shouldn’t disturb that.

This is the damage, the real, tangible human damage in the business world. By business world, I certainly also include other sectors, non-profits, academic and research organizations, etc. I don’t think we’ve changed the business culture much over time — some, but not nearly enough if we don’t start examining and dealing with the “touchy-feely,” undiscussable stuff that causes our enterprises to be woefully inefficient and sometimes really inhumane places to work. Because if you want to know what “touchy-feely” is code for that absolutely scares the crap out of people, it’s really simple. It’s just this: the truth.

Technorati Tags: Healing, Journey of Unlearning, Love, Wounds

Most managers I know do not feel they’ve actually been given much guidance about how to proceed with cost cutting and, particularly, layoffs. As the first line of a recent Harvard Business Review article asks,“Why aren’t layoffs taught as a subject at business school?” I assume the reason is that the subject is both very complex and comes far too close to what it really means to lead, touching that sensitive cross-over point between personal values and professional conduct, a place where theory definitely has its limits.

We are so conditioned now around the word itself: layoffs. It induces deep anxiety. A manager I know compares the impact of the word to a Ginger cartoon (shown below) by the famous cartoonist, Gary Larson. No matter what other words are used, he told me, we only hear the word “layoff” the way the dog only hears its own name. There is some truth in this, I believe — although I’m not sure I like the comparison of dogs and employees.

Unfortunately, the HBR article, called “The Layoff,” does not offer much real guidance about how to approach downsizing. While well-written, I found it to be more about what not to do than how to proceed. In fact, the article confirmed for me the narrowness of the corporate mindset attempting to balance the desires of shareholders against the needs of employees. The article might have been intended as mostly a foil for discussion and to get people thinking, but I’m not sure it provided as great a service to readers as is needed these days.

The most glaring failure in the story, in addition to the fact that the leaders all seemed pretty much adrift and self-enclosed, is their push to simply get together in a room, have some hurried discussion, and then decide what needs to happen. The role of reflection seemed to be bypassed in this rush to create the right strategy — and then, ipso facto, to know what to do. Surely, when the financial heat is turned up, there’s no time to waste, but this is also a time when alignment with real brand values — a topic that requires reflective leadership as a team and as individuals — is likely to be the most reliable long-term guide. Understanding and applying these values demands decisiveness founded on thorough and creative consideration, not some three hour “tall grass” meeting where competing self-interests have a field day, followed up by a briefing and hand-out from Human Resources.

It’s as if no one wants to ask the telling question, “Wait a minute, what was this place supposed to be about, anyway?” That “wait a minute” comment might be followed by any number of statements that come directly from the stated core values of the enterprise (perhaps even posted in the room):

“Wait a minute, what about this word, integrity?”
“Wait a minute, what about this word, respect?”
“Wait a minute, what about these words, extraordinary service“

Under stress, leaders can all too easily forget that creating a particular external brand presence with customers does not happen over time unless the brand is also lived internally with employees. Under the stresses and pressures of recessionary times, the first victim may be these stated values of the enterprise — as if when the money’s not there all bets are off. But this, of course, may turn out to be the biggest cost of all. People will recall for years how critical moments in the life of an enterprise are handled. They notice and remember discrepancies from the intended culture and brand promise they’ve been asked personally to fulfill. If “Integrity” is the value and it means “customers count on us to do the right thing.” Then it also means — if you want the brand to mean anything at all — that “employees count on us to do the right thing.” And also, “People count on me to do the right thing.”

In this way, I take brand to be a variety of things: a certain reputation, a promise, a practice, a value proposition, an identity and a market differentiator. And by these things, it becomes a powerful vision and ideal of organizational and personal alignment. Brand is the living energy of a company. And it must be lived. If it is not, it’s a sham. It is a betrayal. And every time a customer, or supplier, or employee discovers another discrepancy between what is said versus what is done, that brand diminishes in strength.

There is no beautiful way to do reductions and layoffs. But pain can be reduced significantly if the process is guided by values greater than the dollars that must be saved. I am not suggesting that the need to cut costs should be avoided; I’m saying the “what” and the “how” should be guided by how the enterprise has already defined itself. Either the values it says it lives by are important or they are not. One thing that I am certain about, given my line of work, is that most of us contain a highly sensitive wire about others’ hypocrisy. As a consequence, we keep looking for advice about how reductions can be conducted without setting off the wire. Sometimes that takes on the feel of a rote formula:

• Engage everybody in helping find solutions
• Don’t be uncreative — think about alternatives in terms of pay reductions, job shifts, etc.
• Have clear targets for how much reduction by when
• Give people warning, but not too much
• Don’t just cut from the bottom
• Don’t expect everyone else but top management to make sacrifices
• Don’t make cuts across the board
• Don’t stretch them out — let people know when they start and stop
• Make provisions to support the “survivors”

And while these are all good ideas, what they do if applied in isolation from stated corporate values and the brand promise is simply become a checklist. And the worst part of this checklist is that it both preserves the fantasy that somehow layoffs are in some class of their own — and the ideas become arguable in terms of expediency. Do we really have to do it this way?

I say the conversation needs to be different. When applied to hard times in an organization, what do these values mean? If layoffs are necessary, what does integrity look like? What does respect? What does extraordinary service? That the “customers” of the process are the employees who have made the brand what it is, should heighten not lessen the desire to act congruently, and in alignment with what the organization says it is. In fact, I’d say that it is precisely going through the hard times that forges the true lived meaning of these values. Moreover, if you attend to the values, won’t you get to all of the ideas on the checklist anyway? — except it has a link now to who and what you are and probably has a whole lot more flesh on the bones.

Of course, discussing values sometimes has its risks. To do so highlights whether these values apply to the conduct of the people — typically executives — who are making the decisions. Indeed, how are they treating each other and the rest of the enterprise? Are they living their values, thinking on behalf of the whole organization, how the work and possibly the identity of the enterprise are changing, or are they operating according to a default political culture of self-protection and competition? And how has that culture been translated to the managers who work for these executives? I began this article by noting that many managers do not actually know what to do and how to do it. They need their executives to provide guidance without micro-management. They need models of how to live the brand and to be mentored through a process that includes such things as:

• Identifying how specific work is affected by the recession.
• Translating changes in the work to a plan for human impacts that is fair and mirrors the values of the enterprise.
• Coordinating action and communication with other managers and with employees in order to reduce tension and ambiguity.
• Handling all manner of sticky situations that have to do with choices of when and how to approach people.

The need for vertical collaboration may never be higher.

And beyond all of these things, there is a person, you for example, who also needs to look carefully at your own values and how well they match up with the stated brand and actual behavior of your organization. Your own credibility — with others, with yourself — is at stake. A reflective leader is a witness to what is going on in the environment and also what is going on within the self. For example, a new manager I know confessed he was struggling with the apparent direction he was receiving to get rid of a trouble-some employee with a negative attitude under the guise that the function was no longer needed. As tempting as that opportunity was, it begged the question of his own cowardice in dealing in an upfront way with the employee — and with the boss exerting the pressure.

In troubled times, reflective leaders step back to witness…and to learn. Sometimes there is no advice nor anyone available to help make critical decisions. Sometimes the stress is very high. Under such conditions, it is wise to know how your own shadow side works, what you may do inadvertently or unconsciously. There are managers, for example, who subliminally express their need for power and control by working people harder who are scared about losing their jobs. There are managers who are considering savings by terminating the least assertive individuals (think back room technician for whom English is a second language). In times like these it is best to take some time to get square with yourself, to envision how you want to live the brand, what your greatest gift is and your most value-added, courageous contribution. This isn’t a time for blindly keeping your head down; your brain and your heart are needed. This is about careful consideration and it is also about choice, finding your own voice, being real, connecting, and above all, leading from within.

Technorati Tags: Reflective Leadership, Layoffs

Shuffling through moldering overheads, I found an old presentation I used to do called, “Strategies for Reinventing Yourself.” It began with a recitation from perennial management guru, Tom Peters. I’ve lost the citation, I’m afraid, but since this is ancient history, circa 1993, it probably came from a book, speech or article of his around the time of Re-Imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age. Whether or not you are a fan of Peters, listen to this:

“We are coping with the biggest economic change in two centuries. That’s self-evident. But what does it mean?”

“It means that to be scared out of one’s wits is sensible. To be certain of anything is suicidal….”

“1. Don’t worry if you’re feeling nuts. In fact, worry if you are not. There are no certain answers. We don’t even know what questions to ask.”

“2. Don’t even think of hiding. There’s no such thing as insurance against bicentennial change. Overall, Americans’ increasing demands to be protected against any and all untoward events amounts to an enormous drag on our ability to adapt to this tectonic shift.”

“3. Reinvent yourself. Corporations and government must be transformed. And so must you and I. The race will go to the curious, the slightly mad, those with an unsated passion for learning and daredeviltry.”

“4. Remind yourself that you’re in the midst of something really big. Maybe that, in and of itself, will make us a little more receptive to the next cataclysmic disruption that will surely come our way.”

I had to smile. I guess we’ve been with this longer than I thought. Plus ça change, plus la même chose.

Technorati Tag: Transformation

We often think of a calling as a job that doesn’t make much money but has public benefit. Ministers, teachers, social workers, artists of all kinds, as if this work should be done without pay precisely because of its intrinsic lack of self-interest. You know what I mean: a Vocation, capital V. Maybe the sort of thing responsible, practical parents try to talk their child out of because the chances of big success are slim: rock guitarist, dancer, pro basketball star, art teacher. At it’s core, calling seems to be some kind of powerful, magnetic force, something we are “born” to do or be.

Is there then such a thing as a call to lead — an experience of a “powerful, magnetic force” around the act of breaking down the status quo and bringing on the possibilities?

This is a good question to ponder because it really forces us to differentiate leading from other kinds of action; the pure expression of power, for example, or activism around certain social values, such as equality. Don’t get me wrong, power and values are living aspects of leadership, but I don’t believe they are its essence — they aren’t the call to stand in an exposed place and bring change to the order of things. The call to lead happens especially when this personal stand-taking contains a dose of moral courage or wisdom. Without the moral aspect, the actions might turn out to be a form of heroism or a form of despotism, but they won’t be leadership. The “call” is about stepping out, stepping up, finding the rungs and handholds that enable another person, or a group, or a global tribe, to find its way and know a truer compass. That’s why we expect so much of those we call leaders. They help us mediate our own experience against the complexity and confusions of the world itself.

Universally the call involves the act of stepping into awkward, ambiguous or risky space, breaking an implied or explicit social assumption or rule. Sometimes it’s only a tiny action. Sometimes it’s about changing a whole world.

I remember a time many years ago when I was asked to help a fairly rigid, bureaucratic organization figure out what they wanted to do with their annual employee meeting. A task force had been set up, as had happened for many years, so that the interim president was meeting with a small group of people who represented the various levels and sectors of the organization. Together they would decide. It was another difficult economic times then, just as today, with rumors of layoffs rampant in the hallways. I met with the task force and from the start it was clear people were tense about the upcoming employee meeting. Would I possibly facilitate the event? What should be its theme? they asked. After some polite talk going nowhere around the table, the interim president suggested we do some team building and maybe talk about conflict management at the annual meeting. Nothing magic in those topics and it was easy to see that the president had created more, not less tension with his suggestions to to the other task force members. Finally, a small voice from someone who identified herself as an “office assistant” for one of the departments came forward. “Why don’t we use the annual meeting to talk about the upcoming layoffs?” she asked.

Next came one of those soundless but deafening thuds as “the wrong idea” hits the floor. People sat mostly with eyes down, from time to time checking in on the the interim president by glancing sideways at him.

“Well,” he said after a moment of thought, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. For one thing, no one knows for sure what’s going to happen. It’s possible that there will be some layoffs, but then again this could all blow over. I don’t want to scare people.”

Again silence, with people probably contemplating the many rumors about how the place would soon be “gutted” by terminations. The interim president’s face was set. He had just voiced a diplomatic “No” in a way that left no question whether the office assistant’s suggestion should still be on the table. But she spoke up again, quietly, looking at him. “We’re already scared,” she said.

The HR Director, also at the table, looked particularly nervous. Part of the rumor mill included how the interim president had already directed him to offer training to key managers on how to conduct layoffs, although nothing was yet being said about that publicly. Finally, the office assistant spoke one last time, quiet, calm, and respectful: “I think it would really help people if we could just talk about it.”

The outcome is that we had a very successful day-long, all employees retreat, including an in-depth discussion of the organization’s current situation, its protocols for layoffs, when people would know for sure whether layoffs would happen, likely scenarios for what groups would be most affected, how decisions of who goes and who stays would be made, and other issues of vital concern. While some of the news was painful, there was also a sense of relief. And there were many accolades at the end of the day for the interim president for being straightforward and open, even though in the moment some of the discussions had been emotional. I swear there were points when I could hear the HR Director’s knees knocking.

Ah, but the moral of the story is the call, you see. What was it that called that office assistant in the moment to make her suggestions, to break that rule about who speaks up and who doesn’t and about what? The task force had been filled with people who clearly had more organizational stature and power, but she was the one who led.

I’m not sure we will ever know how to define a leader except by patterns of behavior, by sequences of moments in which a person consistently steps into difficult space because of the call. But whether it is a single moment, only one in a person’s life, or many tied together that become the honored reputation of person, again and again it seems to me it comes down to that powerful, magnetic force that encourages someone to stand up in his or her own life. Because I’ll you what, once that “office assistant” spoke to the task force, there was not a doubt in anyone’s mind which way we ought to go.

What a lucky organization to have her there.

Technorati Tag: Changing the World

Wall Street, 2008

Grin’s promise looted trust and hustled many
Gilt scams on fun’s installment plan,
Then loaded trust into its minivan
But dropped nicked dime and tarnished penny,
Torn five. Our firm now wobbles, teeters.
I scour want ads, hunt for honest leaders.

–David D. Horowitz

For details on submission of original poems, please access the guidelines here.

Technorati Tags: Leadership Poems

For Rosa and Dick.

The other day I found myself in a state of complaint. The recession, of course, and what it has done to my business. It’s clear, adding up the cancelled work for this year that I have lost a significant amount. I wrote to a good friend, Tom, about my state of mind. Tom is a compassionate and honest guy. He replied:

“Perhaps, like many of us, this is a time of forced reflection on what are we really doing here, and what is the legacy we can leave. You have certainly left your mark on many of us. But it ain’t over yet, and I’m sure that out of the havoc will arise new opportunities and beginnings.”

“Drats,” I thought to myself. “Caught in victim-thinking again.”

And so it is. A time for re-invention. I have gone through similar periods, notably after 9/ll and at other times during my career when working in a particular direction or with a particular client has come to an end. Despite the financial fears (will I ever work again? work this big?), it is also a time when something else always seems to come forward, something stark and beautiful that speaks of re-grounding, pushing the reset button, going back to “beginner’s mind.”

If someone asks me about my favorite season, I will usually say spring. And yet, given a choice, would I ever go through winter again? It’s hard to say. Chastened by my friend’s comments I took a walk to the local park to clear my mind. Sure enough the answers were there in the emerging green clouds of new leaves, sometimes hardly more than dust on the branches it seemed — but definitely there.

Along the lake, I discovered the willows greening up and the iris that suddenly had reappeared — as a duck paddled across the sky. Trilliums, those magical flowers one must not pick lest they fail to reappear for seven years, poked their lovely heads out of the dried leaves of the past season.

And I was slain again by the beauty of the cherry blossoms fluttering down in a warming breeze to litter my path.

Something springs up, something re-invents me in the hard times. Can I let that happen again?

Synchronistically, a client had asked me to plan a day of training — one of the cherished few left on my schedule. Suddenly I was back in front of my screen and I was thinking. What should be the topic? With a little inspiration from Peter Koestenbaum, a title for my day came to mind: Claiming Your Freedom: Exercises in Organizational Courage.

All this lyricism about recycling. Can it pay off in a harsh political world where money is king? And yet, could there be a better time, really, to talk about the courage of new growth?

I hate winter.

I love the spring.

Technorati Tags: Listening, Transformation

Could there be anything more worthwhile celebrating?

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest on twelve acres of land, half in pasture and orchard, half in woods. As a child, nature was my chief companion, so to pick out only one day, Earth Day, to honor our remarkable island in space, this blue marble, seems now ironic and almost superfluous. Shouldn’t we always be living some kind of hymn of praise to sunlight, running streams, the cycle of days and nights and seasons as we turn and turn through a wilderness of stars?

Unofficial Earth Day Flag

It demands, doesn’t it, that we find the living connections between the reaches of the human spirit and the reaches of all that which surrounds us. A friend of mine many years ago said: “We think we know what nature is because we have eyes, ears, touch, taste, and smell. But we only have these five senses, so we experience only so much. Our knowledge is limited. If we had more senses, nature would seem even more complex to us, and that much more beautiful as well.” So, yes, we have the five, and intuitively, I believe we know there is more, an invisible, “unsensed” more. Indigenous wisdom and poetry seem to best tap these unsensed and unknown aspects.

Unlike other religious traditions which celebrate at separate times to everyday life a revelatory event in the long distant past, the Dreamtime of Aboriginal spiritual practice is celebrated and lives in whatever exists and transpires in the present — in all aspects of Creation, in an eternal now. In this sense all time exists in the present moment and all life — the Spirit Ancestors, the Earth, the Cosmos and all species — are aspects of an inherited divine order and are thus sacramental. There is no ‘thing’ in Aboriginal consciousness that is ‘nothing’. There is no aspect, no creature — be it a dung beetle, a poisonous snake or a human being — that does not have its place and its role to play in the ordained sacred pattern of Creation. There are no gods, no religious hierarchies, no segregation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, no unsavoury bits, and no separation between the physical and the spiritual or nature, humanity, and culture. All came into being at the one time, and all of these dimensions are reflections of each other.

–Anna Voigt and Nevill Drury, Wisdom from the Earth: The Living Legacy of the Aboriginal Dreamtime

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

– Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems (Volume One)

Blue Marble Day. A day to see and honor the stunning patterns of the universe that surround us and our place in the family of things. Let’s learn how to partner with those patterns, what is yet unknown and what is possible. Surely we can learn together how to save this thing.

My Daughter

Technorati Tags: Consciousness, Sustainability

Recently I wrote about the essence of leadership as responding to “the call to stand in an exposed place and bring change to the order of things.” I used the example of someone with less power and stature speaking up at an important meeting where she risked the possibility of her ideas being dismissed — and maybe losing some personal credibility as a result. Yet she did it anyway, an act of leadership that changed the “order of things.”

All of us have faced such moments of truth. Either I say it now or I keep quiet. Rosa Say in her comment to the post talked about how this “inner call might be silently voiced in our self-talk each day without us choosing to act on it.” What she is referring to is the personal fear that holds any of us back from doing what is meaningful and right for us. Such fears are not limited to speaking up. They can inhibit us from doing any of the things we want to do with our lives. If you sense that you are living in only a corner of your possibilities rather than living large and fulfilling your potentials, chances are you are living with fear. Typically understanding this fear, legitimizing it, learning to observe its impacts, and practicing small, everyday acts of courage reduces fear to something manageable. The reflective turn to do so is often the starting point of a new kind or level of self-trust.

In presentations, when I’ve put the question before audiences of how it is that some people seem to feel they can step into “exposed space” at work, almost universally the first response I get is that the individual taking the risk somehow already trusts the situation and trusts the others who are there. Yet when I’ve asked people who have spoken up, made a tough decision, or took action and initiative, the answers I get have almost nothing to do with trusting the situation or others. It has to do with “what’s right” or “what was needed at the time” or explanations such as “Well, I couldn’t just sit there and watch this happen.” It was the circumstance that called the person to lead, even when being in the safety of a trusting environment was not at all an option.

So the answer to me is much more along the lines of self-trust. This is not to say that when a lot is on the line — and sometimes the stakes are very high at work — that the goal is to jump blindly from the cliff. Genuine self-trust is not like that — it is much more of a stand that comes from the core of a person, an inner strength that transcends fear more than conquers it. So how does someone actually develop that inner strength?

First of all, I believe the strength is naturally there. The soulful potential has always been there. It’s born in us and is part of who we are. But there are a million inner voices the come from our past conditioning that moderate and inhibit this birthright. In fact, it can be a highly enlightening exercise to examine these voices — actually write them down and take a look at them.

“This will be a mistake.”

“Who am I to think I can do this?”

“This will just create a lot of trouble for people.”

“I’ll ruin my reputation.”

“It won’t do any good.”

“If Mom were here, she’d say I was being selfish.”

“If Dad were here, he’d say I was too big for my britches.”

“I’m just not ready.”

All of these voices were learned. They have protected us from risk and possibly for good reason at an earlier point in our lives. But today they probably just add up to self-criticism, inner conflict, and stuckness in the face of the real opportunities we have to make a difference. In fact, we may feel a true personal need to make that difference, to stand up, to lead, and just as surely at the moment of truth face walls of hesitation and self-dismissal. All of which leads to depression, blaming self and others, cynicism and, let’s call it out for what it is, the death of our true potentials (another word for soul) in the chains we’ve learned to wear.

Everybody I know wants to understand how to get past such stuckness and out of the chains. Those who promise it, from coaches and counselors to organizational pundits to spiritual gurus, can get considerable attention on this issue. If they are smart and have sufficient testimonials they can make quite a bit of money selling their secret formulas.

Except, over time, this stuff often wears off. The chains come back. I sense this is so because the stuckness is frankly, a personally sacred place, part of the ineluctable meaning of our lives that we must discover for ourselves. Stuckness is given to us as exactly the thing we most need to listen to instead of trying simply to get around, avoid, or escape from, as the ferryman’s words* in Siddhartha illustrate. “The river knows everything,” he says. The river itself is holy. So then the question is how do any of us “listen” to the river, the thing that keeps us stuck? How do you and I actually do that?

If you haven’t noticed the subtle shift of perspective from the ferryman, here it is: in listening to the river we’ve moved from overcoming personal fear to engaging personal mystery. There may be many cultural issues here. Americans like quick fixes and how-to’s. River? Hell! Dam it, pave it over, blow it up! Mention what is sacred or mysterious and not easy, and we’re likely to run for cover. Quick answers, better technology, simple personal solutions, that’s what we need. And yet, the center, the core of what we might most need to get at is right there standing in front of us, mostly like an oracle or temple, inviting us to enter in. This is really the place of the Unknown, where others don’t have the answer for you and you don’t have the answer for yourself, either. Listening to deeper intuitions is all you can do. It’s your whole job. That’s where the gold is.

Right here perhaps you might like to hear some success stories. If you listen in this way what will it be like? What can you hope to gain? How will you know when you’ve listened enough and don’t have to anymore? But I would do you no favors in trying to tell such tales. Every story is different. Every story would only be a reduction and distraction from your own experience. The way is unseen.

Just know that you now sit on the steps of a temple.

*If you didn’t see them, the ferryman’s words about the river are at the bottom of the page.

Technorati Tags: Self-Knowledge

My last post was about how we can foster self-trust as the central means to overcoming “stuckness” and conflict that holds us back from fulfilling our leadership potentials. If leading is responding to the call to stand in an exposed place in order to change the order of things, then by definition leading relies on self-trust, breaking the chains of the inner hesitations we might feel to speak, act, and take initiative. I ended the post with the metaphorical, and perhaps enigmatic phrase, “Just know that you now sit on the steps of a temple.” This post is about that temple. And just so you know, “temple” to me does not connote any particular religion at all. In my own mind’s eye, metaphorically, the temple is simply ancient and definitely not of the ego’s making.

To the contrary, the temple represents a critical shift in perspective — from trying to overcome the personal fears that we see as holding us back to engaging the personal mystery that ultimately makes us whole. The very obstacle we are trying to get past needs to speak to us, speak through us, and if we can listen to it, then deeper personal learning and transformation can come forward. In turn, this helps dissolve the obstacle and transcend the fear. It is this transcendence that we come to call self-trust.

Suppose for example that you want to stop everything else that’s going on in your life and take your sailboat solo around the world. Or you want to start a small business, but you have no experience doing so. Suppose you want to write a book, coach a basketball team, open a school, get out of a bad relationship, do more for social justice or sustainability. Suppose when you go to work, you’d like — just once — to speak your truth about the staff meeting that everyone feels is a waste of time but no one has the guts to bring up with the boss who owns the meeting. These are your dreams, and they risk remaining fantasies unless you act. They are the places you are not leading your own life and as a result have no influence on others.

Another way to put this is:

solo trip = temple
small business = temple
write book = temple
coach team = temple
start school = temple
end bad relationship = temple
lead social justice effort = temple
promote sustainability = temple
speak up at staff meeting = temple

Within each of these temples — and whatever yours are in real life — is exactly the energy needed to engage, begin, embark and persist. And here’s the kicker, that energy doesn’t belong entirely to you. It’s given to you, so long as you respect and honor that this is, in fact, sacred stuff. Some use words such as destiny to cover this ground, meaning the unique combination of personal choice and fate operating in a person’s life. If it helps to think of this sacred stuff as your destiny, great. I think the simpler word, calling, will do just fine.

Life — especially organizational life — is usually a maelstrom of events, conversations, projects, daily routines, changes, crises, challenges and accomplishments. What happens I think is this: in the midst of the whirlpool, the person who leads comes up exactly to his or her points of hesitation and then consciously or unconsciously chooses to see this as a profound moment, chooses to let whatever is in that temple speak. The beauty, of course, is that the “god” or “goddess” within, the genius of the person, meaning the true spirit of that individual, shows up in that moment. From the outside, when we see that true spirit show up, we call it leading. In that moment of truth, the beautiful, real, vulnerable, strong person appears before us. We memorize such moments, take them right into ourselves at a cellular level because they remind us how incredibly meaningful life is and how it can be even more meaningful — anytime, at any moment — with our help.

The image of what the leader did becomes indelible and we wonder, how could she or he have done that? Told the truth about the crummy staff meeting, sailed solo to Indonesia, started the school in a back-room of the house, organized the “take back the night” march, wrote the book that led to the book that won the Pulitzer Prize. What we are actually watching is the movement of something that is literally awe-some in people’s lives. Unfortunately, all too often, having experienced that wonder we quickly retreat, avoiding the the awe because it reminds us of our own personal fears and unrealized potentials.

What we can always do is face that temple and let ourselves be drawn forward toward it. Are you trembling? Then the force within that temple — within you — is especially great. And you can rely on the god or goddess who resides there to give you what you need. The sacred welcomes those willing to enter in.

Perhaps many of us will always want to go some other way. We don’t want metaphors; we want formulas. We want “established business models” and concrete techniques. Useful but incomplete, I would say. We want proof rather than what, with a little self-reflection, we already know. But if this is so, then, ultimately, we will also be faced with the inconvenient truth of our stuckness, our subtle wars with ourselves, and our inability to transcend the private fears that govern our lives and our relationships with others and that keep us in chains. We have enabled ourselves to become smaller.

There is no greater betrayal than self-betrayal, and that is exactly the thing that keeps us from self-trust.

In my last two posts on Self-Trust (here for Part I and here for Part II) you probably noticed a strong emphasis on images and metaphors. In Part I the image of the river and ferryman are dominant, leading in Part II to an exploration of the image of the temple. I have used these images to support a shift in focus from the conquest of fear to engagement with personal mystery, with the fundamental goal of liberating personal potentials, especially the potential to lead “in exposed places.”

If you are not familiar with the use of images in this way, it is easy to have a reaction — either to feel invited into a very different world, or to be put off by the “illogical” nature of the process. As a coach, I have frequently found such images to be especially powerful in the efforts of clients to know themselves and gain some form of liberation from blocks and inner barriers, especially when conversation alone has not seemed to do the trick. For example, I once worked with an Executive Director level client who expressed considerable anger with the people who reported to her. Our work together seemed to go nowhere until I asked her to draw a picture of her life. She drew colorful fields, one inside the next with high fences between them all. As we studied and explored this drawing some important aspects of her past came to light, including a private and secret promise she had made to a deceased child, a promise that she had never shared with anyone. Once that came into the open, many other important connections appeared, including a particularly critical key to her agitation with the people who reported to her. Understanding the image led directly to relief and changes in her own patterns of leadership behavior.

If you are a skeptical about such processes, I don’t blame you. But I also have seen some very remarkable things happen when people allow images to come forward. A client once told me — after the fact — that he had intended to undermine my request for a picture of his situation. He set out to sabotage the process by just “scribbling out anything” on a piece of paper. When he was done, however, he broke into tears because despite his conscious effort to derail the exercise he found that he had drawn a symbolic picture of his family members and their relationships — a series of circles and “vines” that revealed the painful distances among them all. In yet another case, the client saw how an otherwise beautifully well-ordered drawing had been “marred” by a blotch of dark-colored formless scratches in one part of her work. The blotch, she quickly realized, was her own disappointment with herself and her job situation and how that was marring her life. This, in turn, gave her insight about the back pain she had been experiencing and also her own collusion in the problems she wanted to solve. These interpretations of drawings were not the result of going to some sort of dream catalogue to find out what this or that symbol meant. Water or horses or images of flying or purely abstract forms don’t always mean the same thing. They mean only what they do only in the context of a particular individual and his or her situation. It is the person who unlocks their significance.

Such images can show up through a variety of methods. They may emerge from meditation — disciplined or freeform, from writing fairy tales, from art forms such as collage, poetry, sculpture, or dance. Sometimes the image has an immediately apparent meaning, such as the fields and fences of the the Executive Director, but just as often they represent less obvious, more ambiguous messages that are equally powerful. The fact that they do not explain themselves easily causes us to think about them, wonder about their interior meaning over time. If you want to learn more about such processes, I suggest taking a look at the sections on active imagination in Robert A. Johnson’s classic study, Inner Work: Using Dreams & Active Imagination for Personal Growth. For even greater understanding of the roots of the notion that “psyche is image,” access Jungian psychology and modern derivatives, especially this well thought out collection of excerpts from the work of psychologist, James Hillman.

Now back to rivers and temples. It is an interesting exercise — and you might want to try it — to draw some symbols for yourself in the context of shifting your own perspectives. You can do this by first imagining the obstacle that you are facing, a place that you experience hesitation, anxiety or fear and that you sense limits your potentials. Once you have done this, then take that same energy and “convert” it to an image of a temple, where the temple represents the fear transformed to awe. I want to emphasize right away that drawing in this context requires no artistic skill whatsoever. In fact, if you do have artistic skill, the exercise may be a little less useful for you. This isn’t about an elegant picture; it is about the experience of seeing something that is inside you, that is part of your inner world.

Let me share a personal example. If I were to draw an image of my fear it would look pretty much like an abyss or bottomless pit. A big dark mass. (I used to think and feel exactly this way about my finances — and it’s still easy to feel that dark emptiness doing my taxes!) When I convert that energy to awe. I get something like what you see below, which I constructed using Powerpoint and Photoshop, tools that work for me just as well as pencils, pens or paintbrushes. (Click on the image to make it larger, if you like).

Looking at this image, what I see is that the energy is still “hot” — there’s fire in this temple — but there is also a god there, too. Surrounding the temple is the natural world and a path that naturally leads up floating steps to the interior. When I see the god I experience the conversion of that fearful energy to something that reframes it as an awesome mystery. I have objectified it into a set of symbols, uniquely mine, offering a sense of transcendence. On the steps of this temple is where I do my taxes, write my books, confront awkward situations and mistakes, and step out into the exposed space. It’s on those steps that I experience self-trust. As long as I am there I am not falling into any pits. The god is present and literally “has my back.” There are moments, even, when I would say the god actually speaks through me, a kind of radiant presence, but this is definitely not something I can make happen. It’s simultaneously humbling and strengthening. What I sense at such moments is only that there is flow.

To be sure this is a very literal rendition of the transformation of energy. The image actually doesn’t do anything beyond reminding me of inner coordinates. It is a symbol, after all, not the thing itself. The image simply helps get me little closer to a source of strength (translate that as self-trust) by pointing to a sacred dimension in the heart of the fear. That’s the key. The temple image I have created is a powerful metaphor for an aspect of me that I can call upon when fear creeps in.

Why don’t you try this, and if you like, send me your thoughts about the experience of creating such an image, along with a jpg of your drawings? It will be fascinating to post and compare a few images here. To do this give yourself some quiet time. Use whatever medium suits you: paper, pen, paintbrush, computer graphics, etc. Try to focus on a situation or challenge that ignites anxiety in you, that you can actually feel just thinking about it. Try to get to the very heart of that anxiety. Allow whatever image of that anxiety to emerge. (A friend drew himself as a little boy with a towering robed and hooded figure pointing down at him). Then remind yourself that this image is not to be overcome but to be transformed. Allow instead an image of some kind of temple, however you define that term, to come to mind. See if you can get an approximation of that down on paper (or cyberpaper) in some way, and send it along to me as a jpg. How did it feel to do this? What does the image mean to you? Let me know.

If you need inspiration because you are not used to using images in this way, try googling images for fear and for temples on the net. For example, as I was writing this post I came across this stunning photograph of a temple entrance by Craig Ferguson.

I have been thinking about a phrase I used in my last post about self-trust. Symbolically, I said, I have “a god at my back,” meaning simply that there is an energy that supports me from within when I meet difficult circumstances. Many people report having this sense, and know it has gotten them through hard moments or hard times. I think of Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame and her recent TED talk on creative genius. In this short, inspiring presentation she talks about the “glimpse of God,” the inner genius that is expressed through art, the product of gifts that are only “on loan” to the artist. We know them when we see them in others. And I would add that we feel them come through ourselves with a deep sense of flow.

I am reminded of a colleague, I’ll call her Linda, who worked for a very tough, demanding CEO. After the holiday season, company managers and their teams got together for what promised to be a celebration of a highly successful sales effort. Linda’s team had surpassed all their projections and they were riding high. However, instead of recognizing these accomplishments with praise, the CEO chose instead to publicly criticize members of Linda’s team in the meeting for their lackluster performance. In that moment, Linda stepped between the CEO and her team and immediately asked the CEO to direct his remarks to her, not her team members. If he had a problem with the team’s performance, she said, he should plainly address it to her. She also asked the CEO directly why he felt a need to criticize a team that just surpassed its projections — a question for which he had no answer. Later, and after a long series of conversations covering many months, Linda and the CEO decided together it would be best for her to leave the firm. It was more than clear to her that the CEO loved his opportunities to grandstand and hook people into confrontational meetings through outrageous criticism. I think of this story because I know Linda well and I can see her there standing her ground calmly, asking for respect. To listen to her tell the story is to experience her profound genuineness, her real truth and authenticity. This is a classic case, as is the story I told in this post on leadership as a calling, of someone willing to move into tense, uncomfortable space in order to change the status quo. When such demanding moments happen and we have the privilege to see someone leading, it is exactly this same “glimpse of God” that Elizabeth Gilbert eloquently described in her speech. We have all seen and felt that divine energy come through.

I believe this is one of the most challenging thoughts I could possibly put forward about leading. Because what I am not doing is presenting a formula for how actually to respond when the tough moments happen. I am not sharing a list of key phrases to use with people in power, suitable for Powerpoint. I am not catering to intellectual solutions that please the ego and attempt to use slick interpersonal technique to replace truth in the moment. And I am certainly not telling anyone to go back to church to learn more about all this simply because the language sounds spiritual. What I am saying instead is that unless a person wakes up to their own source of this energy, the leadership they might bring will always be bounded and their presence diminished.

Perhaps you feel some anger, as I do, for the situation Linda was placed in, or some anger that in the end she decided to leave without any particular change or new understanding by her boss. These are the shoulds of the situation and they are precisely what trap us and victimize us, along with fear of letting out the force within. If I were to speculate, I would say that Linda was larger than the situation and she did what she was destined to do. No one speaks easily of this reality — that once the sacred energy has learned to express itself, the leader’s path becomes unique and therefore alone. This does not mean that the leader has no friends or community or cannot sustain difficult relationships. To the contrary. But it does mean that the inner strength that moves people out of conformity and compliance also causes them to see differently and to take paths that they alone can take.

Over all the hilltops
There is silence.
In the tops of the trees,
You feel
Hardly a breath.
The birds have fallen silent in the woods.
Simply wait.
Soon,
You too will be silent.

– Goethe

[This is the first of a two-part, three-way post. Many thanks to Dick Richards for initiating this project. You will find the same post at both Dick's and Deb's sites.]

“Life has a way of stripping away the nonessentials one year at a time, until we’re left with our real selves, unashamed before the world, refined by experience, shaped by the things we’ve learned and the passions we’ve pursued…”


–Author Unknown

I asked Dan Oestreich and Deb Call to join with me (I’m Dick Richards) in creating a post about “the gifts of age” because it seemed that we were each plowing that field in our individual blogs. So this is a collaborative effort and it has been my privilege to put our thoughts together and to act as narrator for this two-part adventure. These two posts are being published simultaneously at our blogs.

In response to my invitation, Deb wrote of a lessening of judgmental attitudes as one gift of age. “Smack in middle-age,” she wrote, “I find that life has softened my edges. With perspective I rely less on black and white thinking. Being judgmental feels less satisfying. I haven’t extinguished these traits, as my husband will attest, but engage in them less frequently.”

She also recognizes another gift of age, which she calls inner confidence. “I distinguish this inner confidence as a willingness to be my “real self,” she wrote. “It differs from the external, ego driven confidence I developed from accomplishments as a way to prove something to others. Inner confidence means I no longer have to look a decade younger if I don’t want to. Inner confidence means I can celebrate middle age my way, even if my friends and husband don’t get it yet. It’s about my recognizing whose story I’m listening to about how to do ‘middle age’.”

As an example about listening to her own story rather than someone else’s, Deb wrote, “The other day I stopped into my eye doctor’s office to pick up an order of contact lenses. I happened to glance down and see a woman’s magazine. Sally Field sat on the cover. The headline read ‘How to Look Seven Years Younger.’ I had my Eureka moment: this is an old story foisted upon American women about how to age. Who cares? Obviously I don’t anymore. The real gift of age is the one I give myself, the inner confidence that says I don’t need anyone’s permission anymore to be the natural me!”

Dan told a story which led him to yet another gift of age. He wrote, “Fifteen years ago I embarked on a major mid-life learning and change process. I thought at the beginning I was refining the work I did for pay. It did that in a major way, and it overturned everything in my personal life as well. Figuratively, I went down into the pit, the well of grief, I believe the poet David Whyte calls it, to find the golden coins. It was a very tough period emotionally, enormous highs and lows. I lost many relationships. I was often–usually–at war with myself over something. The one coin I seemed to have brought back I would call acceptance.”

Dan’s story reminded me of a friend in his late eighties who told me that he was having trouble remembering names. I asked him how he felt about that, expecting to hear a tale of frustration and loss. He replied, “Oh, I’ve accepted it. Right now I have one problem; I can’t remember names. If I don’t accept it then I’ll have two problems.”

Non-judgmentalism, inner confidence, acceptance. And I will add one more gift of age, fruition.

Fruition means, the condition of bearing fruit. Seeds planted in my mind have sometimes taken years to bear anything but anemic fruit. For example, sixteen years ago I had a sudden flash of insight: “I don’t have to prove anything to anybody.” But an insight is not a change, and for many years thereafter I continued on the path of proving various things about myself to various people. Today, while I still work at extinguishing the urge-to-prove, I finally feel confident that I no longer desire to prove anything even when old impulses to do so arise. This fruit is now robust, but it has taken sixteen years to fully understand, integrate, and practice not-proving. Those years came only by aging.

The kind of fruit we get depends, of course, on the seeds we choose to nourish. I like the following story to illustrate the point. Two elderly Jewish men, who had met in and survived a Nazi concentration camp, came together again many years later. The first man asked the second how life had been since their liberation from the camp. The second man told of a life of contentment and accomplishment, said, “I’ve forgiven them for what they did,” and then asked the first man about his life. The first man told of a life of resentment and woe and said, “I’ll never forgive those bastards.” The second man shook his head sadly, “That is all too bad,” he said, “It seems they still have you in their prison.”

The seeds we choose to nourish, and their effect on the gifts of age, will be the subject of Part 2 in this series.

[This is the second of a two-part, three-way post narrated by Dick Richards. Many thanks to him for initiating this project. You will find the same post at both his site and Deb Call's site. Read Part 1.]

Whatever we believe to be our gifts of age, it seems impossible to conclude anything but that they derive from experience. This is true not only for the gifts mentioned in Part I — freedom from making judgments, inner confidence, acceptance and fruition — but for so many others unmentioned so far, such as wisdom, peace of mind, continued commitment to a purpose, or enjoying the fruits of former accomplishments. It also seems impossible to conclude that these gifts are given to all. There are many who have them in great measure, and who revel in them and use them wisely, but there are also many cranky and unhappy old men and women who seem not to have them at all. If the gifts are truly gifts of age, then it is probably more accurate to say, rather than that the gifts are not given to all, that all are not able to receive them.

Dan wrote, “Acceptance is not a perfect word. It does not fully convey the sense of flow, fulfillment and peace of mind that I associate with it. It doesn’t fully express the sense of grace. But I like it because what I hear in it is not the part of accept that means endure but the part that means receive. As in receive a gift. If I’ve learned anything, it is how to receive. It was a friend, a psychic, who first told me — as I was waiting for insight at the bottom of my lonely pit — that I needed to open myself and learn to receive (was it this that changed the pit to a well?).”

“You are trying to do everything on your own,” she told Dan. “You don’t trust the universe and you don’t see that the physical reality of your circumstances, the physical world itself, is thin as tissue paper.” She related the story of a man and his wife, clients of hers. The man was washing the dishes one evening when he heard a ker-plop into the soapy water of a bowl in the sink. Reaching in, he pulled out a ring. He had never seen the ring before. He took it to his wife who exclaimed, “Where on earth did you find that? I haven’t seen that ring in twenty years!” Dan’s psychic friend explained that it had just come through in order to help the woman deal with what it symbolized to her, some unfinished business from the past.

“I’m sure I privately scoffed at the story,” Dan wrote, “Yet I would say this has turned out to be what has happened to me, too. Something, a coin, a ring, has come through that tissue paper thin wall of time and space. Its gradual recognition has had a miraculous effect. I do a better job of receiving myself just as I am and receiving others just as they are. I’m more open. The wars between me and me have diminished over time, replaced by an inner connection to the flow. I know I’ve embraced something — or it has embraced me.”

Becoming more open to receiving what is available to us, rather than struggling along possessed by the desire to have things our own way, appears to be a pre-requisite for acquiring the gifts of age. And Deb pointed to a few other prerequisites when she wrote, “Age brings wisdom, a commonly held belief. Although wisdom is not confined to older folks, wisdom can manifest new strains, or gifts, as we age, if we remain aware, open, and reflective.”

Aldous Huxley summed it up this way, “Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.” It is what we do with our experience that determines whether or not we are capable of receiving the gifts of age, and approaching our experience with awareness, openness, and a habit of reflection appears to be prerequisite.

Deb experiences a bittersweet quality to realizing it has taken her fifty-seven years to arrive at her inner confidence. “But some things just can’t be rushed,” she wrote, “Like the silky taste of an aged Cabernet, or the patina on a piece of old bronze.”

She confesses, “Over the past two years I have been envious of women with silver hair. Not gray hair, or white hair, but silver hair. It happened again a few weeks ago while out hiking to a waterfall. I saw a vibrant looking woman in her forties with beautiful silver hair. Contrary to our youth-driven culture, she did not look old in her silver locks.” Deb will turn sixty in 2011. “That’s my target date to have grown out my roots and become dazzingly silver-haired, whether it be au natural, or with the help of my hairdresser.”

This September, Dan, at fifty-nine, will marry “a fabulous woman and soul-mate.” He explained, “We met on eHarmony a few years ago. I haven’t been married in a decade and that will complete a cycle of some kind. I feel I am coming home, maybe for the first time. Indeed, what a lesson, learning to receive, and a ring it is that shows up. Who on earth would have guessed?”

I am the oldest of our troika. I have eight years on Deb, seven on Dan. Unlike Deb, I’ve been bald for a long time and don’t care at all about what hair I do have. Like Deb, judgmentalism feels less satisfying to me, and I no longer care much about proving something to others. Unlike Dan, I would probably not have scoffed at the psychic’s story about the ring. Like Dan, I have had to learn how to receive and was remarried at about the same age that he is now.

I can say from my “elder” position to both of them (and perhaps to you) that if you remain aware, open, reflective, and receptive, the gifts of age will keep getting better, at least for the next seven or eight years, which is all that I can speak to.

Most of us live in multiple worlds simultaneously, the world of our professional life and our personal life probably the most obvious example. Much of the time this compartmentalizing helps us maintain balance, but sometimes it also creates a person with multiple souls, none of which is entirely fulfilled. Insofar as we manage the balance, there may be a sense that life is good, but there is another way of looking, which is to focus on individual unity across the boundary lines. Sometimes, for example, if I am using some type of temperament inventory with clients, I am asked how best to answer the questions. “Should I answer these about the person I am at work, or answer them about the person at home?” It is interesting, isn’t it, that our work and home personalities might vary so much.

What is of special interest to me is the one who is the same in both environments, the one who shows up in the transit between the worlds. This is the person who has left the office or left the plant but isn’t home yet. It’s the person who has left home but not yet arrived. Who is this person?

Some years ago, I traveled a great deal for my work. I traveled so much to Madison, Wisconsin where I had a number of clients — and ultimately friends — that I felt I was living two lives. The only place that really seemed like my own real space was on an aircraft. There I could think just for me; I didn’t have to be anywhere else; I was in the middle passage. Once I realized this I stopped working on planes, and I also stopped doing chores such as paying my bills. I began to more thoroughly enjoy the transition, an anonymous person. I enjoyed the pleasure of being a ticket.

Sometimes, metaphorically, I think we get on planes and yet we don’t know where we are going. The transition, the ticket is the thing — maybe the question we are trying to answer. I met a woman not too long enough who found at a certain point she just wanted out of her high-level assistant to the president role for something different. So she sold her house and most of her possessions and bought a one way ticket from Minnesota to Chile. She had never been there, had no contacts, and didn’t even know Spanish. She just went. A few years later, she found herself buying another ticket, this time to Bolivia, and so on…These are to me cross-over points, where the soul is free precisely because it is in transition. There is anxiety but also excitement. There is a sense of self like no other, and simultaneously a question of personal identity. Who is the person flying? Sometimes we proudly and publicly cross to the other side of something in full daylight; sometimes we sneak across the boundaries in the dark. It’s as if we can’t live with the stone of stability alone. We must also have water, the symbol of transition and of transcience, cutting through our lives and our work, through the stone of adopted identity to find something even more fundamental below.

Without such a sense of the water that flows, a work-life balance doesn’t seem like it makes much sense to me. It can’t be just a balance; it always includes a transition that is itself a world of its own. I sense this place is sometimes the most vital part of a person, a place where an individual is open, reflective, hungry for the downhill run, the thrust over the falls. It’s no surprise that sometimes strangers on planes have very personal conversations, or suddenly find themselves in a group of people (as I have a time or two) who can’t stop laughing.

Most of my contribution in the world is actually when those I help are in transition between their worlds: work – home, professional – personal, past – future, this career – that career, manager – leader. Sometimes, for example, when asked to help a supervisor or manager who is in trouble, I may ask why that individual has set up the situation to create such a powerful personal and professional challenge at that moment. This is often helpful because it changes the context of the conversation from “I am in trouble,” to “Hmmm, I seem to have brought circumstances on myself in order to learn something.” So then the conversation can change to be about deeper life-learning, not simply getting out of an embarrassing or otherwise difficult situation. The whole situation could move in moment from intellectual problem-solving and blame to a deeper journey about meaning and presence, qualities held at those precious cross-over points called insights. But who is the person who has these insights that bridge the worlds?

I continue to find it fascinating that about one third of the hits to this weblog come from searches for “leadership poems” or very similar words. They come from people all over the world. Yet I don’t really know what any given person is looking for. Is it inspiration from a famous leader? Or is it to wake up some part of that person’s own leadership self? A google search, simple as it is, could point to an inner cross-over point, too. Simply putting the search out there to the cyber universe — and real universe, too: “leadership poems,” “poems about leaders,” “leadership poem,” “poem abut leadership,” etc., etc. apparently can make a difference. I’d like to think these words are an invitation to touch some destination not yet defined, meant especially to find the water that wears down the stone and, like all experience of the heart, connects everything as it splits the stone gradually in two.

Photo Credits: First three by Dan; the fourth by daughter, Victoria

Business culture is an accretion of layers, just like the crust of the earth. While the surface often represents the current moment in history, dig a little and you are likely to find something less sophisticated, empowering, and inclusive. A “default” business culture — meaning what we revert to given no other input or direction — lies below the felt aspirations of many firms to create more open workplaces. This default culture is a set of practices and assumptions based on the negative side of old-style formal hierarchy. It includes such “invisible rules” as:

These and other related beliefs do not operate all the time, but are still in the ground beneath our feet, and sometimes by only a matter of inches. Sometimes, when things become dysfunctional, that default system comes back from the grave. Effective leaders reject these older beliefs and act in ways that ensure the “zombie” culture stays in the ground where it belongs.

To fully “drive fear out of the workplace,” it is essential for everyone to be involved in actively rejecting this antiquated culture that divides the world into messengers who get shot and leaders who don’t listen. Both are stereotypes reflecting our fears of one another and our need for self-protection. “Actively rejecting” means moving into action and personally behaving in ways that contradict these negative background beliefs.

The courage to speak up and the courage to listen are the way out, and they require us to “stay in the tension” of the moment, the anxiety, stepping past all of it, particularly the fear that our sincere engagement with others will cause damage, distress, and repercussions or that we will simply experience humiliation and anger because nothing will be done about the obvious organizational problems we chose to bring forward. If we have two enemies in this work it is precisely the fear of repercussions and the belief that nothing can change.

Change can happen, but only if we actively choose to create a different kind of workplace, one where people seek and express understanding rather than make disconnected and insensitive speeches behide one anothers’ backs. Change happens only if we refuse to let fear guide our steps because fear is the essence of the old rules. Change happens only if we choose to address what is right in front of us.

This all works best when it is done in the name of being of service to one another and to our customers. This is a matter of letting our best selves move forward together.

It is essential to understand that rejecting this background culture is not the same as rejecting people.

We have all participated in the negative side of the default culture. We’ve all been carriers and are all responsible for its presence. We have all contributed to it at one time or another, particularly when things have gone wrong or there have been tough challenges. Here are some of the ways we can move forward together. This is certainly one of those circumstances that calls up the dictum often attributed to Gandhi: “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

None of this is to say that our only task should be the rejection of old ways. That’s only the beginning of a different kind of workplace freedom and with that rejection comes the responsibility to define and live — as best we can — what culture we do want. I was encouraged a few days ago to find “Your Culture is Your Brand,” an article by Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh, as a great example of the experiments, innovations, and new thinking that are needed to bring alive positive, value-based work cultures.

Between these two realms of old and new, of unconscious victimization and conscious choice, is a cultural cross-over point of major proportions. Many organizations are ambivalent about which way to go and are some type of mashup of both worlds. Some seem to want to rely upon and return to the past; some strain for the future. This can be an anxious space but also a good one for forging our own leadership. Opportunities abound. Surely this is a time that will shape and define us and our organizations for a long time to come.

(For Feedblitz Subscribers: Direct link to blog posting. Direct link to Oestreich Associates website.)

The term “visionary leader” usually refers to a gifted person who sees farther into the future, inspires us with rich possibilities, and acts to tangibly realize a compelling dream. The gift this person possesses can be in any discipline, from technology, sciences, medicine, music, to politics or social change.

Okay. So far so good. AND, today, in organizations, above and beyond technical or purely managerial gifts, the need is also for visionary leaders who can facilitate a major shift in culture — in our human relationships at work. I would call this person a visionary workplace leader.

I have been blessed in my work as a consultant to meet a few such people. They see farther into the human dimensions of our enterprises. Despite the other business challenges that are present, these are folks who simply love to work in the garden of helping themselves and others grow. They see potential in everybody and are constantly wondering how to help this person or that one past their conditioning and self-made limits.

I am reminded, for example, of a client business owner who offered support to one of his managers, a key report who had been working in a virtually 24/7 mode since he had been promoted, a year or so earlier. Everything was being handled personally by the manager and with withering perfectionism. He was not delegating effectively at all and the 3 AM emails were getting completely out of hand. As a result of this schedule, the manager’s capacity to make good judgments had gone down somewhat, so despite the perfectionism his judgments and decisions were also sometimes mistakes. In addition, the manager’s family life had been deeply affected. He could never let down, and when he finally did, too often he became little more than an irritable couch vegetable. My client, the manager’s boss, was so concerned about the manager that he hired me to work with them both as a coach. The manager was blaming my client for many of his problems, saying that he had to work harder and harder for fear of mistakes and getting into trouble with his boss, my client. My client was a shrewd boss with high standards for sure, but he had no intention at all of burning the manager up with too much work or responsibility. And, in fact, the manager was making mistakes.

What my client recognized is that he had a stellar performer who simply needed to get a grip. Instead of denying the manager’s allegations or criticizing him in return — turning the problems back on him — the boss agreed to do something different. We created an “intervention” of sorts with boss, wife, manager and me all in the same room for most of a day, talking about the effects and natural consequences of his continuing along the track he was on. The manager had no idea my client cared about what he was doing to himself so much. It was quite moving to see him, in the course of our meeting together, accept that care from boss and wife together. Over time, the manager made a major shift in his approach to his job.

Visionary workplace leaders are people who love the development of the human spirit, in both self and others. [They are, of course, my preferred client type.] The fact that they are humanistic does not mean that they are “soft” or unbusiness-like. But they do business differently.

In terms of their responsibility for the culture of their organizations, they:

• believe in truth-telling and compassion in relationships

• accept that not everyone wants to grow and this is not a reason to reject or feel superior to anyone

• understand that even when people genuinely do want to grow they may not know how to grow past their own chains

• understand that real growth, real change takes time

• ask for and receive feedback about their own leadership, even when this is embarrassing or painful; and then act on this feedback constructively

• see themselves as “the one who goes first” to demonstrate what true leading and openness are like in real time

• dive deep in relationships by asking telling questions about meaning, purpose, value, and where the person is at, not just the colleague or employee.

• repeatedly voice the value of trust in relationships and create opportunities for others to build trust-based, collaborative relationships with one another as part of their day-to-day work

• operate from a position of responsibility, not blame, and go into “undiscussable” conflicts with courage, authenticity, and humility

• are vulnerable as individuals, just as they encourage vulnerability in others as a strength needed to overcome relationship challenges

• see family and personal relationships outside of work as just as important as the business and business relationships

• are sensitive to a broad array of social issues, including social justice and the arts

• sees his/her own life as an unfinished work of art.

When I look back over this list, the first thing I also see is that these visionary leaders have an identical concept of their preferred relationships with customers. Whatever service or product is being provided, that outcome is connected to a real person. So quite naturally, the goal is to provide genuine value in the human relationship as much as in that service or product.

Having written these words, I wonder how it is we ever got to a world in which such people are visionary leaders instead of what we normally see in the business leaders we have. So many, even if they say that growth is of interest to them, really don’t seem to live that value at all, either in themselves or in their relationships with others, employees and customers alike. Instead, they seem to occupy an emotionally stunted space that conveys superiority to other people and they exhibit a certain politically thick skin or a “teflon” facade around feedback; a harsh defensiveness or arrogant dismissal when it comes to “undiscussables” that involve their own behavior. There seem to be so many leaders who just want to be immune to complaints, especially the ones about them. Can you blame them? So instead of having the strength to listen, learn and act, they recede into the comfortable belief that it is the other people who are really the problem. Such leaders may see themselves as quite sensitive to human concerns, and most, I would say, are good people who have great potential. But, for now, they are actually operating from their own shadows — or better said, their shadows are actually operating them.

This means there is one additional characteristic of visionary culture leaders. They work from an understanding of the part played by the human heart. They know in what ways they are unfinished as human beings and are highly sensitive to what that means. So with genuine respect for life, and mindfully, they are able to let the heart lead in exactly those places business needs it most.

(For Feedblitz Subscribers: Direct link to blog posting. Direct link to Oestreich Associates website.)

As of this afternoon, my latest post has been replaced by spam in Google Reader. I’m mystified because the feed content in Feedburner appears to be okay. If any of you have any ideas about how to fix this, I’d sure appreciate your help and advice. Please send me an email. I’ve changed my Google password for sure. Spam is definitely one of the shadows of social media.

My prayer: Lord, protect us from those who create this wreckage for a living.

I know. I know. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Last night a dream about my father awakened me. He died last February at the age of 96. In the dream my older brother and I were talking to him about the Holocaust. As a young man my dad had escaped the rise of the Nazis in Germany by leaving the country. He rarely talked about these events. Most of what I know comes from a memoir he wrote some years ago.

My brother and I were trying to discuss the Holocaust with him in the dream and we had a book cover we were showing him — from a book by a Jewish writer. Suddenly he grabbed the book cover out of my hands and tried to rip it or crumble it. His emotions were entirely surprising. I questioned him, “Dad, what are you so angry about? What is it?”

At this, he stopped trying to destroy the book cover. Visibly upset, he looked at us. “I guess I still have very strong feelings about these things,” he said. Then he reached out to me, put his head on my shoulder and began to sob. I held him in utter sympathy and astonishment.

Then I woke up. I cannot tell you how far this dream of my father is from my actual experiences of him. In the dream it was as if he was showing me an entirely different side of himself, one he had never dared show my brother and me previously. I knew him as very private, practical and cordial — and always in emotional control when it came to his largely unspoken past.

Maybe in spirit form he is sending me a message.

If so, I would say it is a mysterious one about a secret self never revealed to his sons.

And maybe it is also a fact we all have such secret selves, sides of who we are that are unresolved but well covered by reason and conclusion, by little speeches that seem to say we’ve plumbed the depths and know what they mean. Except we don’t and maybe never will. Maybe there is shame in these things and that is why we want to keep them hidden, maybe regret, maybe hurt or fear, so they become boarded off, a locked room that no longer requires our inner attention.

And maybe the way is that whatever happens in the evolution of the human spirit, in the quest to become ourselves, we have to go back and unlock all such rooms, bringing light to these spaces and sharing them with those we love. Maybe we must do it even after death, so strong is the need.

(For Feedblitz Subscribers: Direct link to blog posting. Direct link to Oestreich Associates website.)

Recently within the Leadership Think Tank discussion group of LinkedIn, a rather long thread has evolved and taken on a life of its own regarding whether it is possible for people to change. It seems many of us have something to say about it! I have written elsewhere about this subject, and also added my comment to the thread.

There are many wonderful ideas on the thread, but in some ways it is a hapless question. If you say that people can change, you are going to have to face all the good arguments against that belief, and if you don’t believe people can change, you are going to have to encounter all the good reasons to believe they can.

I only want to add the thought there are times when, like a hermit crab, I believe we have to abandon a once comfortable shell that we have outgrown. If we want to be bigger — if we need to be — we have to leave one shell behind and take our chances in the open until we find another. Sometimes this is a difficult process and takes a long time; sometimes things almost magically come together.

I would say this pretty much explains the last twenty years or so of my life. It also has implications for making decisions about who we can best help and how.

I’m sure you can see what side of the argument I am on.

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For more context on this posting, please see:

The Practice of Leadership
Eight Leadership Practices
First Practice: Knowing Your Leadership Edge
Second Practice: Developing Your Comfort Level with Feedback
Third Practice: Caring for Self
Fourth Practice: Leadership and Influence
Fifth Practice: Discussing Undiscussables

Collaborating is the name I give to a conflict that has been turned into a synergy.

All this means is that conflict — difference — is entirely natural to us, and when we use our differences to create a combined outcome that is better than what we might have created separately, we are collaborating. The only really special thing about collaboration is that the process of collaborating takes people some place they might not have gone on their own. My image of collaboration is gates opening between what is mine and what is yours on the way to achieving something of mutual importance and value.

In research that was done by the Amherst A. Wilder Foundation, collaboration was compared to coorperation and coordination — two related but also very different concepts. You can read about the research here. In using their model I’ve found that the one most critical difference is that with collaboration resources are openly shared. Our “money,” whether that represents real dollars or ideas or time and energy goes into the same pot. Nothing is being held back in the process. To achieve something meaningful and new, we must be “all in.” That also means that there is an understanding that no one has the whole answer; only together will the best solution come forward.

It is easy in a leadership role to give lip service to collaboration but actually use it to achieve something else, the most commonly preferred outcome being “buy-in” by others. So, crafty people that we are, we call meetings to discuss our ideas in the hopes that others will adopt them. We actually use the word, “collaborate.” We seem to be open to others’ ideas while maneuvering to get our way. Oldest con in the book and it doesn’t fool anybody — except maybe the leader who brought it there.

I don’t think collaborating is actually about buy-in at all. Its energy comes from a very different place. I am thinking of a CEO I know who went through a very difficult personal period in his life. Previously he had believed he really would achieve the American Dream of a wonderful family life, great job, plenty of financial stability. But then one year it all seemed to go wrong. His wife began experiencing a mental disorder and it became clear to my client that in order to save his relationship with his children he had to leave the marriage. This was absolutely the last thing he had dreamed of, but it became inevitable. At that point, he fell into a period of deep questioning about where his life was really going. He found himself at work attending meetings but not doing what others wanted him to do — which was to make decisions. He realized that in a sense he had been faking it. He didn’t know the answers to their questions, but he could say things that sounded like answers and others would act on that. In the past, his ability to lead in this way had been gratifying, but suddenly it seemed utterly false. He began to do things a little differently. He began to ask others for their opinions and encouraged them to make sound decisions through their own knowledge and insight. Remarkably, the people who worked for him began to prosper in a new way, and he began to get his spirit back, if reformed by the discovery that in neither life or work did he have all the answers. This was not about simply delegating to others, but about having much better, richer conversations where people put out on the table their real views. Somehow he had stopped deciding for others and started collaborating with them.

Oh, how many meetings have I attended where an old culture demands a win/lose argument to prove that one of us in the room (including me) has the right or best answer? Such nonsense, yet I have experienced so many of those apparently important meetings where an active default culture pushed executives to jockey for position and compete for personal credibility: the entangled, self-deceptive, total opposite of collaboration.

But collaboration isn’t really about “win/win solutions” either. That came from models that compared and contrasted collaboration with competition, such as the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument where scales of assertiveness and cooperativeness end up producing five different modes, including collaboration and compromise. I say collaboration is not “win/win” although that may be its most popular definition. I would say it a little differently, I guess, because “win/win” sounds like simply a positive compromise. True collaboration, I believe, goes farther.

An example from many years ago. My boss at the time, Personnel Director for the municipal government where I worked, was (and still is) a mentor to me. But he could also have very strong opinions, given his background as a labor negotiator, about issues such as “management rights.” I, on the other hand, came intuitively from a background of organization development. One day, trying to figure out a solution to a problem in one of the City’s departments, we found ourselves in a serious argument. My boss said to me, “Dan, why is it your solutions always seem to depend on involving and including employees, even if the issue doesn’t concern them?!” My retort, which of course I cannot remember exactly, had to do with his persistent focus on top down solutions that resulted in people feeling manipulated (“Managed” was probably the word I used at the time). So we seemed to be at a standoff. What was critically important about the standoff is that we had just said things to each other we had not said before — but had felt about one another. These things were our “truths.” And we had been having an argument about them, not about the situation in the Department. That was simply our excuse to have the argument. And it had been getting personal. But then something, I’m not really sure what, stopped us from creating a disaster in the relationship. We simply stopped the argument and stepped back. There was something absolutely clarifying about that moment. I had had no idea how my boss had viewed me with regard to employee involvement. I suspect, he had heard something new from me, as well. That was the moment, I believe, when we turned conflict into synergy. We stopped. We reflected. We started talking again, but the knowledge of what had been unspoken in our relationship changed the character of our problem-solving. Neither us then went for an extreme solution. We went for something that was entirely new to both of us.

Peter Koestenbaum in his book, Leadership: The Inner Side of Greatness talks about a group of engineers who found themselves in constant argument until they learned to stop talking about problems and solutions, and started talking about the pain they experienced in their work. The notion of pain, instead of problem, helped them focus on the next move — which was to dialogue, and that in turn led to learning and personal growth. The engineers had stopped the argument, and learned to collaborate.

An instance of this move is a story I’ve told many times about the executive team of a hospital. My plane was late so I arrived after the meeting had already started. As I entered the room, I immediately noticed that several people were wiping their eyes and others were glaring at each other angrily. As I sat down, a few members continued their dark rant about the team and how it always seemed to get stuck like this. The air was full of blame and sideways comments. Someone asked me to help them get out of it. In the moment, frankly, I didn’t know what to do. So I figured I’d better throw it back on them — and did — by asking the question, “What are you learning from this exchange?” The gods were certainly with me that day. That seemed to be just enough of an intervention to stop the hostilities. I made the group formally list out their learnings from the argument they had been having. There were quite a few about the nature of sideways comments and failures to say things directly to one another — as in looking another person in the eye and saying that person’s name so everyone knew where a particular comment was directed. As a result of the group’s self-evaluation, the norms for behavior at meetings changed significantly.

What I am talking about is how collaboration can be born as a tangible shift in group dynamics. A moment you can feel happening. Does this mean that collaboration only happens after an argument? No. But I do believe once people have experienced that moment, they have much better understanding of what collaborating at bottom is about. Having been through that moment, people can come to their encounters with one another differently.

Does this mean that everyone with this experience becomes an effective collaborator? No again. Some people do not find a shift away from argument useful for them. They’ve received too many rewards for dominating, for personal remarks, for loudness, for talking over others, and a host of other bad habits that, unfortunately, have gotten others to go along. And, truly, this can savage the possibilities of collaboration in a team, if the members are not strong enough to talk openly to the offender in the moment. The hospital group had been in that situation for a long time before their mutual tensions enabled them to break through.

To really understand collaboration, I believe we have to go back to that moment just before argument ceases and the synergy begins, and ask, so what’s there? And this is such an interesting moment. I would say it is the instant when the argument becomes sheer reflection of who we are. We are suddenly faced with one gigantic mirror. In the mirror we see the utter futility and pointlessness of the argument; we hear our voices as shouting opinions, not sharing facts. We begin to wonder about where our assumptions and strong feelings have come from, and we take the risk to look at them and see them plainly. Our fallibilities are apparent — at least to us — and we decide that there is nothing, really, in that moment to win or lose. Then, I think, we are able to make a fresh start, apologize if need be, and open ourselves to something really new. Out of this reflection, creativity arises. Remarkably, a sense of partnership or community also can come forward.

The beauty is that real collaboration can’t be faked. Yes, it does lead to a sense of ownership. Yes, it does lead to win/win, but those are outcomes that can’t be bought and sold through technique. All processes can be wrecked by ego, dominance, and slavish adherence to some name or convention. Collaboration can be a sudden and unexpected gift to a group of people who let their common problem become their common teacher.

The process I’m describing isn’t so different from Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, except that it can happen in a flash as people realize how empty it was to put up their careful fences and self-protective barriers in the first place.

One last example, from a slightly different angle. I was working with a big government agency. The head of one of its most important divisions, I’ll call him Salvador, decided to slightly reorganize, meaning that disparate groups would be expected to share their budgeted resources in order to collaborate on their best use across traditional organizational boundaries, both physical and non-physical. Salvador’s direct reports were going through a period of resistance to his vision. In a meeting of twenty or so managers, many expressed their resistance by saying they already collaborated.

One of the most senior of the managers, Richard, put it plainly. “Look,” he said to Salvador, “I do give away some of my resources to the other units. I invite them to learn from our folks when they don’t have training money of their own. They call and ask questions of my staff and we are helpful to them. I include them sometimes on task forces. I think I have a solid reputation for collaborating. And I know others here feel the same way. I really don’t see what you are asking for that’s different from what I already do.”

Salvador faced this challenge directly. “Richard,” he said in front of the group, “I understand that you believe you collaborate. But that is not my observation. And it is definitely not your reputation. My observation is that you occasionally give things to other departments and dole things out, but it never really reaches the level I’m looking for.”

Richard was flustered. “What do you mean, I don’t have a reputation for collaborating?” he demanded.

The rest of the room, of course, was suddenly very quiet.

Salvador continued gently: “Let’s talk about some things you have done to help other departments and things you might have done that would have been closer to the goal.”

As they talked, others joined in to help Richard see that while he had been generous to a degree, he had failed in sharing the one organizational resource that meant the most to him: power. His “gifts” created obligation and superiority to other departments. He really didn’t allow others to participate as equals. Others sucked up to him when they needed his help, but he never called them when he needed assistance. He never really “opened his gate” while expecting others to open theirs. While this was difficult feedback to Richard, as the day went by he seemed to internalize it well. He began to see the part of Salvador’s vision that had been unclear.

Collaboration is a subtle topic. It touches deep parts of who we are. It tests our blind spots. And it enriches us immeasurably.

To do it well, like so much of leadership, requires us to use that very bright and sensitive mirror we all carry within.

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Perhaps because I’ve been working on money management and taxes lately, I have been forced to consider what I do for a living. The conversation with myself seemed to go in circles today until this strange oxymoronic phrase came to mind: selling wisdom. As in, “You can’t be serious, you do what?” The phrase had a strange ring to it, however, and like some odd yet familiar musical chord, it spoke to me, asked questions of me, if only from its own bemused perspective. The word “oxymoron,” by the way, comes from two Greek words that mean first, “sharp” and then “foolish.”

I mentioned the phrase “selling wisdom” to my fiancé, Carmen, and she laughed. “Well,” she said,” I envision a little old man with a long gray beard behind a counter, and behind him the wall of an apothecary, except the medicines would have different names. The old man would ask his visitors what they wanted, and they would tell him their troubles whereupon he might suggest a dose of reality or sensitivity or bravery or such, pulling out the powders and the vials”. A Harry-Potterish kind of vision.

And yet I do think — when I’m at my best, anyway — this is exactly the business I am in, egocentric as it may sound. And I’m in it because there’s a hunger in the world for exactly that. People thrive on it. Businesses thrive on it, acknowledged or not. And I like it; I’m good at it. There’s a sort of destiny feel to it.

Before saying more, I want to acknowledge that despite the bemused stance, the self-inquiry is serious. There are sure liabilities to the work. Last week I noticed Ed Batista’s moving post on author David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide last year. Wallace’s perspective on life, as expressed in a graduation speech he gave, one Ed points to in his post, contains a lot of wisdom — just not enough to help him save his own life. But the content was exactly the kind of stuff we need and that people hunger for: penetrating, human, challenging, and deeply vulnerable.

The point is that anyone who thinks he/she is selling wisdom is exactly a presumptious fool. Wisdom can’t be sold, won’t be sold. It’s living, not a living. Oh, I know there are all those examples of gurus that promise enlightenment through books and CD’s, expensive retreats, and so on. But I actually am thinking of something very different. I’m thinking of when I discovered that the moments I was genuinely doing my best work were not while I was standing in front of a group or coaching the CEO in some private office on the top floor. It wasn’t the time on the clock; it was the time after, the time off the clock. And I was doing it with whomever I happened to run into in the lobby or the restaurant or the bar who was feeling something, who wanted to try to understand more of this whole mysterious, mixed up matrix of relationships and tasks. After a couple drinks, people sometimes would let down their guard, talk more honestly about their impressions of the work I had been called in to do in their organizations. They would tell their stories, share an honest attitude toward their organization, their team, the head honchos. These were the real clients, not so much in search of knowledge or even an opportunity to vent. They were in search of wisdom, including whatever mine might happen to be.

Of course, that can lead to an ego trip. I remember the President of a smallish manufacturing concern who wanted to buy me a glass of wine after our retreat with top staff. Earlier in the day I had called him out for evidently manipulating the meeting toward his own agenda rather than sticking with the group’s agreed upon and well planned agenda. I had the feeling, from that moment of tension I’d caused that I wouldn’t necessarily be working for him again and so I had little to lose. As we sipped our wine, I replied to his not so subtle criticisms of me this way: “You know, Bruce, this isn’t about my clients picking me to be their consultant so much as me picking my clients….You know, I don’t work for everybody.”

And, man, did he love that. I think it absolutely made his day for somebody to challenge him that directly. Wow, another alpha to compete with. Okay, after a couple of glasses of wine, I guess I must have been the one ready to tell the truth. But those days, when I still felt I could afford to be cocky, this, too, was evidence about where the real work got done.

He might have been a bit atypical. But from him and others I figured out that some of the very best interventions I could do would happen after the formal presentation, training, coaching, facilitation, etc…it would be later, one-on-one with someone struggling to find answers. Maybe the problem didn’t have anything to do with work, but it was something that caused him or her to wrestle with themselves. In fact, if this “meeting” didn’t happen, it seemed to me generally a sign that my work was going to be more superficial in the end.

Sometimes the issue someone talked about in the off hours was self-esteem — I think of the manager, sweet guy, who couldn’t confront people in his team and defeated himself out a post that would have taken him to the top of his organization. Sometimes the issue was a secret. I think of the woman, good Catholic soul and experienced, respected leader who’d had a lover on the side for twenty years that no one knew about. When he died unexpectedly, there was no one for her to turn to to share her grief. Sometimes the issues had a lot to do with the past. I think of the VP struggling whether to fire a manager who was loud, abrasive, a little cruel with his reports — the VP reflecting on his father hitting his mother and the VP stepping in as 17 year old young man to prevent his dad from ever hitting her again. And I think of the CEO of the big firm in the little town telling me how important his house was to him, and why it mattered, based on his experience as a teenager of his parents as they divorced, forcing him to pick which one of them he wanted to live with.

I think of the many dear colleagues and our laughter after a hard day with a client, us laughing so hard to celebrate our good work and sometimes also to get rid of the darkness of an experience that wasn’t successful at all; us pretending, searching for an always escaping sense of reassurance. Dear people, all of us, all so incorrigibly human.

The Little Shop of Wisdom, how we all have sought it out in the after hours, just around the corner, searching for that wise old man or that crone who can wrap us up a small package of reality, or vision, or courage, or a restored moral view. A drop or two of sanity, you know. No one, really, can buy or sell it; and you can’t really charge for any of those priceless hours, even if it is your true vocation. You can never charge for it and you would be a fool to try.

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To me, one of the greatest success stories on the web these days is David Zinger, who started the Employee Engagement Network. I had a chance to ask David a few questions about his experiences the other day. Here’s what he told me about discovering that he now finds himself leading a “movement.”

I think my role has been a bit improvisational and haphazard. I love your statement in our conversation:

“It didn’t seem to me you set out to create a movement, but you’ve got one. In my mind’s eye I see you turning around one day and noticing that it’s not just a few friends you are walking with, but a whole street-full. Wow! How did that happen?”

I am passionate about employee engagement and have been involved in social media and blogging for just about 5 years. One snowy Saturday afternoon in Winnipeg I wondered how this NING thing works. Best to learn by doing and I thought wouldn’t it be nice if I could get about 20 to 50 people together.

We are now over 1370 members [1408 as of today].

I hope it looks easy but it requires a lot of love. I have welcomed each member individually. I try to read as much as I can. I have banned spammers. I have tried a lot that hasn’t worked. I keep the content fresh. I keep in contact with the members every week and I am honored to learn from each of them. It is like a Master’s Degree in Employee Engagement spending the last 18 months with such a great group of people.

How do you feel about the leadership role your website and your work as a consultant/trainer have placed you in?

I feel honored that so many people will get involved in employee engagement. I want employee engagement to be for all. It can’t be the sucking out of discretionary effort from overtaxed workers. I know that is a strong way to say it but I want everyone to fully benefit by engagement. I am not overly fond of pairing engagement with the role of employee by calling it employee engagement but that is the accepted term and I will work with it for now. It seems sometimes leaders and managers and owners forget in many ways they are employees too.

I work at leading by following well and creating a safe environment of caring.

I have developed a new model for employee engagement that I will unveil in September. I think it makes engagement so much more inclusive and connected. We need results, strategies, organizations, community & relationships, customers, personal and professional development, energy mastery, and genuine happiness. All of it for the benefit of all.

What is the most important gift you bring to your leadership?

I bring love. I love engagement and I love the people there. I want to connect with the members.

I am a good host and a welcoming host. I can seize a nugget and run with it too. Michael Stallard, one of our fine members, suggested the “movement” focus and he was spot on! I don’t just want this to be a collection of resources.

I hope that the network can be accountable for a 1% enhancement in worldwide engagement. Having said that I am not sure I want to measure it but I do want to monitor it. There is far too much survey work in employee engagement work already. I want action.

I want the employee engagement members to let us know who they are engaging with, how they are engaging with people, and the impact it is having. I hope to create opportunites for the various members to make meaningful contributions to employee engagement, the employee engagement network, and their own engagement.

I am a sucker for an anecdote and I am thinking right know of Tina, the cashier at my local gas station and how incredibily engaged and engaging she is. I just filled up the van two hours ago, so Tina is fresh in mind. She is so efficient and so connected to customers and staff. I know this sounds hokey but I want to share Tina wisdom. I will be interviewing her in the very near future. One real Tina is worth 1,000 consultants or 1,000,000 survey data points.

How do you think this work will change your life?

It has already changed my life. I will not teach what I do not live. I am challenged to engage with others and my work more fully everyday.

I have lived my life in reverse. I retired at 20 until 35. I was in semi retirement until 55 which will occur on September 24 and I will move into a working phase from 55 to 75. I very much wanted to be around home while my children were growing up and they are now 21, 18, 18 and I still need them and they still need me but I can do a bit more global work. I plan for my wife to join me as people who engage fully also re-energize through family connections and intentional disengagement.

I have found some great models of teachers and leaders who are 75 so I know I can do this too. I was so fortunate to study with Keith Johnstone who was 75 when he taught us a 10 day improvisation course last summer in Calgary Alberta.

By the way retirement and semi-retirement do not mean you don’t work; it means you work in different ways and with different motivations — more dabbling, experimenting, no racing, no need to have to acheieve. I was very improvisational from 20 to 55. By the way I am talking about the principles of improvisation, not actual on-stage improvisation. I will still be improvisational for the next 20 years but blend that into strategic-improvisation. And I love the contrast of those two terms standing together.

What wounds does it heal for you personally?

I spent 25 years being involved in teaching counselling psychology at the University of Manitoba. I always loved the wounded healer model. I think Robert Bly stated: Our wounds transformed become our gifts to our community. At times I am prone to both disengagement and procrastination. At times I can disengage from someone I care for. At times I have been quick to judge organizations, leaders, employees. Employee engagement for all keeps me moving and transforms all wounds into a gift to our community! One phrase I made up and tried to teach to my counselling students was: Life is not a problem to be solved but an experience to be lived. I want to help people fully live their experiences and part of those people “is me!”

I assume as someone teaching counselling psychology, that you’ve done a lot of personal work on yourself over the years. Is that right?

You are right.

As a counsellor and counsellor educator there was a lot of self-development and personal work over the years.
Years ago I would have answered that question differently but today I do feel quite secure. I am ready to die happy today. I even played with that as a website for a while: www.diehappytoday.com.

I have grown slowly and “bumpily” into who I am. I really do see life as an experience to be lived rather than a problem to be solved and I am more and more okay with not knowing while also expressing what I know at this point in time. Mindfulness and being more in the moment have helped. Great mentors, I’ve had different ones but I have always had one since about 25. They have all been important to me. My wife keeps me honest, gounded, and challenged.

I read somewhere that all you need for happiness is an income of about $24,000 or something like that (can’t remember the exact number) so economic security is easy for me. Work is an expression of who I am and there is a secure fusion of doing and being. As I write this I also know this has really developed a lot in the past 5 years. I love getting older and I can’t wait to grow up and be childlike forever.

To me, David models a flow of such positive, effervescent, inclusive energy that he is perfect for what he is doing — and it shows in his “results.” This is a man with a great heart, generous, deeply engaged and alive in a way many of us want to be. Communicating with David, I get the sense that he helps everyone feel successful. That sort of presence is naturally inspiring and awakening. It is a pleasure and a privilege to record some of his continuing story here.

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The grip of the recession is still upon us, I know, and perhaps the wise would say this is absolutely no time to look for a new job. Yet the truth is that some of us are suffering in jobs no longer worth the stress of having them. I find myself helping clients answer this question, which is tearing at them, often in the middle of the night.

The specific circumstances under which this question emerges vary, but a common thread is overload, a sense of being overwhelmed with work and/or poor work relationships, with more tasks heaped on every day, pushing the work week to 60 or more hours, sometimes 80 or more, the client caught between a rock and a hard place. As the work hours soar there is less and less time to do the reflection necessary to make the decision to change positions and to prepare for that change. One of my clients suggested she was like a mouse on a circular exercise wheel running so fast there is no way to get off, even for a moment, in order to question whether this is actually a good thing to be doing.

I have to say, Wall Street may be quite happy about reported increases in worker productivity, which can drive corresponding increases in corporate profits, but by virtue of the experiences of these clients the benefit is a very short term one at best and nothing to gloat about or rely upon.

These clients no longer feel they have is either a choice or voice. They have convinced themselves they cannot say no. They cannot say that the workload is no longer reasonable, that more resources are required and here’s what they are, that they are burnt out and the job is killing them. Instead they work twelve hour days that stretch across the weekend in the hopes of “just getting through this.” The problem with “just getting through this,” of course, is that there are even bigger projects on the other side of this, and one lost weekend suddenly turns into the expectation that every weekend involves at least a day or more of work. Unfortunately, such clients, concerned about their reputation as being responsible, also give the impression that it’s okay to take on this work (still saying to themselves it is temporary), in turn teaching those to whom they report that people are capable of doing more and more without limit, implicitly setting a new standard for everyone else in the workplace. By the way, I’ve noticed these clients tend to work for people who put in even more hours than they do, people who have even more completely lost their lives to their organizations and seem to be demanding similar behavior from their reports, as well. It’s all entirely crazy, but that’s America right now — and we don’t have a way out unless some very real boundary setting begins to take place.

What happens to these people without some form of intervention is that they work hard, harder, harder still, go through a process of private agony trying to answer the question (Should I stay or should I quit?) until one day they do simply quit. The engine falls apart and refuses to be put back together. They don’t have another job. They just cannot go on. They reach a tipping point and it no longer matters. They go home to rest. They may be the best people in the shop or office, but one day the toll becomes too great. The boss is surprised, wants to lure them back, gives them the line that they are almost over the hump, doesn’t understand how they have reached the end of their rope because all along they’ve been such good and dedicated employees.

This is a process of hidden, unconscious, or self-deceiving burnout. In burnout, a person goes well beyond the little bell that should have gone off in his or her head that said, “you’re tired” or “you are hungry now” or “it’s time to go home and be with loved ones.” Instead the little bell gets ignored out of fear and a sense of responsibility. Not ignoring it would mean standing up to the boss in a way that could mean loss of reputation, criticism or the possibility of termination, then or later. The worst part of this whole process is that it becomes personal and corporate self-deception. People actually begin to accept this world as the new normal, as we all go to Abilene together. Usually the boss feels pretty powerless, too, just as other managers and executives do, all the way to the top. (It’s sad listening to a manager try to justify working 24 hours on a weekend while the rest of the family goes on a camping trip.)

Clearly what we need to do is re-invent the bell. As a first step in that process of personal and organizational repair and de-programming, I ask my clients to make two separate, simple lists related to their task load: What I can do. What I cannot do. This, by itself, may bring with it simultaneously a sense of threat (“OMG, I’m acknowledging there is something I cannot do!”) and relief (“When I look at the list, yes, I can see how totally unreasonable it is.”) It is usually higher on the relief side because the client can see that feeling overwhelmed is actually a totally appropriate response, but sometimes the client also rebels, refusing to list the tasks he/she cannot do because of the sense of jeopardy to employment status or, more personally, to a self-concept of loyal, responsible employee/victim.

The second step is to fill in the following grid, which is not the same as the first two lists. Rather, it explores the experience of work and it’s organizational impacts. I’ve filled in some sample responses, but these really are situational to the person, nature of the work, and the organization.

The point of this exercise is to remember what the bell sounds like when it goes off.

The third step is to find a voice to express and hold firm at the choice point. This is initially in terms of tasks, what can and can’t be done, but then also in terms of the personal and organizational value-based standards expressed by the grid. This third step is about having a meaningful conversation with the boss in which explicit limits are set. If this sounds dangerous to you, it may well be. Perhaps job loss is around the corner. But if you and your soul are dying and workplace behavior by higher level leaders is verging on insanity, why wouldn’t you set a boundary? Why wouldn’t you trust your own judgment, your own integrity? You have those things, you know, and they are your treasures — treasures meant to be used to live a good life.

So be smart about this. Don’t hold on to the illusion that working conditions will get better when there is no evidence to the contrary. Don’t imagine that somehow others will automatically “get it” — peers, reports, or those you report to — and come with you or even understand you. Don’t assume that because you are special something different will happen. But then do spend the time reflecting on the question and preparing for departure if you decide that’s the best, most reasonable, most self-affirming answer. Get the resume ready, save the money, find the recruiter, and go for it. Then, when you are really ready to have the talk, lo and behold, maybe things can change in your workplace. Or lo and behold, maybe you will discover you were right about this situation all along, that it is untenable. Either way, you’ll be okay because you were thoughtful, conscious, thorough.

There are those great lines at the end of Mary Oliver’s famous poem, The Journey, about saving the only life you can save. Pay attention to those lines. When you do your work and you find yourself in a tough position, you actually have a great deal of freedom and power. You are in the process of unchaining yourself. You’ve looked at your situation all the way through and you are ready to say, loud and clear, “you can’t have this from me.” When you’ve done that inner and outer work, whatever happens — you retain your job in a better way or are forced to find the next opportunity, knowing it will come — you stand on the firm ground of both what is eminently practical and spiritually indispensable.

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My good friend, Joe McCarthy sent me a few lines from one of my favorite poets, William Stafford. It turns out you can make such things into posters. Click on it to make it a bit larger if you like.

In these or any other times, Stafford’s message speaks for itself. As I wrote to Joe this morning, the decisions seem to be 51/49, not 90/10 or 80/20 as they did in the past.

And the mirrors just keep on coming.

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PS: Speaking of posters, I’ve made one to celebrate the Unfolding Leadership blog. Please feel free to download the poster right here.

I have been off-line for the last month and some. I got married on September 13th.

The preceding days had been filled with intense, sometimes frantic preparations, a big family picnic and a Cuban style pig roast. Time passed in a blink, and suddenly Carmen and I were taking our vows — at dusk at a Seattle restaurant facing Puget Sound. We made an offering to the sea as part of the ceremony, joining our Puerto Rican and Germanic backgrounds. My friend Jay sang a song he had written especially for us, “Soul to Soul.” We all ate well — our friends and family toasted us, and Jay sang another favorite song, “How Could Anyone”, lyrics below, while my friend, Barb, signed them. We cut the cake and danced — everybody danced — a fabulous party. We were showered with rose petals on our way out the door.

For both of us, this was the end of one long cycle and the exciting beginning of the next. Because we want to respect the intimacy of the ceremony, I will not be posting any pictures of the event. You’ll just have to imagine the tremendous feeling of warmth, gratitude, and connection that was there and that will be with us for the rest of our lives.

The next day, early, we left on our honeymoon in Tofino on the west side of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. We went whale watching, took a dip in a remote hot springs, ran into a couple of black bears on a hike through dense rainforest down to a deserted beach. We bought fish, halibut and salmon, caught fresh from the sea and made romantic dinners. We wandered the beach out in front of our lodgings, a stunning beach house borrowed for a week as a wedding gift from friends. The weather was typical, cloudy with drizzle and some occasional sun breaks. We didn’t care what it did.

There is such a thing as deep happiness.

How could anyone ever tell you
You were anything less than beautiful?

How could anyone ever tell you
You were less than whole?

How could anyone fail to notice
That your loving is a miracle?

How deeply you’re connected to my soul.

Here are a few photos from our trip to Tofino.

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I grew up in a municipal Human Resources Department between the years 1979 and 1990. It was a different world then and I was profoundly lucky. The organization I entered, with no prior experience in HR, was in virtual shambles, hated and feared by most of the organization, mostly because the department had become a political football and was fundamentally incompetent from a technical standpoint. Over time, and with new leadership, the department regained its credibility and went on to become a genuine center of organizational excellence. By then we had a great team and we had great leaders.

I learned, personally, not just professionally, what HR is really all about, which is the hard fought wisdom that comes from being constantly engaged and with a critical role to play in the lives and feelings of people at work. I learned all about the differences in perspective that those in management roles and those in first-line roles bring to their decisions and actions. I learned the sociology of the workplace and how truth and openness are often distant dreams for people, while day to day relationships go on being fragmentary and people take home their anger and sense of powerlessness.

The day I arrived I was helpfully oriented to my new job — the one on paper — called “Personnel Analyst.” The real job, however, was well hidden. “Don’t eat in the cafeteria,” a well-meaning colleague advised that day. “People around here, learning you are new, will just work you over for the answers they want to hear to their questions; then blackmail the rest of us with some alleged promise you’ve made to them.” Another said, “I won’t be introducing you to the Director of the [such and such] department for awhile. He’ll eat you alive unless you know how to deal with him.” The helpful, “real” orientation.

My first assignment was to take on the organization’s blood drive. It was intended for me to be a way to meet people. I tried to put my friendliest foot forward, but was often greeted by distance and mistrust, as if the blood I was asking for (metaphorically) was not going to a charitable cause.

And then there was the employee survey, some months after I arrived, where employees anonymously rated the HR function. We found that pretty much all eight of us in the department had had our names called out as liars and cheats and incompetents. The feedback was so bad all we could do was laugh and wonder who the heck they were talking about. That was before the better leaders came and we learned we were neither an appendage of management nor simply a mouthpiece for employees, but some much more subtle brokerage in the wars of self-interest.

I stayed over ten years in that department for reasons that had to do with my desire to learn how to talk to people, how to advise and support, how to calm people from their negative assumptions, and help others learn to trust me as I learned to be trustworthy.

HR really can be a place that holds the soul of an organization, but it takes a ton of work to do it, especially when fear and betrayal and subtle or not so subtle animosity have been the norms. Of the many things I received through my experiences, perhaps the best was simply the vision of a workplace where people treated each other with deep respect, compassion, care, where they told the truth, and where the truth was heard. That vision, that inner and outer view of people, of their capabilities and true dimensions, that sensitivity to trust and mistrust as core dimensions of any workplace, of any relationship any time anywhere, that vision of meaningful relationships that comes into the heart and stays because it must in order to do the work — that was the primary gift. Hard fought wisdom is the legacy of doing HR work well. It can change a person and it certainly changed me.

One time, in Hawai’i, I took a class in how to make a dried gourd into a useful water vessel. The process includes putting sand and stones, and a little water, into the gourd, then shaking it hard to loosen the scraps of dried flesh inside the gourd. You need to have something truly abrasive, like the sand and stones, and you have to dump it out and refill it many times, shaking it as hard as you can many times over in order to get all the constricting old flesh out of the way. But eventually, if you stick with it, you get something quite helpful and you can use it for quite a long time.

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As a result of my recent marriage I’ve moved to a new location. This has meant, first and foremost, going through the ten years of stuff I accumulated at my last place — ten years of my life, in photographs, books, papers, art and paraphernalia from my kids (who were 10 and 7 when I moved in, 20 and 17 when I moved out), and more, a whole host of possessions, memorabilia, and knick-knacks that needed sorting and most often disposal. It seems every time I turned to pack another box another set of memories would arise, and I realized that what I was doing was the official work of paring down my past to its essentials. What’s worth bringing forward? What’s not?

I have to tell you I am an inveterate pack rat, physically and mentally. The trash disposal bin at my old apartment was a long walk up the parking lot, and I feel like I both lost some weight and grew stronger making trip after trip getting rid of things. The closer I got to my move date, the more stuff I found myself tossing out, the more memories I decided were not worth dragging along. And something else came forward, too, which was how much I loved this place — my apartment on Lake Sammamish — the water and docks only fifty feet or so from my front glass doors. It had been my sanctuary since 1999, the first and only apartment I looked at during the messy last days of a previous marriage breaking down. It was the place I went to escape the emotional turmoil and to recover my life. It might not have meant any more than a lovely shelter to someone else, but to me it symbolized everything that I needed at that moment: quiet, distance, beauty, and independence, my own choices — a chance to carve out my destiny in a different way. One memory is simply that after moving in I felt I could sleep again, just sleep. Ten and a half years later, the day before I moved out, a river otter swam playfully under the docks, effortlessly mounting one, sniffing around. She might as well have turned and waved goodbye. While I watched she slid again into the water and was gone without so much as a ripple.

A sanctuary. Have you ever had one? It seems to me that our lives are such that sanctuaries are absolutely necessary and in our busy-ness less available than ever. I know some people find their privacy in running or bicycling or some other physical activity. Some find it in yoga. Some in reading. But for me, it will always be a place, real or imagined, an essential place where I am returned to me, even for a short time. In my sanctuary time actually derails a little, and I experience the inner wealth of having absolutely nothing at all — to manage, own, or hang onto, not even an idea.

I cannot imagine my own generative work, or the work of any leader for that matter, as occurring without the counter-balance of a sanctuary. Meaningful work must be infused with the properties of the spirit, and how can these properties arise without the rich gifts that come from time alone in one’s own place? They say a Hawaiian quilter will sleep a night in each quilt before giving it away in order for the recipient to go with the love infused in the creation. In just this same way, a sanctuary imbues us with the intangible forms of our own restoration.

The word, sanctuary, by the way, comes from the innermost and holiest parts of a church, and also the place (in a church) where a fugitive might go to be immune from arrest. Well, so be it. In this life we are all fugitives in one way or another. We are all, at least, escapees from the chains (and possessions) of the past; the chains (and possessions) of our own creation. We are all “subject to arrest” by our lives in the world. And therefore, we also need our sanctuaries.

The new place Carmen and I have moved into is beautiful. It, too, is close to the water, with three floors and three views of lake, mountains, and city at different heights. A different lake, Washington rather than Sammamish, and a new direction. We face west now, not east, as our separate apartments did before. So now I find myself watching the moon and sun set rather than watching them rise. The reflected light of the winter sun draws moving figures all afternoon on the white ceilings of our new home.

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Like many bloggers, I am regularly contacted by publicists who send me new books, hoping for an endorsement as part of a viral marketing plan. I have a stack of these books about leadership and management. A few are good. Some are not good at all, and for a variety of reasons, the largest of which is the implicit claim to certainty, authority, and simplification by authors about subject areas that are notoriously gray. One of these books — it is unimportant to name — stood out for me in this regard. Each chapter began with a page devoted to a quotation from colleagues about how knowledgeable and skillful the author of this book, a former executive, really is. The effect was vain and self-serving, as if to prove the author’s credibility through the endorsements of friends and former subordinates. I wondered about the intention. Initially, I thought the book might have been self-published but it was not. Sadly, it had the imprint of a major publisher.

Perhaps the reason such books are published is inside us, inside our hunger for voices that promise certainty, authority and sure answers — not more questions and complexity. Along with other forms of authority, I’ve also noticed how we like science, such as the discoveries of brain chemistry, to explain things, especially the challenging stuff of human behavior. Another recent book that crossed my desk shows how uncivil behavior is costly to business because peoples’ feelings get hurt and they withdraw or take revenge — and this can be explained in terms of what is happening in the brain. I have to ask, didn’t we already know this? Why do we need the chemical evidence? But apparently we do. It makes it certain, “objective,” verified by experts who have proven these things empirically.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not against science or confidence in one’s views about gray topics. I’m simply suggesting that perhaps leadership, in its essence, cannot be so easily reduced, no matter how much we might hunger for that feeling. And more so, to try to do so constantly does us a disservice.

I remember a class I taught some years ago. At the beginning, I asked people what they wanted to learn. One of the participants in this particular session spoke up honestly. “You know, I don’t really want to sit here all day,” she said. “What I’d personally like is to know what leadership is and what it is I need to do to do it — and that’s all. Please just tell me, so I don’t waste my time here all day.” The rest of the class laughed, but the participant was dead serious, and I applauded her for being so clear about her needs. But I also had to explain that leadership doesn’t come via a formula from an outside authority; that it is not a matter of simply doing certain known things repetitively. It’s not a formula. I think the person was hoping for a short lecture titled, “The Nine Secrets of Effective Leadership” and I was sorry to disappoint her.

The problem, of course, is that there are not nine secrets, no matter how many times we try to discover, create, or define them. The stuff of leadership actually cannot be quantified in this way, which is, perhaps, precisely why we keep trying. I certainly find myself trying from time to time, including as part of this weblog. But I’m coming to believe that leadership in its essence is really quite shadowy and imprecise.

Let me share something of what I mean. A common leadership discussion topic is the difference between leadership and management. A recent inquiry about this subject, for example, to the Leadership Think Tank Group of LinkedIn has garnered over three hundred comments! We keep talking about this potential distinction as if one day some precise answer will be found. We pretend that the question is ultimately answerable — which is why we keep talking — but we never actually achieve a final answer at all, simply an ongoing dialogue. There’s nothing wrong with this dialogue, per se — it’s a constructive, awareness building activity — but it is a subjective thing and a personal hypothesis that comes of it, not some absolute truth.

Suppose we go in a different direction altogether. We give up listening to experts for awhile. Suppose we assume that leading cannot be objectively defined at all beyond a certain point; for example, in terms of the sheer number of those who say they admire a particular leader. Suppose instead we assume that leading means being more frequently bathed in these unanswerable questions and dialogues than rigid answers, that leading is often less in fostering grand changes than little ones, that it is not a statement of authority or expertise at all, but a confession of a humble purpose, subjective in the extreme and about things that are incomplete, imperfect, and very impermanent. Suppose it is in the act of creating the questions. Then it seems to me we would be talking about something that is actually new and fresh, really alive, and like life itself, not something asserted as certain, and therefore already dead.

I’ve probably told this story before, but it is relevant. I happened to be working with an executive team on the verge of making some organizational shifts. It’s been so long ago I no longer remember what they were about, but I suspect the implementation of several new company-wide programs. Anyway, during the discussion a number of the executives were noticeably uncomfortable about the plan for roll-out and this seemed to be because they had not been given one. Several said they thought there would be “major fall-out” if the executives did not act perfectly in concert. In fact, a suggestion was kicked around to develop a script they all could literally read to staff to ensure consistency in the message. The conversation went on in this vein for twenty minutes or so before the CEO intervened, in a calm voice noting that having a script was probably the last thing they wanted to do. He suggested alternatively that they continue to talk about the problems of consistency and alignment but understand that in the end they would be there alone to make the announcement to people and that these announcements necessarily would vary from one another because, after all, the executives were all different people with different styles. If it were too uniform, he said, the employees would see right through the changes and know they were not actually being taken seriously, that the executives were simply carrying out orders that didn’t mean that much to them. “Raw is better,” he said. After a pause, he continued, “And, yes, we’ll make mistakes. There will be discrepancies in what we say and we will get caught in them. But that will be an opportunity to continue to talk about the changes, to talk to one another, and keep the dialogue open with employees. If it is ‘perfect,’ we’re done for.” Instead of agreeing with the executives’ anxieties and asking the Employee Communications Department to write that script for everyone, the CEO asked people to be themselves and to be real.

Tell me which one of the nine secrets of leadership (or ninety secrets or nine hundred) this story belongs to. Is it the secret about being authentic? About creating strategic alignment? Perhaps it’s the one on telling the truth, fostering engagement, or being courageous. Maybe it’s a secret called trust in self and others.

We are so fond of order and knowing for sure. We like experts. We want our concepts and models and proven answers, our “operational definitions,” our conformity. What I am increasingly confident about is that the small, the imperfect, the imprecise, the awkward — and the raw — will escape it all, which is, perhaps, why they continue to be our greatest teachers.

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