First Practice: Knowing Your Leadership Edge

For addi­tion­al con­text on this post, please refer to:

The Prac­tice of Leadership
Eight Lead­er­ship Practices
Sec­ond Prac­tice: Devel­op­ing Your Com­fort Lev­el with Feedback
Third Prac­tice: Car­ing for Self
Fourth Prac­tice: Lead­er­ship and Influence
Fifth Prac­tice: Dis­cussing Undiscussables
Sixth Prac­tice: On Collaborating
Sev­enth Prac­tice: Per­son­al Integrity
Eighth Prac­tice: Spir­i­tu­al Perspective

What is your edge — the place in your­self where you cur­rent­ly want to grow as a leader? This ques­tion is a good start­ing point for a study of per­son­al leadership.

Many peo­ple raise there hands in any audi­ence when I ask the ques­tion, “Who here has an itch to grow as a leader?” But the issue isn’t whether we’ve got the itch. It is whether we can artic­u­late it. If we can ver­bal­ize our edge accu­rate­ly and be con­scious of it, nat­ur­al ener­gies for change and growth can appear.

I remem­ber a man­ag­er in a class say­ing that she want­ed to learn to be less self­ish and self-cen­tered. She want­ed to learn to give oth­ers all the cred­it. On one lev­el this sound­ed very good, very altru­is­tic, but there was a sense that some­thing else was going on. As she con­tin­ued to describe this desire, anoth­er mem­ber of the class com­ment­ed, “It sounds to me like you want to become a bet­ter door mat for oth­er peo­ple.” The man­ag­er asked, “Real­ly?” but I think she could already see from the faces of the thir­ty oth­er man­agers in the room that there was some­thing here to con­sid­er. The way she expressed her wish had sound­ed like she was ask­ing for a mild form of self-pun­ish­ment. I think by the end of the train­ing she was head­ing in a more pos­i­tive direc­tion — about 180 degrees from where she start­ed — a direc­tion where she gave her­self per­mis­sion to affirm her own contributions.

So one les­son about artic­u­lat­ing a core learn­ing chal­lenge (anoth­er name for edge) is that it is not about dis­cov­er­ing flaws but about deliv­er­ing on affir­ma­tions. A con­sul­tant friend of mine said one day, “I’m doing, doing, doing. Why can’t I just be?” Well, there cer­tain­ly was an edge there, but it was attend­ed by sub­stan­tial self-crit­i­cism. With some coach­ing she changed it around in a use­ful way: “How can I release being­in­to my life and work?”

This isn’t just seman­tics. The intel­lec­tu­al part of a per­son might won­der about that, but as human beings I believe we are built to appre­ci­ate our chal­lenges much dif­fer­ent­ly. We need them in a form that pre­serves our fun­da­men­tal integri­ty and whole­ness as indi­vid­u­als. Ask­ing our­selves neg­a­tive ques­tions usu­al­ly results in neg­a­tive answers. Ask­ing, “Why can’t I do this?” at best will give you a laun­dry list of bar­ri­ers, not solu­tions. Some oth­er examples:

Why am I so bad? Because you just are!
How do I curb my impa­tience? By not feeling!
How can I become more cre­ative? You are already too creative!
How can I work hard­er and get more done? Find a way not make so many stu­pid mistakes.
How do I win more fights? By not being such a coward.

Each of these exam­ples can be changed to define an affirm­ing edge for growth.

What is the good I wish to do?
How do I ful­ly lib­er­ate my passions?
How do I real­ly hon­or my creativity?
When am I in the flow? And how can I be there more often?
How can I sus­tain the ten­sion when dif­fer­ences come to the surface?

It’s always a sur­prise to me as peo­ple work on defin­ing their edge, how the issues are most­ly about the rela­tion­ship of self to Self. It is as if we all intu­itive­ly know what Self is, but we have to cross a riv­er of some kind to get there.

The way to get start­ed is to search the ordi­nary inci­dents of your life — what hap­pens to you — for the clues that can reveal a con­scious part of your edge. Let me give you an exam­ple of how this can work from my own recent per­son­al life.

A cou­ple weeks ago, in four sep­a­rate instances over a peri­od of about three days, dis­as­ter invad­ed my kitchen. In the first inci­dent I start­ed the cof­fee mak­er with­out putting the bowl under it, result­ing in hot cof­fee mixed with grounds all over my coun­ters and the floor; the next prob­lem was a seri­ous­ly clogged drain in my sink; the third and worst instance was acci­den­tal­ly turn­ing on a burn­er under a plas­tic bag of rice; and the fourth was the mys­te­ri­ous explo­sion of a box of sand­wich bags I had picked up — fifty plas­tic bags every­where — this time luck­i­ly the stove was off.

Writ­ten in this way it all sounds minor, and it was, but at the time there were mag­ni­fy­ing issues. The first two inci­dents hap­pened just before my broth­er and his wife arrived for din­ner, and I had felt like a rag­ing klutz. The rice inci­dent also left me, shall we say, com­plete­ly pissed off at myself. Rice every­where, bag burned onto burn­er. My daugh­ter Vic­to­ria thanked me for not get­ting total­ly upset — she’d seen (and heard) my reac­tion when the drain plugged up just before my broth­er arrived. And the sand­wich bags, they were just a kind of fatal after­shock in the series. I felt like an evil spir­it had moved into my kitchen — and me.

My friend, Vik­ki, helped me sort it out. She asked in an email, “Is it an evil spir­it or just a sur­fac­ing of emo­tion — your inner state turned out­ward so you can see it more clear­ly?” And she con­tin­ued, deft­ly, “Even the kitchen inci­dents pri­or to each din­ner you gave for your broth­er are inter­est­ing because the prob­lems were resolved at the last minute — almost as if you were being taught to trust. The drain clogged but unclogged in time — you weren’t allowed to fail. Or, to sink beyond reach.”

As if I was being taught to trust. The words rang true with suf­fi­cient irony to make me take notice on a dif­fer­ent, larg­er scale. Here I am a con­sul­tant who focus­es much of his work on trust issues among peo­ple (I’ve writ­ten books on this) now hav­ing trou­ble trust­ing the uni­verse, life, Self — to make it through some real­ly very minor stuff. Vikki’s words turned an unknown rush­ing riv­er into a stream I could begin to wade across. And her words gave me the ener­gy to go far­ther, to look all the way back through my life for moments when I had­n’t trust­ed life in sit­u­a­tions small and large — and paid the price for it in loss.

The reflec­tion helped me empathize a lit­tle bet­ter with all of us, par­tic­u­lar­ly in lead­er­ship roles, who occa­sion­al­ly just lose it — espe­cial­ly over minor events. I’d nev­er thought of it par­tic­u­lar­ly as a trust issue. Now it res­onates as part of my edge — where I am still learn­ing and want to learn more. I’d artic­u­late this the edge as: “How can I more ful­ly bring for­ward my trust in life…and receive?”

But I, like most peo­ple, have trou­ble artic­u­lat­ing an edge for myself. It occa­sion­al­ly takes a vil­lage. It is often eas­i­er for oth­ers to see and to help. So if you feel so moved, share a com­ment, feed­back, or a sto­ry of your own about defin­ing lead­er­ship edge.