Blowing the Lid Off

When and where do lead­ers most add val­ue? Now that’s a sim­ple ques­tion with absolute­ly no well-defined answers. 

On one lev­el it seems to have some­thing to do with artic­u­lat­ing the felt needs of some group of peo­ple and fos­ter­ing con­joint action toward some­thing the group wants: wealth, secu­ri­ty, social jus­tice, polit­i­cal influ­ence, what have you. The lead­er’s val­ue, in this con­text, is often to express the vision, hold to it, and con­nect it up to the felt needs of a com­mu­ni­ty of some kind — often in the face of some form of adversity.

Ah, but then there’s the oth­er side of it — the desire by groups to have things sim­pli­fied for them, to have, as Chris Cor­ri­g­an wrote today, “clear paths for­ward,” no mat­ter how unfair that expec­ta­tion, espe­cial­ly when the future requires messy social changes that involve shift­ing mind­sets and par­a­digms. Chris sug­gests the place where lead­ers (mean­ing every­body) add val­ue is in host­ing a vari­ety of uncom­fort­able emo­tion­al states, such as “con­fu­sion about what we are doing,” and also in help­ing peo­ple “hold each oth­er through very try­ing times.” 

I love Chris’s thoughts. For myself, I have often expressed that val­ue as “enter­ing and being able to sus­tain awk­ward, uncom­fort­able places in the name of fos­ter­ing pos­i­tive change.” Stand­ing, fig­u­ra­tive­ly, in the place oth­ers are not drawn to go because of risk, con­fu­sion, a sense of pow­er­less­ness, cyn­i­cal respons­es, self-pity and so on and so forth. It’s the leader some­how that gets us all out of that dark place of “rather not,” and mov­ing toward more pos­i­tive­ly ori­ent­ed pos­si­bil­i­ties. Whether it’s through reas­sur­ance or voic­ing the chal­lenge, lib­er­at­ing the con­flict or sim­ply invit­ing an engaged, gen­uine dia­logue, lead­er­ship breaks open the dilem­mas that both cause and come from sit­ting still. 

We talk about that “break­ing open” as most val­ue added when it seems to draw down into our own most per­son­al­ly felt pow­ers and val­ues — doing what’s right, reclaim­ing the best of what we are and can be — all that stuff that inspires courage, con­nec­tion and mean­ing — stuff that we are in charge of — but not, it seems, either by just telling us to do it or just leav­ing us to our own devices to fig­ure it out. Lead­er­ship’s val­ue is nei­ther in telling nor abdi­cat­ing, but show­ing how to get across the deep, murky, tur­bu­lent waters of change. (A lot of show­ing is real­ly a form of telling, and a lot of telling is real­ly a form of abdicating).

The times have moved away from the charis­mat­ic view of the leader as one per­son here or there to a con­cept of shared lead­er­ship in which we are all involved. So ask­ing the ques­tion of where and when do lead­ers add val­ue isn’t real­ly much dif­fer­ent than ask­ing the ques­tion where and when do you or I add val­ue? And ain’t that just a rip? It’s more about my stand regard­ing murky, tur­bu­lent waters. It’s more about how I think I can help myself and oth­ers. My piece of the bridge that needs to be built or the raft that might get me and us from here to there. My con­tri­bu­tion. My service.

I love the fact that some­times when you take out the for­mal lead­er­ship, the folks that are sanc­tioned to lead because of pow­er or posi­tion or elec­tion of some kind, when you blow that lid off, there’s a nat­ur­al thing that begins to hap­pen. Peo­ple start to talk to each oth­er, make con­nec­tions, fig­ure out what needs to be done. In fact, if they are not doing this, I think it’s often because some­one is still try­ing to play that for­mal lead­er­ship role (how­ev­er sub­tly), and maybe has placed him or her­self in a posi­tion of advo­ca­cy for some­thing the group does­n’t real­ly want or believe in — but cer­tain­ly fits the agen­da of the one try­ing to be leader. 

When you real­ly blow the lid off, real­ly mutiny about the way things are, when hav­ing that riv­er to cross just sucks for every­body, it’s total­ly amaz­ing what peo­ple can do.

That may be part of the val­ue, that mind­set of see­ing what it could be like “if we real­ly blew the lid off,” hav­ing a vision for just that. But this isn’t about find­ing some­one else to do it for us — some “leader,” some “fol­low­er,” some oth­er group, lord knows not some con­sul­tant or facil­i­ta­tor. I think it’s main­ly about blow­ing our own lid off, and no mat­ter what the roles are, the ser­vices and con­tri­bu­tions, it’s about step­ping into that awful, rich space of anx­i­ety and excite­ment, where what breaks open is most sim­ply and imme­di­ate­ly you.

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