On Finding a Mirror

Read­ing once again the reflec­tions of those of you who respond­ed to the post, The Unfold­ing That Can­not Be Con­tained, I am deeply struck by the dif­fer­ent ways we come at our notions of this thing we call lead­er­ship. From Ash­ley’s com­ment about “sur­ren­der­ing to pow­er that moves through and hon­or­ing the pow­er in all,” to Dan Leahy’s thoughts about “a liv­ing sys­tem’s felt need to change,” to Jay’s words on leader as “com­mu­ni­ty builder,” to Karen’s “prob­lems of vocab­u­lary,” it is a fas­ci­nat­ing array. I am moved by these dif­fer­ent slants of light that flick­er through the window.…and am again grate­ful for this forum.

I am some­times faced with audi­ences that seem to me like they want such a hard, defin­i­tive, lit­er­al answers: here is what lead­er­ship is; here are the five (or six or sev­en) qual­i­ties that define it; here is the way you eval­u­ate your­self to make sure you are effec­tive in each of these pre-defined areas — as if real­i­ty could be pinned down so neat­ly and easily.

I am prone, instead, to sim­ply ask peo­ple for their views and do a sim­ple exer­cise. The exer­cise goes like this:

Please draw a line down the mid­dle of a sheet of paper. At the top of the right hand col­umn write the word “Vision,” mean­ing your vision of an effec­tive leader — basi­cal­ly the kind of leader you’d like to be. Write what­ev­er you want: traits, qual­i­ties, behav­ior, modes, the­o­ry, prac­tice, pri­vate def­i­n­i­tions — any­thing. At the top of the left hand, write the word col­umn “Anti-Vision” and now write any­thing you like about the kind of leader you would nev­er want to be. There is no right or wrong about these columns. They are grasped intu­itive­ly and felt, the prod­uct of so much real per­son­al expe­ri­ence and con­di­tion­ing. The words that peo­ple come up with don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly cor­re­spond to the cat­e­gories laid out by lead­er­ship writ­ers like Ben­nis, Druck­er, Kous­es and Pos­ner, Koesten­baum, Quinn, whomev­er, although often there is a rela­tion­ship of some kind. Most­ly the words come from what we’ve seen of our real teach­ers, the men­tors, author­i­ty fig­ures, and the bad man­agers that have shown up in our lives, and the words come from the heart. Do this exer­cise right now if you like, before read­ing further.

Okay, got your lists? Now do this. Go to the right hand col­umn and cir­cle the words that rep­re­sent your strongest “gift” (strength, tal­ent) as a leader. This might be some­thing you take for grant­ed about your­self, but oth­ers see in you and espe­cial­ly respect you for. Some­times it takes a moment to let go of a lit­tle mod­esty. Just acknowl­edge it, what­ev­er it is. Now take a look at your anti-vision state­ments. What is it that “leaks” out of you from time to time, unin­ten­tion­al­ly or impul­sive­ly, and in a way that you can see it and feel some shame. For a moment, let’s call this “shad­ow.” Cir­cle the word or words that are shad­ow for you. [A super­vi­sor described this as the qual­i­ties of “my evil sis­ter who comes to work in my place once in awhile”]. So now you’ve writ­ten your own cri­te­ria for what a leader should be and should avoid being, and you are using this as a mir­ror to think about your strongest gift and your most uncom­fort­able shadow.

Often there is some type of con­nec­tion between the two. A man­ag­er once said to me she thought her gift was her gen­uine pas­sion for her work. But she added that her shad­ow was her “inten­si­ty” with oth­er peo­ple when she was under pres­sure. A strength tak­en too far in her view. Anoth­er man­ag­er told me he was able to bring peo­ple togeth­er to col­lab­o­rate — except when he became quite auto­crat­ic. A shad­ow under­min­ing his gift.

Why do this exer­cise? Well, after work­ing with it with hun­dreds of peo­ple I would say the main ben­e­fit is to get com­plete­ly away from intel­lec­tu­al­iz­ing the answer to the ques­tion, “What does it mean to be a good leader?” It gets us away from believ­ing some­one actu­al­ly knows the full sto­ry, knows our full sto­ry. That kind of believ­ing can lead to such abstrac­tion — as if there were some final answer and if we talk enough it will mate­ri­al­ize. I’m more inter­est­ed in the part of us that already seems to have some answers to that ques­tion and from a dis­tinct­ly per­son­al van­tage point. Of course we all want to stretch and grow and learn to see what oth­ers believe about this top­ic. [In a group set­ting, as peo­ple share their visions and anti-visions I encour­age all to add words they like to their own lists.]

What I believe is that at the end of the day, in the prac­ti­cal dynam­ics of the worlds with­in which we oper­ate, these pri­vate views and judg­ments of self often are so much stronger grooves for actu­al behav­ior and actu­al feel­ing. Rub­bing up against the stones of dai­ly expe­ri­ence, a per­son express­es the beau­ty and ugli­ness of real human tem­pera­ment — dis­play­ing gifts that no one has ever thought to record as part of some image of effec­tive lead­er­ship; and sim­i­lar­ly their shadows.

Fac­ing our own def­i­n­i­tions means we face a mir­ror, not an out­side expert — which seems emi­nent­ly appro­pri­ate to me for a study of such a per­son­al thing as lead­er­ship. It can be inter­est­ing to think about just how we got the mir­ror we just dis­cov­ered. Said anoth­er way, the exer­cise helps us begin to acknowl­edge how the mir­ror of our own self-judg­ments has been oper­at­ing for some time now.

With my mir­ror in front of me I can begin to ask new ques­tions and deter­mine whether the mir­ror in fact is accu­rate. Per­haps I see myself as inde­ci­sive — and it is this very neg­a­tive view that push­es me to make such bad snap deci­sions. Or I see myself as uncre­ative — despite the evi­dence of so many orig­i­nal projects and ideas. I can ask oth­ers what they think, what they see — whether they sense I am accu­rate in my self-views or not.

And I can become curi­ous. I may not have to spend a lot of mon­ey at the insti­tute to find out some truth about me and my leadership.

I may just have to find a mir­ror and then ask that most telling ques­tion, “Is it true?”