Over at Whiskey River I found a stunning quotation from Thomas Merton’s book, New Seeds of Contemplation:

“The false self consists of all of the efforts we make to nurture a reputation for ourselves in the mind of others. In our culture, we have a compulsive need to be validated by external sources. But the true self is one that is wholly separate from this fragile image that we try to construct in the imagination of others. The true self is like a very shy wild animal that never appears at all whenever an alien presence is at hand, and comes out only when all is peaceful, when he is untroubled and alone. He cannot be lured by anyone or anything, because he responds to no lure except that of the divine freedom.”

The problem with the machinery of the false self is that it is so easily disturbed. Without our protective fantasies about who we are, we believe we will experience pure personal nothingness: the dark vacuum of empty inner spaces at absolute zero. Such is the nature of the false self that it is founded on the belief there is nothing beyond its carefully constructed mirages and hopes of external validation. Indeed, in relationships, we want that recognition: men often look for the validation of women and women often seek the validation of men. Children need the validation of their care-givers in order to know they are (and will be) okay and as the children grow up, those same care-givers may also ultimately look for their children’s approval. In organizations, both leaders and followers yearn to be “seen” and appreciated. We wear our costumes and carry out our roles, hoping at the end of the play there will be recognition, applause, good reviews. We base our stature on what we hope is our recognized contribution. Sometimes we are accurate about that legacy; sometimes it may be only as real as a fantasy of winning the lottery.

In Zen Buddhism there are many metaphors that trace the conditions for appearance of the true self. In phrases such as “jumping right down the tiger’s throat,” “finding the bottom of the river,” and “if you find the Buddha, kill him” there is encouragement to go experience that “nothingness” for yourself, and in doing so break the chains that bind us to falseness and external validation. As I read Merton, he’s calling forth in this image of the very shy, wild animal a vision of quite a humble creature — mostly in hiding it would seem — that nevertheless carries a seed of immeasurable strength.

I like this vision because it places our capacity to lead in the category of learning to get past a false self that addicted to its blindspots. Sometimes we misinterpret with the thought that if only we can numb out our concerns for others and their perspectives, learn to demand, incorporate a certain ruthlessness into our character, then the true self can show up. Sometimes we misinterpret by failing to distinguish between our own problems and the problems of others. In both cases there is a denial of reality. This all seems to me to be the product of a culture that over-values individualism and a certain inner disconnectedness, denying experience. It is the product of a culture that routinely misses the point that the strength of the True Self is in its complete awareness and sensitivity, not the loss of consciousness that is part of some inner emotional disconnection. In fact, it is that very sensitivity that drives enlightened action, not the reverse.

There’s a story about two travelers that come upon a very sick child alone by the side of the road. It’s evident that there is really nothing to be done. The child will soon perish — perhaps in only a matter of minutes. The child is begging for water. One of the travelers is ready to take out his water flask, but then quickly puts it away. “I will only prolong the child’s agony,” he says. “The humane thing to do is hurry death. I’m sorry.” The other traveler, however, drops to her knees and immediately gives the child some water. She nestles the child in her arms. She quietly sings to the child and holds the little one close for over an hour until death finally comes. The first traveler asks,”What good did you do prolonging the child’s suffering? Now you and I are both delayed in our journeys.” “What good did you do as part of your own journey,” she replies, “by learning to deny it?”

To deny suffering — in ourselves and in others — is to be frightened and to run, avoiding the very shy wild animal that goes by so many names. True Self is only one.

Technorati Tag: Consciousness

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am,
then I can change.”

–Carl Rogers

There is so much hubbub around us about self-help and improvement that the key precondition of personal change — self-acceptance — often gets completely lost. I’m as guilty of this one as anybody, and maybe more than most. If you are interested, as I am, in all things self-actualized, you too may experience the dilemma. With all the books and tapes and learning groups out there, it is very easy to fall into the pit of constantly attending to the gap between the ideal and the real — what I should be rather than what I am. For me, a contributing factor is my consulting work in organizations specifically helping people recognize, understand, and work with leadership and organizational gaps. In the process I know I can easily “over-focus” on my own ideals, losing sight of the fact that human change is mostly not a linear journey, but an organic one that paradoxically begins with awareness and acceptance of the parts that are not changing.

For me, Rogers’ quotation points to the softest tissue of the soul. I attended a recent workshop at which I believe the leader, Jim Sorensen, beautifully modeled what Rogers’ self-acceptance actually means. Faced with a participant trying to convince Jim in front of the hundred or so people in the class that he should simply “love his stuff,” no matter what it is, Jim very honestly and vulnerably stated that no, there were parts of himself he could not yet love. In doing so he modeled a deep honesty. By what he said and how he said it, and perhaps without any special intention, Jim made it safe for everyone there to also acknowledge parts of themselves that make complete self-love difficult. And he demonstrated how, even without that final self-love, there can also be self-acceptance.

I can imagine a long argument here about the similarities and differences between love and acceptance, and I’d rather not fall into that semantic whirlpool. But I do want to reinforce the importance of Jim’s gift to the audience. With acceptance, I believe that love, maybe capital L kind of love, comes of its own accord and from “outside.” With acceptance comes grace, comes healing, comes change into our lives, and they come from someplace beyond ourselves and yet in a way that is completely intrinsic to who we are.

Dreamcatchers: Ethnic Fest ‘08, Tacoma WA

Last week, Karen Lynch of Vermont Diary sent me this compelling story of conversion and grace. While I do not identify myself as a Christian, and I certainly am not in any place to make a judgment about the meaning of Karen’s experience, what is undeniable is that somehow a door of transcendence opened for her in a single moment, as perhaps it can for any one of us. Maybe that moment is always happening, if only we have sufficient clarity to see its constant unfolding.

I believe what Rogers is talking about all the private, prayerful nuances of letting go, of finding the end, of simply being, of accepting — that things are okay, that I’m okay. Probably mostly this is an unconscious process of opening, of blossoming, where something redirects us and helps us regain our hold on our fundamental interconnectedness. The True Self. In my work I see leaders who attempt to substitute their hard work, achievements and intelligence for the serum of self-acceptance, leaders who are never enough to themselves yet refuse to go through the eye of the needle in order to experience something else. Truth be told, I identify with them. And yet I also see the possibilities of transcendence, which come from adversity and from questions that can’t be answered, only lived. When I am stopped cold by self-made pain, indeed it is then most frequently that the outlines of a new door begin to appear on an otherwise seamless inner wall.

This one surely goes in the category of “leadership poems”. A friend passed it along to me and I’ve reposted from this site. Truly beautiful. A wonderful day to honor Nelson Mandela, feel and express gratitude. You can find out more about how this day is being celebrated in South Africa here.

[Addendum: 7/19/08: Miki Saxon of Leadership Turn and David Zinger of Slacker Manager point to a fine article about Mandela by Richard Stengel. It’s quite a powerful piece.]

There’s a well-known legend about two wolves:

A Cherokee elder was teaching his children about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to them.

“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too.”

The grandchildren thought about it and after a minute one of them asked, “Which wolf will win?”

The elder simply replied, “The one you feed.”

Photo Credit: All About Wolves

Similarly in organizations, there is a fight, visible as two competing worlds. One world is founded on human interaction as a contest between weak and strong; the other based on a community inspired by “transcendent values.”

We are all a party to that fight.

In most organizations I’ve known, leaders endeavor to speak from the world of transcendent values. And they believe in them. But they often also find that at some level they must deal with the other world, focused as it is on strength and weakness, on power without any particular moral code.

That war hurts us all. A friend in financial services, for example, was approached by a powerful client who wanted my friend to misrepresent the client firm’s performance in a way that broke the law. She had to decide whether to do the work or throw away a client who represented massive income, reputation, and opportunity. After some sleepless nights, her sense of integrity won out. There was no way she culd do what she was being asked. Predictably the client went away angry — as if he had a right to such service — and who was my friend anyway to deny him what he wanted?

But that’s an obvious case. The subtler ones don’t bring us to such clear decisiveness. For example, the executive who knows he has someone working for him that engages in artful retaliation, but who struggles with what to do about it since the business results keep coming in. The petty wars between leaders and their departments in a health care organization that ought to be focused on their common life-saving mission. The behind-the-scenes change efforts and the consultants hired to make the recommendations they’ve been told to make, reinforcing executives’ perceptions rather than challenging a destructive paradigm. These are more difficult skirmishes in the war, perhaps because they seem so minor. But they are, of course, exactly what keeps the war going.

This are why we need the elders.

I think it is unfortunate that nationally, when we look for those elders, positive ones, ones that know how to feed the world of transcendent values, we often come up short. Perhaps that will change with time. In the corporate world, it is sometimes hard to find the models because the apparent models turn out to be different than we imagined. They nourish the wrong wolf, endorse the wrong world. I think of this famous, purported leader and his suggestion that it’s a good idea to fire the “bottom” 10 percent of performers each year. And if a manager refuses or has a hard time with this assignment out of integrity, that manager should then also become part of the 10 percent that is terminated. This is tantamount to a gang environment. I’ve known a few managers who worked for him. Believe me, their stories have not been particularly laudatory of the organization or of the leader himself, but then, perhaps, they were part of that “bottom” 10%.

This is why we need the elders. Their presence personally reminds us which wolf to feed, which world to inhabit. They have that not-so-subtle thing called a moral vision, which is not to say a righteous one, but just an enlarged, human view that there is more to business and to life than being clever, strong, and “winning.” Instead, somehow they lift us to see the possibilities, believe in us, help us do incredible things together, even when the stress is high, and the time and the money are short. They convey the importance of learning and, especially, of doing the right thing, and they are willing to sort that out through conflict because “the right thing” is often not so easy to determine in a group. They help us understand that we are, after all, in only one world, share only one ship, and we choose together which one.

They don’t think for us. They think for themselves and they help us and encourage us to think for ourselves, too. They see our importance more than they see their own. In this way they engender that most precious quality called — respect.

Technorati Tag: Choices

Lately I’ve been doing more work than ever related to speaking up at work. Typically I use the book, The Courageous Messenger, that I co-wrote twelve years ago, as the hand-out for the class. I love teaching this material because it brings people together who are willing to acknowledge that they need some help and they take the risk to show up at the workshop. I admire them because they often bring deep feelings about their dilemmas at work (and at home, too) and they are universally willing to help one another with ideas and strategies and in-the-moment feedback. Usually I ask people to focus on a particular speaking up situation during our day together so the learning is often very personal. By the end of the day, people are willing to comment on their own “communications dilemmas” — the conditions of temperament and personality that interfere with sharing what they want and need to share at work. This makes the training more than “assertiveness” work. In fact, sometimes the dilemma is just the opposite, leaking too much aggression or blame. I like to think of the learning as finding a way for the soul to show up without the woundedness that we all have acquired along the way.

Telling stories from the class would be a violation of the rules of confidentiality that all class members and I agree to. So, instead, I’d like to talk about this in the context of who you are and the kinds of relationships you want in the workplace. But first, some background from Michael Meade, sociologist, regarding levels of reality as described in a short essay found in The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart:

“If the First Layer of human interaction is the common ground of manners, kind speech, polite greeting, and working agreements; if the Third Layer is the area of deeply shared humanity, the universal brotherhood and sisterhood of all people, of the underlying, fundamental oneness of human love, justice, and peaceful coexistence; then the Second Layer is the territory of anger, hatred, wrath, rage, outrage, jealousy, envy, contempt, disgust, and acrimony. It is the Via Negativa, the field of Conflict, the plain of Discord, the hills of Turmoil. And, the Second Layer always exists between the First Layer the Third.”

“All three layers are necessary for a society to continue, for a relationship to endure, for an individual to endure.”

I believe Meade has it exactly right. We say we want to live in accord with those human universals found in the Third Layer, but mostly we have trouble — and have been conditioned to have trouble — making the passage through the Second Layer. And it gets worse, says Meade, not only do we have to make the passage if we want to live in tune with the universals, but the Third Layer “is constantly moving around its location; its not to be found today where it was yesterday…The Third Layer is mysterious, unpredictable, leaves no forwarding address.” Which, in essence means that the passage is never for all time, but only for right now and then inevitably we will need to go back for more — but perhaps having learned a thing or two. We learn we can trust the journey more than we thought we could.

The people who come to the workshop on speaking up are asking for passage through the Second Layer. “How can I tell my boss she needs to change,” someone might ask, “without actually ruining the relationship?” We muse together about the risks involved in opening the conversation, get clear on the message and the messenger’s motivation, work at accepting the receiver for who he or she is, and focus on specifics, including a specific request. “I’d like you to treat me with the same respect that I offer to you.” And so on. This is work without guarantees, and the messenger also has to focus on accepting the outcomes whatever they might be.

And so it is, to be a messenger is to take on an eminently heroic journey, filled as it is with scary creatures. Meade says, “The population of the Second Layer includes a high percentage of giants, hags, trolls, boxers, bars, street criminals, cops, vultures, gargoyles, streetwalkers, and outraged motorists. The sidewalks are cracked, the stores are closed, the lights don’t work, and there is no one who’ll listen to you.” He is explicitly not talking about the messenger’s outer world or the nature of the receiver to whom the message goes. He’s talking about the messenger’s private and subjective world that has to be faced internally in order to deal with the fear of repercussions externally. On the way to asking my boss to be included in an important meeting, perhaps I need to make a deal with the pathetic orphan I carry around inside of me, the orphan who is never included, always begging. Perhaps as I confront my co-worker about pulling his weight, I notice a lethal shape in my internal shadows ready to stab him in the back at the slightest provocation. This is why, of course, Meade calls this the Via Negativa, the dark way.

This is exactly what constitutes our heroism: the willingness to go into the dark spaces inside us that are called up by organizational or personal realities. We have to if we want to find that “fundamental oneness of human love.” Not a popular thing to talk about at work. Yet that is the direction, isn’t it, really, that we must go to create real understanding? Sometimes people are surprised when I open the class by suggesting to them that the problem of speaking up at work isn’t the problem of a situation that needs to be resolved so much as a true relationship between and within people that needs to be formed.

Too often, we protect ourselves, saying consciously or unconsciously “well, it wouldn’t do any good anyway,” and in fact there may be evidence for that. But essentially the cynical posture is a safe one and doesn’t give the soul what it keeps asking for. You can put on earplugs. You can muffle the sound coming out from under the door with a towel. But ultimately everybody knows it’s there and there’s only one way to find it and address it — which is to open the door.

Something else people discover from the workshop is that courage isn’t some thoughtless force or confidence, but comes from full awareness of the risks and the solid, conscious, self-knowledgeable choice to face them. That facing may lead to a decision to speak up or it may not. The path of integrity, the path of the soul, doesn’t actually care, but it does demand that we look right through the doorway, and having found what is waiting for us there say loudly and clearly, “yes, I will” or “no, I won’t.”

I like to think of this work, ultimately, in the way Wendell Berry describes the relationship with his wife in one of his most moving poems, The Country of Marriage:

Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.

If even a fabulous marriage requires us to enter the darkness, how much more the conflicts we experience in our daily work? But can we take the same opinion with us, can you, that “the dark [is] richer than the light and more blessed”? Do you have the strength to “stay brave enough to keep going in”?

I do believe the principles apply, if we are going to create a better marriage or a better, richer, more human and humane place for us to get our work done together.

Technorati Tags: Self-Knowledge

Recently a friend, founder of a successful financial services firm, shared this observation with me:

“My perception is that people desperately need depth conveyed in a
simplistic manner that they can grasp and use in their daily living.”

The context is a conversation between us about the journey each person faces in moving out of individual shadows and into his or her gifts. My friend’s exact words, perhaps, don’t strike me quite right. I might say simple way rather than simplistic manner. Maybe the word desperately is too strong. But something here really resonates with me. Maybe it is the times, the complexity, the powers we have now to connect with one another but also all the ways we have to stay disconnected — from each another and from ourselves.

The poets have always known how to reach that shore of simple and profound.

Asagoa-ya!
Tsurube torarete
Morai mizu.

Oh! the morning glory!
The bucket seized away,
I beg for water.

— Chiyo-ni

Chiyo-ni is one of the best known haiku artists of the 18th century. I’ve read many translations of this poem, and although they vary greatly from one another, the sense of it always remains the same. She sees a morning glory blossom tangled in an empty water bucket and is so overcome with its beauty she dares not untwine it; instead she goes elsewhere to get her water.

On my way to meet my friend I travel through heavy traffic. Stopped at a light and frustrated because I am late, I read the license plate holder of the SUV in front of me: “There is beauty in everything but many do not see it.”

Indeed!

I’ve always admired my friend’s ability to communicate. We’ve done some work together in the past. I remember him telling me that his method with clients is to listen to them and then add just one thing they might do to make their circumstances better. I have seen him do this and it is amazing. By comparison I’ve got a hundred suggestions clamoring to prove how smart I am; he has one — of value. What he says he is trying to do is be “peacefully effective.”

There is a story about the legendary founder of the tea ceremony, Rikyū, and the powerful Lord Hideyoshi. In the 16th century, when the morning glory was still new to Japan and Rikyū had planted his garden full of them, Hideyoshi invited himself to a ceremony. But when the Lord approached Rikyū’s hut, he saw that the entire field had been cut down and gravel spread about. Only when the angry Lord entered did he see the single radiant blossom Rikyū had preserved in the sacred alcove. In one flower, the entire experience of the field gained spiritual expression.

Not long ago I conducted a training session. I asked one of the participants on a break how the class was going for him. “This model is so simple,” he said to me. “It helped tremendously.” Ah, that felt so good!

Simple depth. A single flower. A single word or phrase, an idea or image may unlock so much more than can be imagined.

Sometimes I think of moments that happened many years ago, still seeing in my mind the face of the person speaking:

(My first good boss) “If you are a leader and you can’t get feedback, you shouldn’t have the job!”

(A challenging professor at college) “That’s an interesting point you are making about stress. What do you think that point says about you?”

(An elderly man who sat next to me on an airplane) “If you want to know the truth, you have to make your whole life the truth.”

(A high school mentor) “You think too much. Do you believe you can get through life by thinking about it, as if it all could be solved as one big problem for your brain?”

(A lover, parting) “I won’t steal any more of your life.”

(My four year old daughter being carried onto the coach section of the airplane) “Coach is better than First Class, Daddy.” “Why is that?” I ask. “It must be,” she continues in a loud voice. “There are so many more people here!”

These morning glories, each stunning in its way, in its remembrance. How often they come to me and I “grasp and use them” in my daily life!

(As I have no images of morning glories today, these fair tulips must do!)

Technorati Tags: Reflections

The Shadow is one of Carl Jung’s most powerful concepts, an archetype of personal and collective unconsciousness. Its relevance is that all of us have parts of ourselves that we do not know, and yet in the maze of our lives, we seek unknowingly to understand. Shadow, said Jung, is everything we have no wish to be — an amalgam of weaknesses and embarrassing, shameful qualities as well as a great deal of repressed “stuff” (such as an unexpressed creativity) that is pure gold. All of what we attempt to hide from the world by first hiding from ourselves is Shadow. The inner push-pull of needing to know ourselves yet keeping parts of who we are distant from consciousness results not just in inner conflict but also the reflection of that conflict in our outer lives. We discover ourselves in repeating patterns of events and relationships that we have attracted, drawing us closer to knowing what we need to know, but are afraid to know about who we are. As Jung reportedly said (perhaps this is only a paraphrase), “What you don’t bring to consciousness appears in your life as fate.”

If you want to know more about Shadow, you might try this book or this one, or for a quick summary, this article on the net.

The relevance of the Shadow archetype for leadership is staggering. For it is precisely these hidden qualities and characteristics that leak into relationships with those being led. It is often said that the culture of a workplace is the product of a leader’s own personality. But how much does the leader know of his or her personality and its actual effects? For example a leader will ask others to overcome a problem facing an organization, and in the efforts of people to overcome that problem they discover how much the leader is unconsciously colluding in creating the problem. However, this is undiscussable with the leader, lest there be retaliation.

Some years ago I listened to the CEO of a large midwestern company make a speech to hundreds of supervisors in his organization, exhorting them to help support and help grow the employees who they were privileged enough to work with. “You are mother and father to these young people who start their working life here,” I remember him saying. Later, talking with people who had been with the company for some time, I learned that he had the bad habit of angrily and abusively dressing employees down in public — something people accepted about him, but perhaps not exactly in line with his stated preference for supervisory relationships. And, of course, this contradiction was undiscussable. Sometimes after his tantrums it was rumored he had to lay down on a cot in his office to sleep, thoroughly exhausted by the scathing exercise of his power. In an entirely different company, in which I happened to be doing some interviewing, the CEO had a reputation for blowing up in a way that caused his pant legs to hike up, with employees rating him on whether today’s explosion was a “one leg or a two leg tantrum.” And then there was one of two top managers at a nuclear power plant who had a reputation for his famous “meltdowns.” It appeared that all of these men in top leadership roles simply accepted their angry reactions and rationalized them away as unimportant aspects of their own styles even while publicly espousing an entirely different set of personal and corporate values.

How could this be so? How can such incongruity exist in a single person?

Shadow.

And we all have it. You and I may say to ourselves, but that’s not me. I’m not such a hypocrite. And in fact, I may say, I condemn such hypocrisy. People like that make me sick, I may say without even a moment’s reflection. And yet I remain unaware of how I really feel — which is angry and fearful and self-righteous. You see? And while you or I might think we are not doing so, in that moment we find our own ways into revenge, if only in the way we think about an “us” and a “them.” We have already subtly learned to retaliate against the people we say we hate because, after all, they retaliate against us. This is commonly known as the beginning of a war.

In a way we are all about two or three years old when it comes to Shadow. Have you ever seen a young child put her hands over her eyes and repeat that charming provocation, “You can’t see me!” That’s how Shadow operates. We put our hands over our own eyes and imagine no one can see us. Where Shadow is concerned, we can’t tell the difference between our state and the state of others — but we think we can. And Lord help the person who suggests otherwise in an effort to awaken us. This is one way to define what it means to be unconscious.

Mostly, we find it easy to see Shadow in others, particularly when our own Shadow is triggered. Everywhere else we may notice incongruity, contradition, weakness, everywhere but in ourselves. But perhaps our very certainty that we see another’s Shadow is an aspect of our own still waiting to be discovered.

A supervisor in a training class I was conducting nervously stood up and condemned the lack of integrity among senior managers in her organization. It was a small organization and they were were in the room, somewhat embarrassed and angry. Late the next day, as the session continued, she went through waste paper baskets searching for crumpled notes by these managers, searching for something that would prove her earlier indictment of them. “See,” she said, when she later brought me the notes she had fished out. “See how they are!” Indeed, the crumpled papers proved that the senior managers had been passing notes that commented about some of the people in the session, then throwing them away. The comments were in poor taste, bad jokes, an example of bad judgment all. But for her they had also become something much bigger. Before she’d brought them to me, she’d taken them around in the background to everyone else in the session, including the people commented about, a profoundly embarrassing “gotcha” in its own right. Generally, I’ve come to think of Shadow as any time we enact some form of retaliation while claiming it’s the others who lack integrity. Were the managers justified in doing what they did? Was the supervisor justified? You decide.

Shadow can be a tremendous teacher — if we can stand the process of learning. The fellow at the nuclear plant had an epiphany one day that his behavior was getting in his own way. He had thought of himself as a “good leader” and a “good person,” and one day he began to acknowledge how embarrassed he was about his blow-ups. How could such an insight happen? I don’t know. Maybe it was a book he read, maybe a moment with one of his children, maybe he just got tired of it. Anyway, he did what we all must do, which is turn and face the Shadow, and ask for help. It was an honor for me to help him. He already had so many of the answers. I asked him, “Do you know when you are about to blow up?” He told me, yes, he did, and I asked him how he knew. He said he could tell by the force with which he was gripping something, the edge of the table, or a pen, or the arm of a chair. He said he could see his knuckles turn white. “What will you do?” I asked him. He found his own solution by promising himself he would notice his anger before it overcame him and he would leave the room for a moment before trying to continue the conversation. Now this doesn’t ask the deeper questions about the source of the offense that was driving him to blow-up so often. Sometimes that’s the product of life conditioning such as projecting old hurts as a child onto colleagues who happen to use the wrong tone of voice. But it was enough for him to begin to change the game. I remember him saying to me “I used to think I wasn’t that kind of boss, but as it turns out I am that kind of boss. A few days after we had a conversation he called me to tell me about an incident in which he physically got up and walked out of the room for moment. When he came back, quieter, calmer, the conversation continued uninterrupted and respectfully, and afterwards he felt so proud that he was able to make this small change for himself and the organization. He had, of course, acknowledged to the group beforehand that he was now working on this aspect of himself and would they help by allowing him a moment if he needed it? This I believe is what a brave person, learning, looks like.

Of course, for any one of us, it isn’t just anger that can leak. It can be just about anything; selfishness, greed, manipulation, envy, revenge. I’ve come to think that the dynamic of retaliation and the fear of retaliation in organizations is driven by individual and collective Shadow, particularly the Shadow of leaders who do not notice their own emotional slides, or who have learned to excuse them as either necessary or unimportant to their style. Shadow triggers Shadow and soon the culture perpetuates itself as a confused mixture of the way we say we are and the way we really are.

One thing seems certain. We are responsible for our Shadows, as much as our more conscious decisions and actions. If we turn to face our own crap — whatever it is — a blessing can descend. You don’t have to be a religious person to sense that redemption is hidden in the Shadow as much as the sin or that liberation is concealed by the karma that chains us to the very oldest patterns of our lives.

Technorati Tags: Shadow, Consciousness

Some years ago, I co-wrote a book called, Driving Fear Out of the Workplace, regarding the dynamics of speaking up in organizations. My co-author and I described typical “undiscussable” issues – undiscussables being issues that people hesitate to talk about with those who can do something about the problem – and how to approach them to create a more open workplace. Based on interviews from a wide range of organizations, we spelled out the reasons people most frequently don’t speak up, the negative effects of that and we also suggested specific techniques that enlightened managers might use to create high trust, high performance environments. The publication of this book propelled me into a national consulting practice with private and public sector clients of all kinds.

What I quickly discovered as a leadership consultant was this: if you want to drive fear out of the workplace you must start by fostering courage among its leaders. At its simplest, this courage comes in three forms: the courage to listen to difficult messages, the courage to have a real voice, and the courage to act from a strong sense of personal purpose. These, in my view, are the most important interpersonal tasks of a leader, the ones that either build or undermine trust, that either lead to shared, collaborative, aligned action, or to desertion of a leadership role in favor of formal power and control. These tasks are not for the faint-hearted and, because of the depth of human potentials, they are never-ending.

The outcome of mastering these challenges is the development of a relational field among people that is open and mutually influential, a place of dialogue even when people otherwise might seem disconnected from one another. It is the place where the “best selves” of people show up, where there is a free give and take of feedback with a minimum of tension or indirection. It is filled with the stories of lives as much as the stories of work, a place a seriousness, laughter, play and difficult but worthwhile combined efforts. It is the home of trust. To reach this place requires a new journey each time people come together and especially when people are new to one another. For the leader is requires reflection, the process of opening and challenging oneself to ever greater levels of awareness.

The first form of courage involves listening to others’ challenging personal views and perspectives, especially when that involves negative perceptions about the leader. In many organizations, taking the risk to bring such issues to the surface can easily savage a messenger’s reputation and credibility if not tenure in an organization. The term, “kill the messenger” is not folklore. It is an embedded part of American culture, although it may happen as a less conscious aspect of a leader’s style than is often imagined. Whether intended or not, however, before openness can replace fear, a leader must understand the dynamics of retaliation – which may not be a conscious act at all — and be able to sustain feedback that may be personally quite uncomfortable.

Over the years, some of my clients have had little trouble with this responsibility. They understand that hearing and acting upon the perceptions of their reports are critical supports for their leadership success. From the standpoint of their own integrity, these clients see hearing and understanding tough data an essential part of modeling what they want from others, particularly because it means modeling a standard for both speaking up and hearing others’ truths. They understand that feedback is useful, maybe even more useful, when it comes with a sting, and work hard to separate negative projections of others from constructive feedback. But other clients have had a very difficult time responding at all. They recoil into a sense of personal offense, rationalization, or inaction, as if the core of their integrity has been challenged by another’s disagreeable views, no matter how much truth is involved. This is such a profound distinction that it is perhaps worth noting as a fundamental test of whether someone should occupy a leadership role at all. Either a person can get feedback as a leader or cannot.

The second form of courage is as the energy needed to distinguish the leader’s presence from others. Courage liberates a personal and professional voice to become real, a true reflection of the essence and values of the person. People without authentic voices can never take the risks to serve as effective messengers within the complex of systems that keep us captured by the status quo. They have trouble setting boundaries for themselves and others in the scope of their professional responsibilities and are often under- or over-involved in the day-to-day work. They cannot usefully initiate change.

This is different from the classic term, “assertiveness.” Assertiveness as a stand-alone quality primarily implies adult-to-adult communication in order to get one’s needs met. Voice by comparison represents the broader qualities of a unique personality resulting from radical self-trust. It emerges from the hard work of learning to accept, love, and care for self; allowing the self to stand up to the invasions of others without becoming impermeable or cold. The very strongest of people with voice are more quiet than boisterous precisely because they need no artificial strengthening in order to be heard.

The third form of courage, and this kind undergirds the first two, is reflected by the will toward deep self-inquiry and therefore, after trials, meaningful self-knowledge. Those who cannot look into the private, subjective aspects of their own past conditioning are not likely to find a great purpose and a role through which to galvanize action. Money and the personal accumulation of it are not such a galvanizing purpose; in fact, money is usually just the opposite. Courage is required for wakefulness in life. The possession of too much wealth may keep people asleep by removing the learning that comes from adversity.

Without courage in these forms certain things decrease in likelihood: the desire to see reality for what it is; the articulation of a vision stronger than being better than others; the capacity for operating in a personally ethical manner when pressures mount to break principles. It might even be argued that the greatest of human virtues, compassion and the forgiveness of others, require courage, as these are hardly accessible to us without the personal strength to evaluate our own flaws.

Sadly, some leaders appear to believe just the opposite, that leading is really all about insensitivity to their own shadows, about hiding their voices in favor of manipulating circumstances – or using their voices simply to dominate, and about the denial of purposes that don’t serve corporate ends. Their methods are more about cover-ups, threats, and impersonal relationships than about honestly marshaling the great capacities of human communities and enterprises. In their view, ethical action and compassion are either simply naive or a matter for media relations. Because of the way society is constructed, these people nevertheless may end up in very powerful, controlling roles. This distinction was noted years ago by Ronald Heifetz of Harvard as the difference between an authority and a leader. My sense is that pure authority seeks to crush out leadership the way a male lion kills the cubs of its predecessor. By comparison, leaders spread their trust, encourage others to lead, and foster a broad vision in which all may participate.

What is clear is that each of the three tasks requires that we risk ourselves in one way or another. This is the foundation of trust. The lesson is that leaders who really want to drive fear out of the workplace, who want to create genuine openness, collaboration, and alignment, must take leadership personally. It is a road, a journey, a path to personal and societal wholeness. It is a transformation of the leader, but more importantly, the transformation of everyone else, too. This is pre-eminently not about blaming others for the problems of an organization or society at large, or setting ground rules for other people while breaking them yourself. It is about the deepest form of congruence; about the unfolding process of leading by learning more and more about oneself, sourced both in understanding one’s inner states and one’s external results.

Technorati Tags: Self-Knowledge, Trust, Truth

Extraordinary. A poet filling a 2,500 seat concert hall, a standing ovation for her inspired presence and ecstatic reading. Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize winner, National Book Award winner, remarkable human being, captivated the crowd last night at Benaroya Hall in Seattle. I’ve rarely attended an event as deeply delightful and as moving.

When was it I discovered her poems? Many years ago in the midst of major life-transitions (have they ever stopped?) The Journey was the first and Wild Geese and The Summer Day. Mary Oliver’s poems are eminently accessible, which is to say profound in their simplicity. There is often a transparent magic in them, and sometimes transparent grief, eloquently connected to her stated purpose of loving the world. A few lines and it is clear she has been to the bottom of our modern wound, the loss of our innocent perception and connection to that world.

And for this reason I have also often felt that she touches deeply on the kinds of leadership themes that most interest me, the ones that see leading as a mystery that begins with a desire to help in the healing of that wound. The great leaders I most admire are entirely realistic and pragmatic, understanding that the human spirit must pass through many dark times in order to grow, but they have not lost their inner capacity for primary innocence, for dreams and delight, despite those inevitable, sometimes awful losses intrinsic to the process of becoming.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

she writes at the end of The Summer Day, which is a question about awakening, attending to the world, and in so asking she cuts through the dross of our daily ambitions, machinations, complaints, and televised self-absorption. Her poems bring our heads and hearts back up out of the sand to do something radical: to see and feel what is really here, to re-ground our potent imaginations in that view. Quoting The Journey, we are then free to save the only lives we can save.

Listening last night from the fourth row back as she shared one remarkable poem after the next, I thought, “What have we done to this concept of leading?” Corrupted it. Given it over to formulas, categories, techniques, the will and the conscience, to cold, overly masculine attributes based on the nature of power and intentional influence. Hmmm, there is a side of leadership that touches these elements, but it also makes leading something distant and lonely — and only for the few. The testimony of Mary Oliver, her 71 year-old voice strong and humble, stands up to all that by simply reminding us — any of us — of the magnificence of the place where we live and reminding us, too, of our inner mission, by virtue of the primary love from which we came and are destined to reclaim. Simple. Profound.

There she was: “beauty the brave, the exemplary, blazing open.”

She is exactly her poems.

Technorati Tags: Reflections and Poems

Here’s the deal. Fully 75% of the hits to this site are from people in search of “leadership poems,” or some variation on that theme. Yet no one actively contributes to the collection. Is there a misunderstanding here about where leadership poems come from? Indeed, I think so.

They don’t come from famous leaders particularly, nor folks who feel they are experts on either leadership or poetry. They come from you, the inner leader in you waiting for a reflection, looking for a mirror. And isn’t this an interesting conundrum? It says so much about this search for meaning and wisdom. For me, it is like asking someone in a workshop to speak first, to stand up here in the front of the room and declare. Yes, you, too, can do it. I believe you can.

Not long ago I had coffee with a wonderful woman who is part of a training program in organizational systems work. She has had a fabulous and varied life, and yet in her questions I felt a thread of waiting, a question in her to determine what, in fact, her work and practice might be in the world after she got done with her program. When I asked about this, she referred to all the learning she still needed to do to find out what her options were. A legitimate inquiry on one hand, a slight defense on the other.

“So you think the answer to this question about what your practice will be will come from the outside?” I asked. And, of course, she understood immediately. “It comes from in here,” I said, pointing to my heart. Soon, we parted and I hope I added value to her day.

Well, leadership poems are the same, I believe. They don’t come from out there. They come from in here, even if you haven’t written them yourself. So please, my friends, brave souls that you are, check it out and bring something that says, “I’m not afraid to stand at the front of the room. I am ready!”

This is the audience participation part.

Have I got it wrong? Let me know.

A related story. Not long ago I took a brief vacation near Cancun in Mexico. One day my girlfriend and I visited a sanctuary for jungle animals that had been adopted and then discarded as pets. There were a lot of crocodiles there (we went right into the cage with them — I hoped they were well-fed…and not on tourists) and many other species, including some spider monkeys. One of them, Jessica, had acquired the capability of being fed bananas from a human mouth. Our guide encouraged me to put a piece of banana between my teeth and bend toward her. I thought for sure I’d be bitten, but Jessica turned out to be a very sweet, gentle presence, and I had to laugh at myself for my original misgivings. I wasn’t afraid of Jessica. I was afraid of something in myself. What was it? Perhaps the Jessica I didn’t know in me.

You get the point.

Technorati Tags: Reflections and Poems