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

The other day I was throwing around the words, “reflective leadership” when a client stopped me and asked me to explain exactly what I meant. I found myself using a familar tool in the human development field, the Johari Window, created by Joe Luft and Harry Ingham in 1955. The model is a way to look at interpersonal relationships and processes. It is formed of four “panes” that highlight what we understand about ourselves compared with how much others know about us.

Let me share how the model works before coming back to my definition of reflective leadership.

When you and I share common perceptions, trust and communication are likely to be higher, our conversations are more open, and our problem-solving is easier. This area, where “what I know about myself” and “what others know about me” are the same is called the Arena. For example, I know my eyes are brown and by looking at me you can see that that is so. We don’t disagree over this fact. Similarly, if our subjective judgments are the same — for instance if you believe I am intelligent and I see myself as intelligent, too — our relationship and communications are likely to be quite open around this point.

However, if what I think about myself is different than what others think of me, my relationships could be affected by my Blindspot. Perhaps I see myself as very open-minded and interpersonally sensitive, but others do not see me this way. If I am confronted about this difference two things are likely to happen: I will react emotionally and defensively, and I will likely exhibit the very behaviors that confirm the nature of the Blind Spot (e.g., you suggest to me I am insensitive to your feelings and I react in a way that displays this insensitivity). This is the area of denial — where we can’t see what we can’t see, potentially causing misunderstandings, mistrust, and “undiscussables” in our relationships with one another.

The third area, the Facade, reflects what I know about myself that I keep hidden and choose not to share. I might not want to disclose, for example, that I was fired from my last job, so in my relationships with my new co-workers I avoid conversations that could lead to questions about my former work history. I might even lie about what happened if asked directly. Other aspects that we keep hidden include our private opinions of others or judgments that feel too risky to share. I may not share openly my perceptions of my boss’s insensitivity. In this way, my facade may have something to do with your Blind Spot (and also, perhaps, my own!)

Finally, the fourth area, the Unknown, reflects shared lack of awareness. It represents pure potential that is constantly in a process of evolution and emergence. This is an area of great mystery, accessed through our intuitions, feelings, dreams, meditations, and spiritual or artistic self-inquiries. You know it when you see it. For instance, an acquaintance starts behaving in ways that suggests he is “not quite himself” — and he agrees with you and also really doesn’t know why he is behaving as he is. That’s the Unknown showing up.

The Goal

The Arena clarifies the fundamental interpersonal goal of reflective leadership with the other panes defining key tasks to achieving it. The Arena is the place where our shared understanding of ourselves puts us in real and genuine contact with one another, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, and therefore gives us the capacity to create a common vision for change. Out of this contact comes a rich sense of who we are for one another; our assumptions about ourselves, others, and the systems within which we operate; how much we will trust and collaborate with one another; our self-interests, needs, and desired payoffs; and how we will deploy our separate gifts toward a common end. Our individual and shared self-knowledge becomes our shared capacity to lead. Reflective leaders are intentional around this goal and intensely conscious of the level at which they are connecting with others.

Creating a wide-open Arena with others varies in the time and effort we choose to give to it. Once in awhile you or I find a spontaneous sense of communion (of community) with another person. When that happens, it can be a little surprising, pretty much like finding a new friend, whether or not that friendship lasts a lifetime or only for a few moments. In other cases, that connection is a task that is consciously and intentionally worked at in the way the partners of a business or of a marriage work at it, constantly deepening to find a way through the thickets of past conditioning and private histories. Sometimes those “thickets” turn out to be continents. No matter, the goal is to truly “meet” the other, and that inevitably drives the reflective leader to access each of the three other tasks implied by the other panes of the Johari Window.

The Tasks

The reflective leadership task associated with the Blindspot is understanding personal impact. We are all prone to be unaware of some aspects of ourselves and to defend against awareness. The quest for self-knowledge can take us on a journey through the underworld of personal demons we would really rather avoid. But failing to take that journey restricts our capacities to move in the world and positively influence our surroundings. A leader who does not know about what others see and know about him or her is unconsciously building a tightrope for others to walk or setting up a labyrinth for them to find their way through. What is not seen, and what facilitates genuine awareness is not only naming the blind spot but also understanding its full impact. For example, if I have trouble accepting myself (but don’t acknowledge it), I may be prone to being swayed by others who question my judgments. My being swayed by others inappropriately then has an effect: I can’t be trusted in my decisions because it seems that my decisions change too easily and are based on who I last talked to. Or, on the other side of that coin, if I have trouble keeping an open mind because I don’t question myself enough (and don’t acknowledge that), I may also lose trust, driving people to stay away from me to undermine the decisions I have made. Depending on the size of an organization or change effort, these impacts of a leader’s blindspots multiply their effects. The fortunes of a Fortune 100 company, let alone a smaller enterprise, can be easily thrown off. A reflective leader always wants to know how an enterprise or change effort is a reflection of personal style. “How is this thing I’ve founded and created over the years,” a small business owner might ask, “limited by who I am?” A reflective leader will ask for personal feedback constantly and look for the patterns that get in the way. That leader intuitively knows that dismissing the importance of personal blindspots is precisely what gives those blindspots their power and effect in the world. The worst case is the leader who believes he or she has no blindspots. This is disaster in the making.

A second task of reflective leadership is authenticity, the practice of “showing up” in a way that is genuine and true and real as a person. The facade represents the chosen limits of authenticity. Most of us are good at holding information private, including information that might be very useful to others, as a way to protect ourselves and we, frankly, are not altogether aware of how hidden we may be. We live in an imperfect world and need to be savvy. We enjoy and even envy at moments the child’s refreshing naivete in speaking her mind or asking questions but we’ve learned as adults, almost as a second nature, there may be a cost to personal openness. Some of this is appropriate, some not. A reflective leader is highly aware of the point when that lack of personal openness becomes a pattern of dysfunctional communication, when what he or she is not saying gets in the way of the very changes he or she would like to bring about or is otherwise incongruent with closely held personal values. The reflective leader opens the difficult conversations that people in relationship need to have, models a connective, respectful vulnerability, and shows not only that such conversations are “survivable” but that they are frankly essential to the survival of relationships (and perhaps the enterprise, too).

Finally, the third task is to enter the Unknown. Above all this is the spiritual task of individual growth into potentials that have not yet come into personal or group consciousness. This is the task of finding one’s calling and destiny where the unique meaning of one’s life and work becomes manifest and is consciously experienced. The words here are cumbersome because entering the Unknown is the place where choice combines with an inarticulate something pre-existing, an “acorn” that a person experiences within that becomes through the course of a life-time the oak tree that is “meant to be.” A reflective leader takes the task of unearthing this acorn seriously, knowing that it is only through this discovery that he or she will find real joy and fulfillment and have the stamina to lead in the world.

A leader who becomes centered in the goal of connection, who is open to learning about his or her blindspots, who sees through his or her own personal facades and leads into needed, powerful conversations, who gives time and effort to discovering the personal meanings of work and life — that person can be said to lead reflectively.

There is so much more that could be voiced about any of these points as parts of the definition of reflective leadership. But for today, it is enough — a good start.

ADDENDUM

A few moments ago, a friend suggested a call to action that needs to be included here:

Think of one action you could take today to practice what I’ve suggested in this post and let me know how it went.

This is a great idea. So if you have a mind to, please email me or simply comment below!

Technorati Tags: Self-Knowledge

We want to think that something as elusive
and strong as a butterfly’s wing
can be contained by the fine filigree of language; 
that there are words that say what can’t be said
about the essence. Once and for all. If you’ve read 
all the books you still won’t know (I’ve tried) 
though your head will be filled with a million 
abstract geometries set just like constellations;
you go outside only to find it’s night 
and as the cold air clears your brain, there
it is hovering, that strangely infinite 
archipelago of stars.

No one seems to believe that leading,
like being enlightened, or dying, or loving
well or badly, or letting go of a little child to yourself, a stranger,
is not some carrot in a secret garden,
waiting to be pulled up when needed. Once and for all, 
it can’t be served, though all the experts try so hard –
shout with such authority — to say their high-sounding bargains. 
Whether it’s five or seven or nine steps 
to nirvana, the jargon just doesn’t matter.  
It can’t be held like that,
it’s a baby.

You might as well say the Dylans knew, 
Bob the poet and Dylan Thomas the folk singer, 
the one named after the other. Or you could hope 
to say that all the great Teachers knew 
and did so well before each one stepped 
in peace or skipped in suffering through the portal –
once and for all. You could say there is some 
proprietary formula, known only to a few 
in Hollywood, that keeps us shelling out the dough
to see ourselves as hero or heroine and hope,
hope for the final healing report at that last session –
just so we’d all know who really had it, baby, 
and who didn’t.

Light pours down, like
innocence stuck to green ribbon:
it’s that thing that keeps inviting us to stand up
in our own lives, you know, uniting us in silence 
to say the obvious 
in the face of the risk of…what? Hold out
for the truth just because it’s right 
to know and say it and then not be shamed?
And then, to top it all off, without turning the other cheek, 
express exactly, once and for all time
something so unwounded and brilliant it brings
the whole diamond-like problem to tears,
shearing it apart like the miraculous, 
weightless atom we had personally forgotten
was already our own?

As that thing Dr. King said one day, like this…. 
once and for all
faith is taking the first step
even when you can’t see 
the rest of your own
staircase.

~Dan, 1/22/08

Technorati Tags: Reflections and Poems, Martin Luther King Jr