Unfolding Leadership

All Content on This Site has been Moved!

2006-08-15T09:17:00.000-07:00

All content and archives on this site have been moved and the site will be terminated eventually. The new blog location for Unfolding Leadership is http://www.unfoldingleadership.com/blog. Please visit me there!

Thanks and have a great day!

Goodbye Blogger, Hello WordPress

2006-07-19T18:54:00.000-07:00

As of immediately, I am moving my site to a WordPress template at a new location. If you are subscribed to this blogspot address through Bloglines, I've followed their directions for duplicate feeds so in theory you will automatically be moved in a week or so to the new address. Not to be untrusting, but...(you could go ahead and change the feed yourself).

I look forward to hearing from you at the new site!

Who Heals the Healer?

2006-07-08T10:22:00.000-07:00

Hear Dan read this post.

Well, the obvious answer is we are all one another's healers. Through simple acts of appreciation, a willingness to listen, the offering of new perspectives and ideas, just a touch, perhaps -- all of which may trigger an inner connection or two, and a resolution to something that may have been bothering somebody a long time. A very effective leader I know told me one time her "secret" was this: "All you have to do is take care of people. They do the rest." And it strikes me this is another way to say the same thing, that in the sunlight of one another's care we are stronger, and because we are stronger, things can change. Things can get done. Oh, I know, it isn't so simple as all that. The leader I am thinking of is an incredibly good reader of others and their needs, and she's no pushover -- what she has is a gift.

And yet, who heals her? Who heals any of us when we are alone, whether it is at the top of the organization or at the edge of a community or even in its midst while attempting to create positive change? How does the one who brings care, the one who stands solid when others cannot, the one who gives, sustain herself or himself? The risk is what some colleagues used to refer to as "change agent flu," a disease caused by not seeing enough organizational or institutional change from one's hard work, the symptoms of which are such things as low self-esteem, persistent crankiness, pushing too hard at meetings, private panic attacks, recurring depressions, darkening cynicism, and finally withdrawal from the work that a person once loved the best.

And yes, support groups can help, and that's a variation of where we started, with the thought that we are all one another's healers.

There is another answer, tougher, that takes us to a deeper well, that causes reflection at a more primary and sometimes primitive level of ourselves, that has to do with why we do the work we do, why we lead, why we need to create change, and ultimately what we are trying to work out in ourselves through our own leadership. And so we are faced with our values, perhaps our sense of worthiness to the roles we have accepted, and to the processes of self-reliance and of our own healing, processes which are like roots slowly growing down and in, searching for nourishment within our personal, inner landscape.

I have found, like you, that sometimes that landscape is intact and sufficient, and sometimes it has been washed away -- by events, by dilemmas, by pure exhaustion. And when it is washed away and there is no one to talk to about it at the moment, then there has to be another place to go. A place of essence or peace that is given, not self-created. Precisely because personal landscapes are prone to get washed away from time to time. But to find that place can be difficult. It never seems to leave a forwarding address from the last time we were there. And so, in turn, the amazing process of waiting kicks in, sometimes for excruciatingly long periods, but never, it seems to me, forever.

A little context and disclosure. The last time I got washed away, it was the product of an awkward conversation with a friend (worse for me, in many ways, than a client), with the issue being exactly my role as a "healer" and the inexpressible aloneness I sometimes feel that comes with it. I was really suffering over this, busy linking stuff that went back to my family of origin, feeling alienated, and wanting something more than me relying on this role to keep the relationship in tact. I was facing where the role came from in the first place, how I'd used it to foster and maintain connections and what that was now delivering back to me in return, what baggage and insecurities I was still carrying that might prevent me from dropping it. So that's where the question came from. I was feeling like a burning bush that had burned itself right out.

Fortunately, the wait for me wasn't too long. The next day I happened to be sorting out some CD's and ran across the Charlotte Church song, "All Love Can Be." The song, with music by James Horner and lyrics by Will Jennings, can be found on the soundtrack CD for the film, "A Beautiful Mind." I dug up Jennings's lyrics, put the song on my player, and almost instantly felt something reach into me and go all the way down to the painful places I had been feeling most alone. Was finding that particular song that day synchronicity, just a meaningful coincidence? Well, perhaps, if you believe that synchronicity finds you.

Here are the words (there are several slight variations -- if these are not the official ones, please let me know). Here is the song.

I will watch you in the darkness
Show you love will see you through
When the bad dreams wake you crying
I'll show you all love can do
All love can do

I will watch by the night
Hold you in my arms
Give you dreams where no one will be
I will watch through the dark
Till the morning comes

For the lights will take you
Through the night to see
All love, showing us all love can be

I will guard you with my bright wings
Stay till your heart learns to see
All love can be

There is agency in this world, of course, and maybe as the song suggests, it comes from the heart of an angel. I am sure you have your own interpretations of this force; for me angels are but one elegant archetype. But whatever it is, it finds us, if we let it. And that did answer my question -- at least on that day.

Technorati tag: Healing

Points of Healing

2006-06-09T19:07:00.000-07:00

Hear Dan read this post.

The important thing to know is what is healing. There is a place in all of us -- a difficult spot -- where something is felt that is literally unbearable. It is too simple to say what we feel is pain. It is a kind of pain: anger, embarrassment, despair, humiliation, fear, hurt, or a complex arrangement of these emotions, a dark bouquet. And more to the point, this is a place inside ourselves we have learned to bypass quickly, an image in a movie put on fast forward the moment the pain begins; fast, fast forward, until the effect is only momentary discomfort, obliquely conscious, or numbed out completely. This is the door to the wound. And the wound will have its way, like a broken piece of glass or a metal blade swallowed at an early age.

We avoid constantly the point of that blade. Others cannot see what it means to us. I may show you only a facade of arrogance or some selfish, superficial part of me when internally at the moment I switch to fast-forward what I actually experience is humiliation, or the all-consuming fear of it. I develop a reputation for arrogance or shallowness, but what I cannot see or feel is how I got to be this way. Switching into fast-forward has become automatic, so that I no longer feel the frames of the movie that I might see if I slowed down. And I have my explanations for all of this. "It was the way I was raised. My parents did this to me. I've always been this way. It's just the way I am." I hardly notice my deflections and dismissals of the deep parts of me where unsettledness and maybe chaos still reign. In the end I give this place a voice, begrudgingly. This is the voice of my low self-esteem, my dark side, my insensitivity. If I am clever, I go farther: this is my lack of meaning, my search for Vocation, my bitter complaint with the world.

Healing comes when I resist the fast-forward button and I let the movie play; when I attend to my experience, when I name the thing I'm actually feeling, when I notice the specific discrepancy between my emotions inside and the way I am projecting myself to others.

When I see my masks. I can begin to remember my life and start to re-locate joy. It is someplace. But first I have to find the folder I put it in. I've forgotten the password to open it. (Here's a clue: it's listed under your mother's maiden name.)

Technorati tags: Wound, Joy

World on Fire

2006-06-08T06:44:00.000-07:00

[I am reposting this from Daniel O'Connor's great blog, Catallaxis. Daniel's site offers a sophistocated discusson of enlightened economic models. And it is clear where his heart is. Thank you, Daniel.]

"This latest video from Sarah McLachlan is a powerful way to think about issues of price and value... specifically, the very different subjective valuations that can be associated with the very same objective price."

"Sarah chose to spend nearly all the money she would have used for a professional music video on a whole portfolio of life-changing goods for people in need of the fundamentals of a decent life."

"Thanks to uber-blogger ~C4Chaos for this video."

The Long Road

2006-06-05T22:00:00.000-07:00

Hear Dan read this post.

Someone I knew ran off this road returning home late one night. He had been drinking and died in the accident that everyone knew wasn't one. I heard about this a couple months ago just after it happened. I didn't know him that well, but well enough to be really sorry. Those who knew him wondered if maybe they had been responsible. Anyone could have said more to him, asked better questions and listened. And the truth may be that if he knew he was going to die that night, he might have even fantasized about the regrets his death would cause others. A pattern with suicidal people is to imagine how others will feel after they are dead. It is a common way for disguised anger and self-pity to show themselves.

As a young man in training in my profession, I volunteered at a suicide prevention center, answering phones in the middle of the night. I still remember the two most important things I was taught to give the people who called: limits and support. Limits on doing harm: "Put the pills away. Think about how this will affect your kids for the rest of their lives." Support for the person: "You are good and deserve to live and have a good life." It was all about boundaries and care.

If the "someone I knew" had called me on his drive home across the desert, I would have said, "Get off the highway as soon as you can. Don't let the long road get to you. You've done fine things in your life and have more to do. Other people care for you. Lean on them a little. You are trying to handle the despair in your life all alone. I'll keep talking until you get to a motel." It's what survivors do: imagine what they could have said or could have said differently after the person is gone.

There was one other lesson I remember from suicide prevention training. You can't feel guilty. If a person really wants to take their own life, they'll find a way. You can't stop them, no matter how good you are at connecting. This is what it means when a person has been wholly swallowed up by their own internal wounds and has lost contact with any guardian angels, inner or outer.

We have a responsibility to help each other not let it get so bad. Human love may not hold the perfection of what is divine within, but sometimes it's still enough to help what is best in us remember itself and survive.

Technorati tags: suicide, choices, guardianangels

The Dance of Light and Dark

2006-06-01T20:50:00.000-07:00

Hear Dan read this post.

A person's life is a dance. A flowing movement, a pattern and a breaking pattern, a turn and a reverse. And, yes, also more than a single misstep. There is no one right way to do it and so you practice alignment with your image of what the dance is supposed to be -- at least to you. And the greater part of the mystery is that you dance with a hidden, inner partner representing all those aspects of yourself that are yet unknown to you.

The beauty of dance, like all arts, is not in the pure performance, not in how flawless or technically brilliant the dance becomes, but what comes through in the human performance. The dance is always more than what we see: what has been choreographed and rehearsed. The dance also reveals the dancer's private human story and individuality, her deeper range of impulses, thoughts, images, intuitions and feelings. They flicker across her face and give their life to the sway of her body. The dance is about her as uniquely someone. These aspects come forward bidden by the music in the moment, and often only slightly channelled by the illusions and rhythms of art. Her good and her bad are in the ritual dance, her skilled and unskilled selves, the controlled and more flagrant parts of her being, her illumined and shadowed features -- all sliding one into the other like waves in a slant of sun. An awkward dancer who is true to herself may be the better one after all, in her ability to be her whole, vulnerable self; in her inability to be false. The best, most masterful dancers, the memorable ones, never lose this quality of vulnerable individuality. No matter how good, their souls are never submerged by perfection.

The secret is this: in the dance of our inner light and dark we all become part of an outer light and and outer darkness; sun and moon, midnight and dawn. This connection makes the dance a cosmic and spiritual thing which cannot be contained. Beyond time and space, the dance is a part of our nature and a part of Nature itself, and in that is enormous power and magic and exquisite grace.

The River Knows Everything

2006-05-07T22:10:00.000-07:00

Hear Dan read this post.

One of the most powerful passages in Hermann Hesse's classic spiritual tale, Siddhartha, goes like this:

I
am
only a
ferryman
and it is my
task to take people
across and to all
of them my river
has been nothing but a
hindrance on their journey.
They have traveled for money
and business, to weddings and
on pilgrimages; the river has been
in their way and the ferryman was
there to take them quickly
across the obstacle. However,
amongst the thousands there have been
four or five, to whom the river was not an
obstacle. They heard its voice and listened
to it, and the river has become holy
to them, as it has to me. The river has
taught me to listen; you will learn from
it too. The river knows everything;
one can learn everything from it.

Never mind the real identity of the ferryman, it's the river that this passage is about. Every so often I find myself coming back to these words, if only to honor the fact that it is the river, the "obstacle," that is the true teacher. Indeed, how frequently we want to simply get across the river rather than listening deeply to the messages hidden in the flow.

What does this mean...to listen to the river?

It means, I think, surrendering to experience. Staying with the painful ones all the way across, the ones we most want to run from.

It means allowing and enabling insight to emerge. Staying open to the learning instead of shutting down, even in the moments we are most afraid...of what we might learn.

It means regarding passages and transitions as the most sacred parts of life. Seeing the river from the perspective of a life-time or beyond.

If the ferryman is right, few of us have the stamina to listen well. We want to get through the rough patches of our lives and careers as rapidly as possible and unscathed.

I remember my first major client, Jon, a vice-president for a big company, itself owned by an even larger one. Without a doubt, Jon was one of the finest leaders I've ever had the pleasure to work with. I assisted him over the course of several years as he progressed upwards, moving several times to new locations, taking over and managing new segments of the business.

He used me to help him open up communications and build rapport in his executive teams, one after the other. Since his career was moving forward rapidly, I'd get a call every year or so. At first, he would enter his new leadership role by asking a lot of questions of his key managers, often big picture stuff: What strategies were they working from? What were their most important challenges? How did they feel about the people who were working for them? If they were in his shoes, what changes would they make? He had a way of listening, paraphrasing, responding alertly but without judgments that quickly gained people's trust and respect.

But Jon was also listening to the river, learning from these transitions. The farther he went, the less he depended on the big picture stuff, the more he began to just tell his own story, especially the places where he had succeeded in his career and the places where he felt he had failed. His modesty and self-objectivity modeled a high level of self-knowledge and let others see how he both trusted himself and came to trust others. I watched one day as a new group of executives followed up his personal disclosures with many of their own. They were a team together with Jon without noticing how instanteously the rapport had been formed, how his own openness had filled the room with strength, character, and common possibilities. It was clear that day that Jon had mastered the art of building a new team.

Year after year Jon and his changing teams delivered: better services, better quality, lower costs, higher morale. You name it, Jon led it. He measured things, but he was humane; "subjective" things like integrity were as much or more important than anything you could put a number next to. He let go people who clearly didn't fit the organization but did so in a way that always preserved their dignity and he demonstrated concern for everyone who might worry about such decisions. He often seemed to see things in people no one else saw, and he stuck by them as they learned from their mistakes.

But there came a time when Jon faced a much bigger, deeper river than before, and this time the listening was much more difficult, even for him. Senior management in his company decided that Jon should end his career in one of those outpost assignments known widely in corporations as "Siberia." A much smaller segment, far from the place he thought he might retire, and without much influence on the rest of the organization.

Why did this happen, given his skills? No answer would be forthcoming. It was just, as they say, "good corporate policy" to move key players every few years. But Jon only had a couple of years to retirement, maybe less. Couldn't they let him ride it out on the huge success of his current assignment? Well, maybe it was also a result of Jon becoming a little too powerful in his own right. Maybe he had pushed back once too often with those above him. Maybe his private disdain for their insensitivity and all too frequent incompetence had leaked through too much. Whatever. He had to go, and on humiliatingly short notice. It felt like the only real reason was the power-play: "because we can."

He called me to come "debrief" his executive team. They were hurting, he said. They just needed to talk. Maybe I could reassure them in some way. Maybe give them some hope. So I spent a day at it, hearing those managers review the trauma of the announcement about Jon's departure and soothing themselves with the idea the group would be fine without him. I thought I was almost done, when one of them brought me up short.

"You know why you are here, don't you?" he asked me. "If Jon told you it was for us, he's lying. It's for him. He's the one who's really hurting." A shiver went up my spine. I'd worshipped him so much I hadn't noticed what I had actually been asked for.

At the close of the day, I sat in his office, sharing my observations of the members of his team, how strong they were, how much they had learned from him. I listened while he told me about his strategies for supporting each one during the transition, the kind of stuff good bosses do without anyone else knowing. And I asked him, "What about you, Jon? What are your strategies for supporting yourself?" But he deflected the question.

I pressed. "Jon, you are not just a leader in this company; you own a significant number of shares. You've been here for twenty years. Why on earth don't you tell these guys what you really think of this bullshit move. Why don't you get angry about this?"

I'll never forget Jon's response. It was the second shiver that day. For the first time in all those years, I heard Jon's voice break and saw the tears start in his eyes. "If I show anything," he said, "they will know they have won."

Sometimes, as Forrest Gump would say, there just aren't enough stones to throw. At least, at that moment, that's the way I felt. I realized just how much damage had been done to Jon and just how hard he had had to work to buffer others in his system. He inspired me to the core of my being and also left me with a sense of irreparable loss for senior leaders too ignorant to appreciate someone with his finesse. I don't remember what either he or I said next. I'm sure it didn't matter. Jon was going to Siberia without a fight.

Later, I remembered a story he had once told me about the CEO of the company. The budget had to be cut one year. The guy took out his pocket knife and laid it across one of his outstretched fingers. "Boys," he said, "I expect you to make the cuts. You know, I can cut off my finger right here and now and I can either choose to feel the pain or choose not to feel it. It's up to you." My God, I thought, that was the system Jon had learned to survive in, build in, create trust in.

It's too little to say Jon was a gift to his organization. There is no word, and I never worked another day for that company.

Some months after Jon and his wife had moved far away, I called him just to check in. And he was happy. He had found a way to do more good things at work -- even in Siberia. He had built a new home. He was laughing. There didn't seem to be an ounce of pain left in him.

In my career, Jon has been one of the "four or five" who has really heard the river and learned from it. There was meaning in his life and he was still listening, even in that last phone call. He will remain one of my most profound mentors.

Technorati tags: Listening

Working the Edge

2006-05-02T08:23:00.000-07:00

Hear Dan read this post. (You might wish to open a separate window to make it easier to access links along the way).

for Jane

It is an ancient analogy: consciousness is to unconsciousness as land is to the sea. At the edge, there is a beach where stones are washed smooth and round, and the driftwood lies heaped and battered from the storms. A place of immense beauty, it is the continent's edge, filled with the sounds of seabirds, wind in the grasses and white water that tumbles down constantly upon itself, fanning smooth across the sand.

The edge. To walk here is to let the wisdom in. Hard decisions become easier by looking out across the restless unknown to the very curvature of the earth. Or by simply looking down to find a gemlike pebble of worn glass like a recovered memory of home. Clouds, inner and outer, sweep their shadows before them.

The salt air carries the rich scent of life and its cycles. The wings flash their migrations. The shells you pick up are lives cast off and foretell the new ones yet to come.

How many times, at least in your mind's eye, have you walked that beach alone, asking your questions? Waiting, allowing the sea to deliver what it is meant to bring, knowing that it is polishing you, too?

Technorati tags: Edge, CannonBeach, Consciousness, Choices

On the Capability to Lead

2006-04-18T12:07:00.000-07:00

Hear Dan read this post. (You might wish to open a separate window to make it easier to access links and diagrams along the way).

Capability, meaning the skills, intelligence, spirit, and desire -- the full mental and emotional potentials to lead. For some of us, this word, capability, is a tough one. It means "equal to the task." I know a number of people, clients and colleagues, who struggle with interior "voices" that tell them they are not ready to lead and may never be. For these folks, "capability" has come to mean "adequacy," and is attended by feelings of frustration and self-criticism, sometimes depression. Actually, my sense is that the best leaders, not the worst ones, are closer to these feelings, precisely because they value leadership so much and are not blind to its requirements. There certainly have been times in my own life when I've known these feelings, too, and wondered about my own capacities.

I am reminded of the famous words of author, Marianne Williamson, often incorrectly attributed to Nelson Mandela's inauguration speech.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

As powerful as this statement is, it certainly can be in conflict with our actual personal histories and past conditioning, particularly the messages we received early in our lives regarding "stepping up" in more interpersonally exposed places. Stepping up may have been regarded as arrogant or impolite, foolish or useless, or simply reserved for others on the basis of cultural norms.

What can we do, if these feelings persist and stop us from living our dreams? How can we remove the whole mechanism of cultural belief and personal self-deception that keeps us from living our true capabilities? How can any of us realize and actualize ourselves as instruments of conscious, positive, confident change?

To me, the answer to these questions has to do with what a person sees when looking within for his or her own leadership. If I look and see nothing or feel drawn into a dark vortex of uncomfortable feelings, then I know I am at the starting point. If I can see and acknowledge my most positive attributes and values, then perhaps I have begun to move down the path. If I have gone even farther, to examine my own blind-spots, discovering a true gift or two and feel a rising tide of light within, then I know my confidence is beginning to genuinely express itself. And if this light, this "inner wisdom," this "genius" is a radiance I can no longer contain, if it is music that I no longer play as an instrument of change but instead is what plays me, then surely, this is the way.

The stumbling block around adequacy is the assumption that confidence is about force rather than practice. If I try to force my confidence, all that is awakened are the brooding insecurities that hide within my unconscious Shadow side. I may be able to accomplish some things, but at a certain moment -- quite possibly the one in which I need real confidence the most -- I will be betrayed by the insecurities I am concealing. However, if I make a practice of simply standing in what I know to be my own insecure spaces, then light can begin to come in and begin to grow -- light that can eventually disarm the ego and be the change for which I learn to stand. True confidence is always based on an acknowledgement of the truth about myself and my ultimate insecurities, and this truth in turn is what opens a portal to the greater wisdom that can pour through me. Inadequacy is not "overcome." It is erased by a greater wisdom, passion, or beauty expressing itself in a human life.

Let me share, with her permission, an example from the work of Jory Des Jardins, an accomplished writer, media consultant and co-founder of BlogHer. In two especially beautiful posts on her weblog, Pause, (here and here), she shares her discoveries of how her writing is an aspect of what flows through her.

Since I was in high school I liked to go on long walks or bike rides, immersing myself in music on my Walkman/iPod. I always came back from these walks renewed. I started to pay attention to the thoughts that generated during these walks and realized that I'd always had conversations going on in my head, but I'd often ignored them. I also noticed that I didn't "write" these conversations--they wrote themselves. The voices seemed to pre-exist--I never summoned or conjured them intentionally. I asked myself, what if these voices that I've ignored have something to say? I learned to still my mind and listen to the conversations play out, like I was listening to music. I also learned to take note of the interesting parts.

One day I challenged myself to write down one of these conversations. The process felt like dictation--like I was writing down someone else's words, not my own. I pulled the dialogue into a short story and asked my writing group to review it. They thought it was the best thing I'd ever written. It occurred to me, almost painfully, that amidst the years of forced prose I had in old file folders--reams of bad writing, that divine energy, or flow, was tapping on my shoulder, saying, in effect, "Lady, you asked for insight, and you got it! Here it is!" I just never acknowledged it because it was too easy; I didn't slave over each word or sculpt the writing. It wrote itself.

Jory's words represent the non-egocentric power of a true gift, the thing that flows through without thinking, without the paralysis of an embarrassed or insecure self-consciousness, without the negative censoring voices that can cut any of us off from the source. The flow is not forced, but also requires a commitment to the practice of staying open; in Jory's case, to a flow of words that write themselves. The gift just is. If you take the time to savor both of Jory's posts, they may, as they did for me, remind you of what flow means for you. It is safe to say that her writing is an essential part of how she leads in the world.

Our leadership is a reflection of the Radiance pouring through us. For some, the process of awakening and allowing this Radiance is easier than for others. You might say, "Well, you are really describing the unfolding of a mythical, psychological or spiritual quest." And you would be right about that, although this quest is not one I would associate with any particular religion or framing psychology as much as just my personal effort to find metaphors and images for our growth into true human beings. My words and symbols are just my own ways of speaking about something that is essentially divine. Radiance, I believe, comes of itself, and may be halted only by trying to coerce it. And this, I sense, has great implications for the nature of genuinely human leadership. Our job is practice, not pressure.

Below you will find three diagrams, three mandalas, intending to describe the course of development in our capabilities to lead. The stages are not necessarily linear and are not all-encompassing. Some aspects of our personalities may be more open in some circumstances than others, so we mostly hold these stages simultaneously in different parts of ourselves. Knowing we are in part imperfect, inconsistent and insecure, we can practice the art of gradually allowing more of these parts to open, allowing more of the Radiance intended for our personal "channel" to flow through us into the world.

Stage One: Defending

When we are defending, the interior world is a dark and vulnerable place. We protect it, and we wear the mask of a fencer who is mostly "on guard" to defend our unknown territory. The darkness leaks out as we continually make sure neither we nor others see what is going on inside. If there are problems, they are caused by what is outside of us, not within.

Stage Two: Learning to Open

If, by chance, we become curious about the interior world and just brave enough to begin the journey, we enter the stage of opening. Here we discover that there are more and less conscious aspects of Shadow -- our unconcious side. The more conscious aspects sometimes appear as self-critical voices that remind us of our weaknesses and can sometimes overwhelm us. The more we enter, the darker it seems to get but, in truth, something waits for us on the other side of the Shadow's darkest walls. Eventually light and life begin to appear in new forms. A seed we plant germinates. We discover some aspect of our interior light that, like an angel, contains the message of a destiny or purpose. Like the Roman god, Janus, the god of doorways and windows, we begin to identify with looking both inward and outward.

Stage Three: The Radiance

As more areas within us awaken, as we discover and break old patterns in our conditioning, we find ourselves to be channels for a Radiance that gets brighter the more it is allowed to pass through. While some Shadow energies always remain as mysteries to be gradually unlocked, the Radiance wipes out the distinction between looking out and looking in. What is left is the flow, an infinity that is neither wholly one or nor wholly the other, but both combined.

The trend-line in three diagrams depends on our willingness to enter into the darkness of personal and social unconsciousness in order to learn. The central learning is how to lose an ego-life in favor of a higher Self. How we express this realization in our own lives does not have to be in big ways. As much as we may want to change society or the world at large, the most immediate expressions may be in the smallest daily acts of leading: in compassion, in generosity, in acknowledging mistakes, in connecting with other people, in telling a good story. And then, perhaps, fate will bring us our possibilities and our larger chance to be of service.

So now, what is it that defines our capability to lead? Only this: the practice of allowing our Radiance to express itself in the world. If I have no idea of my own Radiance, then my leadership will at best be a partial thing; at worst, it may do damage. A person locked into defending an unexamined personal darkness, who never turns to find the interior Shadows, can loose incredible destructiveness and violence.

Instead, I must have a sense that there is something much larger than my ego at work and passing through me, even at this moment. And for that to happen, I may have to constantly ask myself, following Williamson's famous affirmations, "Who am I not to lead?" Because of past conditioning, I may have to consciously learn as much as I can about my critical voices in order to still them. I may have to practice letting go the ego energies that erupt each day like small fires only to burn themselves out. I may need to clear the pipes of all my private negations so that Radiance pours like water outwards to do its healing work in the world.

Technorati tags: Radiance, Shadow, Adequacy, Leadership

Six Leaders I Trust

2006-04-07T17:02:00.000-07:00

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As an exercise, I wrote down today the names of the leaders I have worked with who I trusted the most. Six names immediately came to mind; three women, three men, all working in separate industries. I wanted to explore what it is that causes me to trust these people as both clients and as colleagues, some of whom I've known for years. I began by trying to find what was similar about these people, a common thread. Many things occurred to me: their openness to experience, people and learning; their fairness, intelligence and emotional stability; their capacity to simultaneously live life with both innocence and great political and business savvy.

Still, these characteristics did not really separate them from others I have known and trusted less. And what did I mean by trust, anyway? Trust them to do what? My meditation grew deeper and felt, as all good ones do, like a passage under a very large mountain.

Well, I thought, trust them to know me, see me, appreciate the value I bring. Wasn't that it? Maybe. Suddenly, it seemed trust could be an almost mystical thing, a strange, intuitive "click" between people, even when the formal roles of organizational life had to intervene. That click was some kind of understanding, a shared truth that might never be completely expressed in words. But then, what was that?

I continued to sit still under the mountain, soaking in its wealth of minerals and crystals, invisible weights and structures, its kinship with night. At some point, a few lines came forward from Rumi, the 13th century poet:

I honor those who try
to rid themselves of any lying,
who empty the self
and have only clear being there.

Indeed.

My six leaders were all people who do not lie to themselves. That central thread, that consciousness suddenly tied them together in my mind. In the vocabulary of that great model for human relations, the Johari Window, these are all people whose "blind spots" are minimized. Something, I would say, that can only come about when a person knows he or she has them and is devoted to finding them out, again and again, with a sense of humility and humanity. And so, not lying to themselves, they can share in a private understanding and an outer honesty, and invite others like me into that holy world where, as Rumi says, we have "only clear being there."

Not one of them wears self-honesty on his or her sleeve. They seem to know that no one, save, perhaps, some truly enlightened being, fully achieves the goal. Working with these people, the rewards were always the greatest. And the clear being was always at the core of our mutual performance, in what we could envision and achieve together.

Here is a homely image for what I want to express:

Shall I ask you to share this wine with me? For it comes contained in a matrix of minerals and crystals claimed from beneath the mountain and that somehow we together must heat and shape into the beauty of a glass. Fragile, durable, fitted to the hand. Perhaps, we will never stop drinking.

Technorati tags: Trust, JohariWindow, SelfAwareness

At the Water-Line

2006-03-12T13:32:00.000-08:00

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Many years ago I came across a remarkable model, known as the cultural iceberg. Developed by Stanley Herman of TRW Systems in 1970, it describes some of the most important workplace dynamics that any of us could ever know about. The top part of the iceberg represents the visible, formal aspects of an organization, such as the stated goals, the technologies, structures, policies, and services of an enterprise. Below the water-line are the covert or so-called "hidden" aspects of an organization, the beliefs, assumptions, perceptions, attitudes, feelings and values that characterize the real-world interactions from which an organization is also built. If the top of the iceberg represents "the way we say we get things done," the bottom and larger part is "the way we really get things done."

As I watch the interplay of these two aspects of organizational culture in my consulting role, I often see imbalance. In over-managed organizations, the top of the iceberg dominates the bottom, squashing it under the weight of formal systems, paper bureaucracies, rigid controls, a-policy-for-everything, parent-child management. By comparison, in over-led organizations, people enact a fantasy wish for an organization in which there is no water-line at all and we try to prosper solely on the basis of effective relationships, intelligence, and entrepreneurial spirit. In this view, systems and processes are discounted in favor of the smartest and best idea -- or person -- winning out. The first style is without a doubt the federal government. The second may be closer to a start-up going south.

Neither of these approaches, in its extreme, is effective. Formal and informal aspects of an organization need each other. Order and opportunism, policy and good judgment, goals and passions, strategic plans and a sense of belonging -- head and heart. These things are wound around one another in a complex dance called congruence or alignment.

This is why we must honor management as much as leadership. Good managers -- people who can organize, distribute resources, and implement -- are as invaluable as those who through their own presence can release a common aspiration, inspire people to collaborate and achieve, and foster deep change. We need each other and we need these parts of ourselves.

I am struck by Herman's diagram because it highlights where things can go right or wrong in an enterprise. Either there is perceived alignment between the above and below the water-line worlds or there is not. When the alignment is there, people are engaged and the work gets done -- no problem. When alignment doesn't exist it highlights something that is out of sync and needs to be addressed. For example, it may be that the self-perceptions of an executive group do not match the group's own behavior. Or it may be an even broader question, such as "Does our organization match its marketed image of itself?"

These differences are not a problem, only the failure to talk about them in a meaningful way. This is where drift occurs. It may be after discussion that a system does need to be accepted. There's a boundary condition for peoples' behavior and the boundary needs to hold -- for the leaders and for everybody. It may also be that that certain systems are the problem and need to change. Failure begins with a lack of real dialogue, which includes mutual exploration, clear decisions, and respect. Without this dialogue, undiscussability and tension begin to take hold, often embedding dynamics of mistrust.

We are refined in our abilities to see incongruence in organizations and people, but it's important to stay humble. I once worked with the head of a big health care organization in the mid-west where there was a very strong, value-based statement prominently displayed throughout the workplace. It articulated the beliefs of the organization about such important matters as customer service, quality, collaboration, and employee development. It was a stated vision, but I wouldn't say it was a particularly well-lived one. One factor that stood out was how the leader himself used these positively stated values in negative ways. It was said that if he ever told a person, "I'm not sure we agree on our values," that pretty much meant sayonara -- whether for a Board Member or an employee. Sure enough when it came time for the organization to enact a collaborative partnership with another business entity, the effort failed directly and personally on the basis of the values he didn't see in his counter-part leader. There was a quality of utter righteousness about this decision -- and about him. In my mind, his personal incongruence had neatly become organizational incongruence.

And so, in my role, I attempted to tell him about this problem in no uncertain terms, and I thought at first he had not heard me. But, later he invited me to his home and instead of continuing the discussion of the partnership agreement, he openned up about his life. Many years before he had been a gunboat captain in Viet Nam, seeing a great deal of action before he returned from his tour of duty to the United States. He felt grateful that he had made it out alive and also felt responsible in a very deep way -- so responsible that he did another tour, as one of the black-coated people who knock on the doors of the parents who have just lost a son or daughter. He learned to bring the news of death and to stay with people through the unimaginable moments of their first grief.

When I asked him whether others knew of this experience, he replied that telling this story was like offering a peek-hole into his shower. He didn't relish the thought of others seeing him so naked.

To me this shows how deeply we have to understand ourselves before criticizing another's apparent incongruence. I think this guy knew at some level that his righteousness was in his way but he was stuck at a water-line in himself and in a conflict that would not easily go away. I think if he had told this story to a few more people, stopped trying to keep his own grief so private, others would have known better how to address him, and perhaps his own edges would have softened. I, for one, in the moment, had to examine my own shadows of righteousness.

In organizational life, we need both head and heart, just as we do personally. We all have to search out the conflicts between "the way I say I am" and "the way I really am." And we have to find ways to close the gap -- the wound -- and also forgive ourselves for the difference.

Technorati tags: OrganizationCulture, Undiscussables, Alignment, Forgiveness

For the Future

2006-03-07T19:44:00.000-08:00

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Today I had lunch with my friend, Karen Sela of Lumina Coaching. As we discussed the dilemmas of writing and voice and Presence, she reminded me that we can either get stuck in the present, what is happening now, and what seems to be the answer today, or we can choose to look farther out and write and teach for the future, for the evolution of consciousness and for the unknown but latent possibilities each of us holds.

What a beautiful thought, that it is the future we are giving life to through our words; it is the future we are learning to sing.

In that moment, I felt a little breath of encouragement and inspiration, and when I really allowed that thought to be taken in, an even larger breath began to come out of me, a larger breath and a song, just like the howl of a coyote.

Have you ever been lucky enough to hear, really hear that sound? Not in the movies. Not in imagination, but for real? The last time for me was in Wyoming, looking out across an empty, impossibly dark night from a perch on a high ridge, feeling the sharpening wind and behind it a silence so profound it made my ears ring and my spirit vibrate like a tattered rag. Then, suddenly, and with all-consuming magic, that music came up out of the valley, so familiar, ancient, and vital. All I could do was listen, smile and be drawn into its shadows until I, too, became that old/young canine that I must once have been, still am, and letting it all out, I howled, too.

There are millions of us now, howling in our ways, writing and speaking and teaching for the future. Can you feel that? And yes, the wind is sharpening and the night seems so impossibly dark we can trust little but our own noses to guide us forward.

But when, in truth, has it ever really been different? Hasn't the world always favored us, its admirable tricksters, stirring up the potentials, dislocating the present?

Suppose you were trying to make a difference in a village fraught with avoidance, tension, and dishonesty? Oh yes, my friend, you'd be a coyote, too!

Tags: Leadership, Future, LuminaCoaching, coyote

A Few Images of Puerto Rico

2006-03-04T12:46:00.000-08:00

The weather was almost indecently beautiful, so different from the drive-you-inside-to-work, puritanical drizzles of winter in Seattle. Instead the air and sun were soft and warm, and only lightly salted with Caribbean sea-scent. I was there to teach a class on coaching skills, but in the evenings and for a couple of extra days I explored, spent time with friends, saw the sights. This was the first time I've been to Puerto Rico, mostly spending my time in and around San Juan, and it seemed so clear that the dollar, American mercantilism based on cruise ships, the presence of Starbucks and Burger King and a multitude of souvenir stands, form a very thin veneer on a much richer, deeper culture that somehow is constantly escaping into the background, perhaps as a form of self-protection. Such is the mystery of an island historically subject to too many attempted conquests. There are parallels to other situations at a more personal level: how thin a veneer can be and yet how persuasive.

Of course, all the people I met were wonderful and warm. It's been awhile since I've experienced a workshop that was as open, engaged, and where there was so much laughter.

If you'd like to see a few images from San Juan and a nearby rainforest, you can click here.

Beyond the Edge: Distilling the Depths

2006-02-19T19:06:00.000-08:00

Every year I co-facilitate a great event called "Beyond the Edge: Affirming Your Destiny as a Leader." You can find out the full story of this event by transferring to the BTE website here.

While Beyond the Edge is not meant for everybody, in a personal way I believe everybody should come. It was designed for anyone who wants to know herself or himself much more deeply, who wants to learn from the heart what it means to be a real instrument of change.

I facilitate this event with my close colleagues, Barb Hummel and Jay Howell (who you can also find out more about on the website.) We don't have some hard and fast definition of "leadership." Generally speaking, we believe a leader is anyone who sincerely desires to make a conscious and positive difference in the world and sees the connection between their own personal development and making that difference. That's how we see ourselves. We're not gurus, just good, accomplished conveners out there everyday like you are, trying to make a better world, and who know something about the process of leadership unfolding.

If you are reading this weblog and you find something here that resonates with your own work and your own personal view of yourself, you may want to think about attending.

There are too many stories to tell of how people have come to Beyond the Edge over the last ten years and how they have made important discoveries. Some of these are not so much life-altering revelations as very straightforward confirmations of what was there all along -- but that, by itself, can be the most powerful thing for any of us. There is a famous image, sourced in Zen Buddhism, that says we all need time to let the silt settle out from the pure water of the spring. That's what Beyond the Edge is, a chance to let the water clear, to distill the depths, and then look through rather than look at. People have come for so many reasons: to find their vision, to cure a fear of failure, to rediscover the person who can operate from equanimity, joy, patience or hope. So many reasons and just one really, having to do with releasing an essential, deeply personal possibility. Beyond the Edge is a kind of portal to a better world through the growth of people who in whatever ways, large or small, with corporations or non-profits, in their lives with their families or only with themselves, are intentional. They lead.

Once you have been to Beyond the Edge you can never really go back to looking at the world in quite the same way. It is not that this experience adds something so radically new to your life. It is more that it just speeds up the wheel that is already turning, a wheel that you may have noticed but not quite known what to do with. That's the way self-knowledge is. It's always taking us someplace, always compelling us to purchase yet another ticket. Beyond the Edge makes you stop and notice this process in much more detail. And it confirms a way of being so eloquently expressed by Deepak Chopra: "Awareness cannot unfold without also unfolding outside events that mirror it."

As it turns out, I happen to be working in San Juan, Puerto Rico this week. Last night as I flew down from New York, I sat next to an older man who introduced himself as Abel. He was my "outside event," my current life experience of Beyond the Edge. I had an option: strike up a conversation or return to my self-absorbing book. I was tired from flying all day from Seattle. I was tired from the weeks before. I wanted to retreat into myself and rest. But, of course, this was just the moment for fate to intervene, and so naturally I found myself striking up a conversation. I understood in some way this was something I had invited long before I got on the plane.

For the next few hours I listened as Abel told me much of himself, his faith in life and his deep gratitude for his seventy-one years on this planet. He expressed his belief that the measure of people is their generosity. And he shared how once some years before he won a lot of money playing the numbers and decided to buy a mountain top in Puerto Rico where he might meditate. But before that could happen he was visited by the voice of God who said to him out loud, "Abel, why the heck do you need a mountain top anyway?" And so he desisted, he told me, realizing the ego of it. Abel is a humble man but a very powerful one. Before his step-son, a taxi driver in San Juan, dropped me off at my hotel, he shared a line that spoke volumes to me: "You cannot find the truth unless you make the truth your life."

When as friends, Jay and Barb and I put Beyond the Edge together in 1996 and 1997, I think that was exactly our guiding thought, though never expressed so well. We wanted to help people find the truth by living it. Not a mountain top experience (although the Tetons are beautiful and inspiring), but a quiet place to enable a deep ideal and a conviction, that we can all use some time to find a better way into the world by first finding a better way into ourselves.

Through a Darkened Wood

2006-02-14T07:55:00.000-08:00

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"Midway upon the journey of life
I found myself within a darkened wood,
For the straightforward way had been lost."
-- Dante, The Divine Comedy

How many times in your own life or work have you felt that same anxiety? We are often "midway upon the journey" and "in the darkened wood." I think of so many colleagues and acquaintances who have faced difficulties -- a divorce or separation, a cancer, a job-loss, a loss of spiritual meaning -- and who have had to lead themselves out of it. I admire this greatly, this surrender to fact and then leading out from the center of the person to his or her edge, finding a new center -- and more beyond. This, to me, is the bedrock, the reality of leadership, not the concept. Life does a lot to us and, for some, it awakens a new truth, a transcendence. For others, refusing the call, the soul goes into hiding and becomes a permanently wounded animal at the bottom of its cave.

How a person responds when life is shaking hard, that's the seedbed of impact in the world, the foundations of genuine integrity. I think of a friend who was gradually deserted by her husband, left alone for longer and longer periods on his "business trips" to another country until he finally no longer came home, and then also finally left to the bankrupcy that resulted from his debts. It's a long story and I won't tell it here except to say that over the next few years the toil was all hers. And for a long time she especially struggled to reclaim her self-confidence and inner joy. She could see it so clearly in others but not in herself.

And then one day, because she had grown out of her suffering enough, she started teaching classes to managers in her organization about what it means to treat themselves and their employees with love, trust, and a sense of responsibility -- precisely, of course, the opposite of the way she herself had been treated. Her personal story does not come up in her training, but it lies behind the exercises and so her life-learning and her presence are always there.

Her classes are overbooked. She has become an oasis. She inspires managers to create their own supportive networks to talk about the times when they feel most challenged in their relationships at work -- and to learn how to help one another. If ever we could say that a person is a gift to an organization, this would be it.

At a recent gathering of new friends, consultant Paul Everett told the story of a spiritual training he attended some years ago in Arizona. He was led by his guide to the edge of an extremely dense, darkened forest of pine trees. He was then asked to find his way to the other side of the forest "without the forest knowing he had been there." The one piece of advice he received was this: "Where there is no hurry, there is no danger." And then he was left alone. He could not charge through the pitch black forest. He had to wait until he could see just the one next move forward he could make. He had to slow way down, face the thickest branches, look carefully for how he could just slip through, then stop, waiting in long moments for the next opening to appear. Very gradually in this way, he was able to make the journey.

This is a metaphor isn't it? Doing the next right thing, and the next, even when it is very unclear how big the forest really is. And how different this is from all the gimmicky management training that suggests we can always go fast, that there is a technique for everything -- how to create change, how to motivate people, how to sell the program, how to, how to, how to. All these techniques that keep us really unconscious. All these how-to's that are never enough ever to really face life or even be in touch with it -- in or out of organizations. Sometimes, as Paul's story suggests, the only technique is the "no-technique" of waiting and growing into the next right thing.

I think of my friend's story and what she teaches in her organization and it comes down to this: how to come out of denial, how to see the branches in very low light, how to take the first step without panicking, how to have the patience to wait for the next opening to appear, and ultimately, how we can do all this together rather than apart. These are things we need guides for, and leaders, because in the open space of our lives and our work there are many darkened forests to pass through and, like Paul, we must also do so "without the forest knowing."

Tags: Leadership, Love, Trust, Responsibility

Fifth Practice: Discussing Undiscussables

2006-01-31T11:43:00.000-08:00

Hear Dan read this post.

For more context on this posting, please see:

The Practice of Leadership
Eight Leadership Practices
First Practice: Knowing Your Leadership Edge
Second Practice: Developing Your Comfort Level with Feedback
Third Practice: Caring for Self
Fourth Practice: Leadership and Influence

So what is an "undiscussable"?

An undiscussable is a work-related problem that people hesitate to address with those who can do something about it. It isn't that people don't talk about undiscussables. They talk about them frequently -- in the hallways and parking lots, bathrooms and across the cubicles. But it isn't with the person or the people most often associated with the issues. AKA "the dead moose on the table," it's what people come out of a meeting to share with one another privately that should have been part of the agenda.

Undiscussables are more than just sensitive topics; they are the "secrets everyone knows" and they can be incredibly disruptive to trust in relationships and the whole process of getting work done. Some of the most common topics are how people feel treated by their bosses, whether their peers are pulling their weight, unreasonable workloads and deadlines, tensions around diversity, tensions around working styles, compensation -- all kinds of stuff that people consider not smart to deal with too directly and openly. We've learned to keep these issues behind the scenes because of our fears of repercussions from speaking up. Sometimes those repercussions are fear of losing personal credibility and reputation by being labeled (the terms, "trouble-maker" or "high maintenance" come to mind) and sometimes the fear is just that it won't do any good to be "the messenger." Either the messenger gets shot or the message just falls on deaf ears.

While not everything needs to be laid bare in group settings, I believe there are situations, many more perhaps than we'd like to believe, where it is up to the leader to get a tough issue on the table. It takes courage and patience, along with sensitivity. But it may be the only way to build the bridge forward.

I recall an experience working with a small import/export firm that did a high volume of trade. Because of the nature of their business, they rarely got together face to face. The different internal teams, especially Order Processing and Sales, were in frequent conflict. The two owners of the company took the risk at their annual meeting to open the door to dealing with this undiscussable conflict -- which of course they had been hearing about in the background a lot. There were about 40 people from all departments in the room. Sales was clustered on one side of the room, Order Processors on the other. The owners were nervous about getting started. When I had problems with the overhead projector, they both lept up to bustle around me with their individual fixes, quibbling with each other about what to do.

Here's how the opening of this conversation went, in a condensed form:

Junior Order Processor (very sincere): "Well, I'd like to be the first to speak because I know exactly what all of you in Sales think of me. You think I'm a screw up and, you know, the fact is that when I first started, I really didn't know what I was doing. My computer kept breaking down, too, which didn't help matters. I was way over my head and I kept making the same mistakes. It was awful. There were a lot of days I thought about quitting but I hung in there because I thought it might get better..."

(Nervous laughter in group)

Sales Manager: "Wow. Uh, I'm a little stunned. I thought you'd be really defensive...I'm surprised you are taking so much accountability. It's not what I expected. And believe me, I do know we have made things worse for you on occasion ourselves. I guess when people are making mistakes in OP, over here we kind of use that as an excuse to go on the rampage...."

Junior Order Processor: "I want you to know I didn't blame you. I knew you were blaming me and I would have done the same."

(Several back and forths here as the Order Processors and Sales Team share some observations of times when there were problems. There's tension in the air because it reminds people of some pretty bad days. Everybody else from different departments is as silent as can be).

Owner#1: "Well, let me just ask a question here, how is it you were so overwhelmed? Wasn't there help available?"

Junior Order Processor: "That's what I've been trying to say. There wasn't anybody around who could answer my questions. There wasn't anybody to call. My boss was always overloaded and, as you know, she works on the other side of the world. I was kind of plopped down in a chair in front of a screen and told to "just do it -- you'll figure it out."

Owner#2: "Without training of any kind?"

Junior Order Processor: "That's right, no training. That's why I don't blame the Sales people. I'd have been mad, too, if I'd had to work with me."

(A few chuckles ripple across the room).

Owner#1 (Turning to the HR Director for the firm): "What's happened to our training program? Don't we have a training program for Order Processors? I thought we had a training program!"

HR Director (Straight arrow): "Don't you remember? You two guys (pausing, looking grimly back and forth between the owners), you two guys couldn't agree on whether to fund it. You had a fight about it as I recall. You had a lot of fights about the budget. Anyway, as a result the training plan hasn't been funded for the last year and a half and we also scrapped most of employee orientation. I can't believe you don't remember this. You approved it."

Owner #1 (looking at Owner #2, but beginning to chuckle to himself now): "You actually opposed a training program?"

Owner #2: "I never opposed a training program, that was you!"

(Everyone laughing watching these two guys go at it).

Owner #1, really getting it now: "Ohhh, Nooooo! It's Us!"

Owner #2, (also getting it, louder now and also laughing): "And what was it you said about the equipment? You said your #%*&@# computer didn't work??!"

(Everybody laughing really hard)

A remarkable occurrence, don't you think? People laughing at how screwed up things had become, how interactive it all was in a human, financial, and technical knot, how the leaders were beginning to see their big contribution to the problem. I'll tell you, as a facilitator, I could have given that Junior Order Processor about half my pay that day for the way he opened the conversation. The other half probably should have gone to the Sales Manager who owned up to his team's own problem rampages. Both of them out there with just the gutsy, undefended truth of it all so that the whole company could witness why and how the systems weren't working. And I also think back to the power of that for-real HR Director and to those two owners -- their ability to get it and actually laugh at themselves while they took the heat. Bless them all. I know they weren't perfect -- or why would they have let this go on so long. But this was a team of people that had the openness and courage to let that conversation roll. From this one problem, we ended up with a whole cluster of action steps that involved better communications between divisions, training and orientation, budget system revisions, access to unified decisions -- all kinds of good, solid action. And the major payoff? An understanding by the two owners about the real impacts of their fights on the company.

Do you think everyone knew where the real problem was before the discussion even started? You bet they did. And they'd been talking about it in the halls for years, but not directly with the owners.

Look, from my experience, it's almost never this easy to get at and constructively address the undiscussables. Most of us, most of the time, take it so much more personally. It can be a lot harder. I remember a retreat where one of the chief undiscussables was how much time supervisors spent on breaks (they'd all park their trucks in front of a certain cafe, that was how workers knew). The room of supervisors and employees thought this would be an easy and constructive thing to talk about together. It was all a misunderstanding, right? Except it wasn't, and suddenly we were in the middle of "What gives you the right to comment on my break times? When did you earn your stripes?" It took a lot of facilitation and leadership to get that one slowed down enough for people to really start listening to one another.

Oh, there's just no space in this post to cover it all...Lord, the rooms I've been in (I know you've been in some of those same rooms, too). Some discussions I facilitated worked out so well, some were just as hard as they could be and took some follow-up work to get to a positive place. Along the way, I guess I've learned a couple of things about the process and one central point about leadership: the leader must be able to be present non-defensively -- both as a person who may be on the receiving end of others' concerns and complaints and as someone who must intervene when others are becoming defensive.

If you are a formal leader of a work team, and you want to advance the capacity of your group to handle undiscussables, here's a sequence you might consider:

1. Begin by identifying to yourself the undiscussable that needs to be addressed. They all have names, "Conflict between Order Processing and Sales," "Break Times for Supervisors," etc. This will be "code" for certain people and certain behaviors that would need to be addressed openly. Now, do a gut check. Are you really willing to move into this territory with a team? Leaders are often expected to handle every sensitive thing in the background. But sometimes that's just not feasible. When problems are multi-dimensional, affect a lot of people, and are habitually avoided, sometimes the only way forward is through the group itself. If you don't feel you can handle the situation alone, can you hire a professional facilitator to help you?

2. Introduce the topic to the group as a possibility for discussion. People generally need soak time to decide whether they want to address a tough topic. Be clear that it will require non-defensive behavior, owning up to problems and mistakes, patience and mutual support. Poll the group for readiness one by one. If they are ready you'll feel it. If not, the group will look divided and hesitant. In that case, look in another direction for solutions. Advocate for openness but don't force the group. If there's consent to proceed, set your time and place.

3. When you get there, start by talking about how to discuss any undiscussable. This is very different from just diving in to discussing the one in question -- don't let that happen. Instead, decide together how to structure this conversation. Structure helps people feel safer by providing a container for their shared experiences. First, establish ground rules, and don't be naive about them. Don't say, for example, that we will "separate the problem from the person." It's poppycock. If we could have done that, the issue wouldn't have become undiscussable. Instead, help the group agree to rules that are about staying open at tough moments, maintaining vulnerability, mutual learning, respect, forgiveness, and support, being willing to listen and disclose, and using one's freedom to identify feelings not act them out. Second, establish a plan for the conversation itself. My colleague Kathy Ryan, my co-author on Driving Fear Out of the Workplace, found that by breaking conversations down into three pieces: facts, perceptions, and feelings, much of the weirdness and volatility we are all prone to can be reduced.

4. Have the conversation. If you use the facts, perceptions, feelings model, write this stuff down on three (or more) flipcharts or on a white board. Sort out the facts and perceptions first, then focus on the feelings the perceptions are driving. Stick to the process and keep it moving. It may feel risky to get even this far, so as leader you'll need to show that you are with the group by asking questions, thanking folks for speaking up, probing to help people articulate what bothers them the most, and, for sure, owning your part of the problem. And don't be afraid to come back to those ground rules. "Jeff, we agreed in the ground rules to avoid 'flaming one another.' Do you want to try to say that last thing you put on the table in a way that makes it easier to hear?" Gentle. Warm tone. Pausing to let Jeff decide. At its best the discussion feels like real dialogue where people can slow down, take it all in, hear contributions from many vantage points, then decide how to proceed. Once people have gone to the trouble of specifically separating their agreed upon facts from their conflicting perceptions and have owned up to feelings such as anger, frustration, disappointment, or embarrassment, they are usually very ready for constructive problem-solving.

5. Move to action planning and decisions. Usually there will be a cluster of things to address, not just one or two. Brainstorm. What can we do differently for each aspect? How do we prevent "knots" like this getting tied in the first place? It's best for everyone in the room to have a piece of responsibiity for helping things move forward constructively, even if at first the problem seemed to belong to only one or two people.

6. Follow-up. Don't let the issue drop just because people got a chance to talk about it. Rather, bring people together again later to collectively assess progress on the action steps. Then keep brainstorming to remove further barriers to implementation and to extend the group's learning.

I've used this process in a wide variety of contexts -- it's just the basics, of course. Each situation is different and requires different planning and set up. I've used this method to address all kinds of workplace issues such as perceptions of racism in a management team; political, power-based rivalries and agendas in a group; high level nepotism; the leader's (problematic) style; a group's dependency on the leader; lack of internal cooperation; competition for succession; poor decision-making processes; potential business failures; incompetence among principals of a firm; lack of any meaningful strategy or purpose for the group -- you name it. These are usually the real reasons organizations can't achieve what they say they want to achieve -- their inability to sit down together and deal with the big stuff, the stuff that every one of us would like to avoid.

It takes heart to do this work, genuine fortitude. It's messy. It's not intellectual and it's not a game. It's anything but a technique. And this is another reason why the capacity to be open and to reflect are such important leadership skills. Because the bottom line is that if you are leading a discussion of what's been undiscussable it will be about you in some way, your thoughts, your feelings, your style, and you will learn something about your own propensity to defend and to stay in denial about problems. I'm not saying this to suggest that the leader is always the problem. I'm saying that leadership is often the solution with a group struggling with its undiscussables. How you carry yourself in that moment, what your presence is, how stable you are in a discussion that might be eminently destabilizing for you and others -- that's where your leadership will be tested. That's where everyone's leadership will be tested.

Reflect on this:

Could you have done what the Junior Order Processor did?
Could you have acknowledged your role in the problem as the Sales Manager did?
Could you have begun to question and inquire as the owner did?
Could you have stood up to the owners as the Human Resources Director did?
Could you have acknowledged the source of the problem without blame and converted a potentially painful moment into a shared discovery, as did the owners?

Reflecting in this way, I believe that you will find the source code behind the page and be ready to lead the changes that will most benefit your world.

Technorati tags: Leadership, Undiscussables, Courage

On Whole-Hearted Reflection

2006-01-22T11:25:00.000-08:00

Hear Dan read this post -- here.

A few days ago I posted a few "reflections," which I described as a little less than full-fledged meditations and a little more than thoughtful prose. Hmmmm. I've been thinking about this definition, and also about why reflections might be valuable to anybody as they consider ways to strengthen their leadership capabilities. Let me share some of these thoughts and then I want to offer one more reflection on "whole-heartedness" -- based on the ancient Chinese symbol for Yin and Yang and its implications for self-study.

To me there is a real art to reflecting. It is the art of listening within. A good reflection isn't quite yet the answer to one's problem, but it can be the portal to that answer. Let me explain. A colleague I coached a few years ago was struggling with her career direction. She could leave her job to find another company. She could ask for a position of higher responsibility within her current company. She could make the leap to consulting. These were her choices and she was also grappling with the grief of losing a parent. Her energy was constricted and she was circling but couldn't find the right place to land. Somehow, she had to figure out a way to loosen up and let an answer come to her. Over and over in our conversations she seemed to come back to the question, "What should I do?" But one day the air seemed to clear a little and question transformed itself into "What do I want to do?" That tiny breakthrough made things much easier. It was the right question. If I were going to write a reflection for her about this shift, in shortened form, it might look like this:

Everyday I wonder what I should do. All my choices bring their rights and wrongs and all of them have to have their day in court. They are clamoring for an answer. How am I to make this judgment?

Without warning, something goes off in my head. Whereever it came from, this thought redefines me. Suddenly, in a quiet room, I take my time to practice this question again: What do I want?

The reflection is like a personal history of thinking and feeling, with a good question at the end to signal the very place where both an opening and a "stuck point" occur. We do not yet have the answer, but we do have the right place to wait for its coming. It is one thing when, as if in a dream, we do not know at all how to get out of town -- or that we must -- that's really stuck. It's quite another to be consciously waiting for a train that hasn't quite arrived at the station.

(And by the way, the person I coached now does occupy an expanded role at her company).

I believe the value of these reflections can be enormous for any of us. They require slowing down the racing processes of thinking and feeling. This builds consciousness so that everyday dilemmas and conflicts are not "acted out" but deliberately attended to. In my experience, when people don't bring the right reflections to consciousness they end up yanked along by their untended feelings rather than making more deliberate choices. And this can have a dramatic effect on their relationships at work. People under stress, attempting to solve inner questions that lie outside awareness, often turn their "shadow" sides to the world. They can become impatient, blaming, dismissive, mistrustful, and judgmental, spawning in turn these same qualities in others. They may do things, like make comments that are insulting, as simply a way of displaying the stress and leaving clues for others -- sometimes very painful ones -- that an inner conflict is out of control. The circumstances being faced certainly may be quite stressful, but the real stress may actually be coming from the unanswered questions on the inside. If I am struggling with knowing just what to do to become successful, for example, I may become very defensive about my performance, taking things very personally or reading into others' behaviors all kinds of motivations that just aren't there.

These inner insecurities are not a problem, they are an opportunity, but they require time and attention and willingness to search within. Not all stress is inwardly caused, but I sense much more of it is inward than most of us like to acknowledge. For an additional perspective on some of these ideas, you might want to take a look at the Slow Leadership blog. It is premised on the need for "slowing down" as a specific strategy for improving businesses.

Now here is where the Yin and Yang come in. Good reflecting requires the ability to consider both our light sides and dark sides, our strengths and also our mistakes and problems. It is a balancing act of "inner" and "outer," tied together in a continuous loop. Joe McCarthy's excellent posting on practicing and preaching is a great example of this loop. Effective reflection sometimes takes us down into very dark territory and sometimes into joyful and uplifting discoveries. This is why I like the ancient symbol so well. Dark flows into light and light flows into darkness, and each contains its opposite just to make sure we get the point that nothing is ever absolutely pure. Yin and Yang are not about good and bad, but about polarities, such as the revolving passage of the seasons. There can be good and bad winters, but today it is just this season, in its constantly evolving transit to the next. It's no surprise the symbol itself may have come from ancient astronomical calculations.

What this means is that for us to learn about ourselves, we have to take an attitude that honors all sides of who we are. It is what I would call "whole-heartedness," which means to me bringing all of who I am to some task, whether that task is writing a posting here, serving a client, or fostering a living partnership with my friend, Jane. I bring my whole heart, not just the good parts or the bad parts. I bring it all -- and I'm willing to work with it all. Wholeheartedness brings together surrender, love, passion, and compassion. It is a kind of intelligence that embraces intellect, emotion, spirit -- and mystery. If I adopt this attitude in my self-knowledge work as a leader, I will become increasingly aware of my conflicts, my insecurities, my needs, and my talents. And I can start to bring a whole picture of myself into focus. I can begin to carry my life-energy into my challenges in new ways. I can begin to connect more courageously and patiently with others.

There is a particular kind of grace that comes with a whole-hearted approach to self-understanding. There should be a word for it, although I doubt there is one. The ego-less seeing of one's true value is quite a wonderful thing.

But, if I stand back from whole-heartedness or only focus on a part (if, indeed, I only want to see my good self or my bad self) then I really am not wholehearted and I will try to compensate. I'll try to hide some part of who I am -- probably by projecting it onto someone else. I won't let in what is yet unknown, and this, of course is the whole trick to self-knowledge, isn't it, letting in the unknown?

A good reflection may help open just that door.

Whole-Heartedness

Slowing down, I risk seeing more than I bargained for. But I will take the risk anyway. What is leading but learning to follow an inner revelation into the outer response of the world?

Let the dark matter come forward out of the shadows, the things I've avoided; let the light matter come forward; the things I've been blind to. Today, I will look them all in the eye and introduce them like old friends.

Whole-heartedness is a gift of the gods, shattering every other mirror.

Who am I to experience this good Self, exactly as I am?

Technorati tags: Leadership, Reflection, Whole-Hearted, Yin/Yang

Three Reflections

2006-01-19T17:09:00.000-08:00

Make no mistake, if you think you have it bad, it could be so much worse. One only has to look out for a few moments across the landscape of the blogosphere to find deep suffering -- it's enough to be paralyzed in grief. And yet, I do believe we also work pretty hard most days to make a difference -- in the ways we know best -- and to prepare and strengthen ourselves as instruments of change. If you and I are going to change anything, often the first thing we discover squarely in the path is ourselves.

Here are three reflections that may prove of value to you as you think about your own circumstances. A reflection to me isn't quite a meditation and yet isn't just thoughtful prose, either. It is a way of guiding ourselves into the questions whose answers can best shape our lives and our ability to make a difference. My advice, if you want to take a few moments with these reflections, is to slow down your thinking and feeling as if the usual pattern were a film strip running too fast through the mind. Sit quietly. Focus on the italicized question each reflection contains. Think or write, and, for sure, feel. If you like, let me know how this works for you.

You can also hear me read this post -- here.

Crisis

All the storms have gathered and I live in the tight squeeze of my decisions. What really am I to do?

If I knew what the outcome would be I could be courageous, but in this rough-shod moment, there are all too many unknowns. Underneath the presence I wear for others, I too, am scared.

Scared. Sacred. A simple shift of two letters in a word, but so much hangs in the balance, changed in the doing. Now I am in a holy moment and what holds me only is my truth. I cannot seem to escape a single thing and every place I turn I only find another mirror.

Which of my internal voices can I truly rely upon? Which will best guide me through this moment?

Forgiveness

A perfectionist, I am not one to easily forgive. I hurt my hurts. I hold my grudges. Even with myself.

I could move on from anger if it didn't mean accepting so much weakness in me. At a certain point, I can't stand not being right. I want to argue about how I've been offended. But time is running out and things are not going my way. And I have to admit it, I, too, am to blame. I look in the mirror and much too quickly look away. Why do I keep on defending? Why can't I seem to overcome this fault?

Among these blossoming hawthorn trees, I forget to hold on with such force. I finally feel my sorrow. When I actually agree with myself to apologize, the pain begins to ease.

What will it really take me to forgive...myself?

Freedom

My freedom does not depend on the power given to me by others. My freedom is in thinking for myself and trusting to this path.

Still, I am forever discovering, like rusted chains, the old patterns of emotion and belief that have bound me. One by one I am learning to let them go. So many I learned as a child, justifying with time their limits to my own possibilities.

I held onto them, perhaps for approval, perhaps for love. And they have protected me well, but today they must be broken.

A broad field opens before me and I move forward toward a compelling dream and purpose.

Indeed, what shall I do with my freedom?

The Unarmed Truth and Unconditional Love

2006-01-15T14:00:00.000-08:00

A friend sent me a copy of a beautiful and remarkable speech made by his 17 year-old daughter, Clare, to her school last Friday. With permission from Clare and her father, I reprint it here along with her photo.

It is an honor to be invited to speak briefly on behalf of myself and my family about Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, one the greatest Americans ever born. The fact that our country celebrates a national holiday in remembrance of such a leader, legend and liberator of freedom is a clear recognition of how great a man he was.

Racism is no longer as blatantly obvious on the surface of our society as it was during the 1960’s when Dr King was alive. Today, it lies underneath the surface, always disguised and undiscussable. If I were to ask you if you are racist, you would probably answer that you are not. I could direct this question to any of us in this gym, whether you are white, Africa-American, Latino, Asian or any other ethnicity. To understand racism today, we need to look underneath the surface because no matter who we are, we all feel feelings about people who are different than us. The problem is not that we feel differently about others but that we are afraid to admit to ourselves that we feel differently.

This lack of insight leads to unconscious behavior. Often, I, as well as others, do not take the time to think back to the roots of where our feelings come from. It is so important to know what our feelings are and where they come from because that is how we can learn to change. If you do not know what you feel, you are likely to act unconsciously. Unconsciousness breeds fear and fear breeds hate.

Maine Commission for Community Service

Racism, sexism, homophobic behavior and any other forms of discrimination sprout from people’s fear of difference. This behavior and discrimination is no longer as apparent as it once was but it is communicated daily through our unconscious actions, feelings, jokes or hurtful words towards others. Just walking down the halls at our school you can hear people using sexist or racial slurs as the butt of a seemingly harmless joke. This form of unconscious discrimination continues to seep deeper and deeper below the surface of society’s awareness. It hurts not only the individual, but hurts all of us as a society. A painful national example of this form of unconscious behavior was seen this past year with the government’s inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina victims. No one intended to act with discrimination. But you only had to watch the nightly news to see that most of the victims of Katrina were poor and black and not receiving the aid they desperately needed.

I grew up in an environment that encouraged me to investigate my feelings. My family taught me the importance of reflecting upon my thinking before I acted because they held me responsible for the outcomes of my behavior. We all need to take a look at our own thinking and determine why we think the way we do. Is it because that was how we were raised or because those are our parent’s opinions? Simply questioning your thinking process makes you aware of your feelings and thoughts and allows you to be liberated but this takes maturity, modesty and a willingness to change. We are all scared to search within ourselves because we cannot be sure of what we might find. However, this step is essential for one to change and continue growing.

Martin Luther King is an inspiration to me because he reminds me to carry forward his dream everyday. He called each one of us to join in a brotherhood and sisterhood between all races, ages, genders and all levels of society. His dream makes us believe that the world can be a better place. I believe that such a place can exist because I have seen it, here at our school, when people admitted their faults and learned how even their silliest jokes might actually have hurt someone severely. So, I ask you to join me this morning in renewing our efforts to reflect upon the discrimination and racism within ourselves, within our school community and within our society. Together we can change our community, bring hope to others and begin to create a better world in which our children will not have to suffer or endure the effects of any type of discrimination.

I would like to end with a quote from Martin Luther King,

“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become reality. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”

Thank you.

We are All Leaders of Our Own Lives

2006-01-15T11:02:00.000-08:00

I found a wonderful anonymous comment this morning on an earlier posting, What is Self-Knowledge? This is part of it:

...I will not forget to remind us that we are all the leaders of our own lives. Self-knowledge may be the most priceless commodity in an age where everything has a price. To be in the process of journeying towards the self is the soul's path, but by beginning to be aware of the journey we are able to take quantum leaps towards creating love and beauty in our lives. True leadership must be by default only an extension of one who is the truest leader of his or her own life, and in sharing this art with others can help guide and be an example that life itself is just greatness waiting to be discovered, if only we knew how.

What else is there to say?

I want to honor these words as a sublime gift.

Why I Re-Named My Blog

2006-01-12T15:23:00.000-08:00

Well, isn't it obvious? Oestreich Associates is just my business name, not a descriptive name for what I am about. As leaders, as people, we are always growing and unfolding...our stories, our lives; our hearts, minds, and spirits. We unfold the way leaves unfold, blossoms, wings. It is a beautiful process, and not easy.

This is a picture of the amaryllis that is growing (towering) on my desk. The green part of the stalk is about two feet from where it leaves the bulb to where it splits into four huge blossoms, each about eight inches across (about the size of a salad plate). It's been my inspiration for making the move to a better name. As the amaryllis grew and unfolded, I guess, so did my desire to make the change.

Here is a close-up of the flowers. Thanks to you all for coming here whenever you can.

I'll be updating internal links in this site over the next couple of weeks. I beg your patience...and please email me straight away if you can't find something!

Feedback

2006-01-09T22:16:00.000-08:00

In truth, I am afraid of what I might hear.
I'm not sure I really want to know what others think of me.
I'd rather keep my illusions so that nothing will change.
But I am trapped, you see. I can never go back without dying.
If there is news for me, I must hear it.
If the words are unkind I must face them.
My heart is alive, but like a swarm of wasps.
What will prevent me from running?
Nothing, and yet I can't do it.
What can assuage this wound to my ego?
Nothing, and so I will bear it, only sometimes looking to the side.
I will hear better if I know their love is also part of the truth.
Tomorrow, what will my hurt say? What will my anger?
Still I must cross this burning road as if only a field of blond summer grass.

In the end, giving up, I find a mystery: it is just the grass itself that is real
And the small blue flowers hidden in its folds.
Having finally listened and heard so much,
Now I can stop for one single, private moment.
At last, I can also hear the wind.

Dan Oestreich 1/9/06

Hear Dan read this reflection.

Re-Creating the World

2006-01-06T19:57:00.000-08:00

Hear Dan read this post.

I've stayed away from posting anything in particular about the new year, mostly I guess because not much seems different. Crossing dates from one year to the next to me is much like driving across state lines. There's a garish sign marking the spot and perhaps the surface of the road changes a little but the topography whizzing by outside remains exactly the same.

There is something worth celebrating, however, and for me, at least, it is what's happening on this incredible net as more and more people connect in, put up their blogs, access Friendster or MySpace and a host of other services, and figure out for themselves the meaning of RSS. It's happening as a torrent of pictures, words, ideas and feelings spill forth revealing what is inside us that needs to get out. It happens every time we click an unfamiliar name beside this or that comment on a post or check out something new on a blogroll or tap the link that takes us on an instant journey of relationship to another person and then another and another all over this lilypad world.

It is no less than a re-creation of society, the totally amazing advent of a global tribe. It is deeply heartening to me to think that what we've found is not just a better way for strangers to meet, but that the very nature of our meeting is transforming. And with this comes a regenerating sense that openness, equity, listening, and appreciation can play their true roles in saving what we have left of our planet. Surely we are just at the beginning, but as I survey the blogosphere what comes through to me out of our phenomenal mixture of politics, poetry, and personal testimony -- and millions of images -- is the utter beauty of people. Oh, I know, there's just so much ugly stuff out here, too. Repression and depression are on peoples' minds. Society is what society has been and it is best to fold up the rose-colored glasses right now: the world is still a very dangerous place and that also is mirrored electronically. But what is good is also here, as the soul of humanity is revealed with a new kind of intimacy. We are exposed by our own light.

It is enough for any of us to be moved...and I believe the heart of the world is moving, if only we keep talking, sharing, and pushing at the very foundations of violence, greed, destruction of nature, and all the other sources of suffering. Isn't this what we, through our own leadership, are to do? Isn't it exactly our job to connect with one another and to sift the ashes of the current chaos? Isn't it us who must re-discover the sparks, re-light the warming fires? Isn't it our real vocation to hold up the light of our discovered (or recoverd) wisdom and even in the midst of this present dark space help find the way to a better world?

Isn't this what leadership has always been?

I want to invite an angel of hope to warm herself at this, our new common hearth.

At such a moment I am reminded of another of William Stafford's great poems, "Ask Me." Stafford was a poet, pacifist...and realist. In this poem he suggests where hope really comes from:

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

Dropping Into the Void

2006-01-04T10:57:00.000-08:00

Hear Dan read this post.

This morning I again read the many fine comments related to Chris Bailey's great November post, Is This What Leadership Looks Like? Chris uses the phrase, "dependency leadership model" to describe some of our most negative cultural conditioning about leadership. In the dependency model, the leader makes our decisions for us, grants us approval or disapproval in a parental way, caretakes us, and "knows all." Meanwhile, we the followers defer to the leader's apparent agenda, focusing more on his or her power than the group's power as it works together.

The post got me thinking about the array of business owners, CEO's, and presidents I have worked with over the years who have asked for help with direct reports -- executives -- who exhibit all the syptoms of this dependency, including lack of meaningful collaboration and lack of personal initiative. There are many reasons for these dynamics and a number having to do with th nature of hierarchy itself. In addition to the dependency behaviors, I have also frequently observed posturing, silo-driven "me first" thinking, and passive aggressiveness in team members' responses to the CEO and each other. Sometimes that was fed and fostered by the behaviors of the top person. Sometimes it clearly was not. I continue to see hopeful signs with my clients that they want less and less to do with the traditional, ego-driven leadership approaches -- and the dependent behaviors by reports that go with them.

The rub for the top person is often how to mentor people from dependency into autonomy so that everyone on the executive team expresses their own authentic, personal leadership. Thinking back about the best and most effective clients I have worked with, many themes come forward -- for example in the way they delegate, how they co-create and communicate visions, how mutual expectations are set, how failures are not condemned but everyone is still held to important goals and standards, and mostly, how the growth of each person in the group is nurtured and fostered as a matter of fundamental trust. These things are not viewed as niceties, but as business essentials and there is a compact that developing personal awareness, strong interpersonal skills, and organizational sensitivity is all part of a mutual promise between leader and led.

The one aspect of this process that I find the most fascinating is the feeling that goes with the shift from dependency to autonomy. It is the fear of and escape from this feeling that often keeps an old system in place. I would call it, dropping into the Void. It is what happens when the autocrat disappears, either by a change of top leader or by a leader's own growth. We assume that people jump up and shout "Hurrah! Hurrah! The King is Dead" but the truth is more complex. Democratic methods have their own prickly demands. What people find is that they are at least for some time lost, anxious and frustrated with lack of structure and ambiguity. There is a longing -- expressed in countless ways and tests for the new leader -- a longing for someone to do the tough work: make the hard decisions, sort out the competing priorities, deal with the high-level performance problems and personality conflicts, assign the scant resources, and otherwise temper the embedded spirit of political competition among the players.

Dropping into the Void is a feeling of personal exposure, risk, and responsibility. It is raw and real. In order to survive and succeed within this free fall, the executive must deal with things that he or she has been avoiding (a-void-ing!) If I have issues with power and authority, I find them in my face when I drop into the Void. If I have a fear of failure, that fear quickly comes forward. If I have to have control, that will be mirrored back to me in conflicts and resentments. If I've never paid much attention to developing my own staff, that will show up plainly in my results. Within the leadership dependency model, these issues could be bypassed or covered up. The old skillfulness had a certain teflon quality to it. But take out the leader who reinforces these past dependencies and the floor gives way. The chickens, as they say, come home to roost.

When I think of the best leaders I have worked with, they all get this point: they are changing the social contract. Here are some of the ways I have observed these good folks to operate:

They don't make all the decisions. They refuse to make decisions their reports should be making for themselves.
They are clear about their expectation that people work collaboratively and they will intervene when it does not occur -- not to get people out of their trap, but to mirror the need for them to use their own wisdom, values, and care for one another to get out on their own.
They don't do all the planning; they confront the group with its absence of planning.
They may not specify exact outcomes and they certainly don't expect perfection, but they do require progress.
They don't allow the group to self-victimize or blame others for issues and organizational problems; not suppliers, not customers, not the Board, not the union, not employees. Instead they challenge group members to deal with the internal conflicts they have real control over.
They ask for feedback about their own leadership. They disclose their own challenges, strengths, problems, and mistakes. They tell people what they are thinking -- and how they think.
They ask people to talk to each other and they are especially dissatisfied when people say things to them after a meeting that should have been said during the meeting.
They put the "undiscussables" on the table for fair consideration and hold the group to its confrontation of the issues.
They are frustrated with meetings that are for information sharing only; without real, honest dialogue the meeting isn't worth it.
They are exceptional at inquiry, overtly and consciously asking people to do their own thinking.
They don't take interpersonal or business risks away from people -- instead they make them even more conscious and public, and provide the sounding board essential to making these risks calculable and take-able.
They listen carefully to the insecurities of others and without caretaking, provide affirmation, support, and a truer form of love than is often found in families.

And one last behavior: they are patient. They know it is a long road. They are willing to keep the Void present, right here right now, and for a long time so that everyone, including themselves, can learn. They hold the tension first so that others are eventually able to do so for themselves.

At least these are some of the things I have seen. Have you also seen this phenomenon in your organizational life? Have you ever felt that feeling of dropping into the Void? Have you led others through it?