Gifted Leaders

Choosing Character Over Comfort

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

As a culture, we Americans have chosen comfort over character.  It’s during times of challenge and adversity that character is developed, but most of us (me included) place more value in maintaining an affluent lifestyle than on facing these challenges and making sacrifices for the greater good.

And thus, both major party candidates in this year’s election seem to be focusing on pandering to the masses who want someone to fix the economy so that we can maintain our current level of comfort.

Maybe we need to come to our senses and break free from the prevailing consumer culture that’s driving us to the brink of insanity as well as financial ruin.  We need to realize that our own materialism, our own ambition, and our own accepting of the conventional wisdom of what constitutes a good life is a major obstacle to our happiness and our well being.  Perhaps change can’t and won’t come from the top until “we the people” change?

Columnist Ellen Goodman writes, “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to the job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.”  What kind of lifestyle have we created?!  Maybe we need to redefine “normal”?

How can we liberate ourselves from our love affair with comfort and convenience so that we might be people of character?  What is a more sustainable definition of normal?

Building a Community to Co-Create a Future that's Distinct from the Past

“Leadership is a concept we often resist.  It seems immodest, even self-aggrandizing, to think of ourselves as leaders.  But if it is true that we are made for community, then leadership is everyone’s vocation, and it can be an evasion to insist that it is not.  When we live in the close-knit ecosystem called community, everyone follows and everyone leads.” - Parker J. Palmer

Leadership is the capacity to initiate a future distinct from the past.  A distinct future can only be achieved through high engagement.  The essence of leadership then, according to Peter Block, is about convening, valuing relatedness, and decentralizing its own role.  It is not a personality characteristic or a matter of style and therefore it requires nothing more than what all of us already have.

In this way, “leader” belongs right up there with cook, carpenter, artist, and landscape designer.  It is a capacity that can be learned by all of us.

An alternative future occurs when a community of people chooses to come together and be accountable for something larger than themselves.  All we know about learning, exceptional performance, and creativity indicates that the existence of a supportive community is what makes the difference.  Leadership in these terms is dependent on building strong communities.

Creating a new future requires a shift:

1. From a place of fear and fault to one of gifts, generosity, and an “abundance” mentality.

2. From a bet on measurement and oversight to one of social fabric and chosen accountability.

3. From a focus on advice and predictability of leaders to a focus on evoking the wisdom, capacities, and ownership of citizens.

Considering that leadership "requires nothing more than what all of us already have," what can you do to create this shift and help build community within your sphere of influence?

The Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff

“People construct their shared view of the world socially, through interaction. If you want people to operate synergistically from a shared vision, you must give them the opportunity to think and talk about it together. You must go beyond sending emails, constructing power-points, and otherwise delivering messages to them. You must convene them.” - Seth Kahan

This is from an insightful Fast Company blog post where Kahan notes that, “It is the people-side of the change equation that is difficult to get right.”  He goes on to say ...

Participation - Engagement - Buy-in - This is the stuff of successful change.  And it's not something that can be gained through a transaction.  Rather, it requires generative dialogue.   It is, in fact, voluntary evolution.

Every major stakeholder must become a player, with skin in the game and the opportunity to craft their destiny.  The change leader's job is not so much to set the vision and inform everyone else.  Rather it is to convene the players in the right context and allow them to generate the future they will to strive to achieve.  That's engagement.  That's buy-in.

Kahan has studied how people change themselves and their business processes in service to a higher goal and has discovered that it requires a highly interactive approach.  Rather than top-down, it is inside-out.  As people generate new insights and understanding their behavior changes.  The real territory of change is inner space.

How are you trying to lead and bring about change?  How can you shift to an inside-out, dialogue-driven approach?

Being “Fully Known”

“We must try in life to surround ourselves with people who have faith in us and with people with whom we can truly be ourselves.” - Sir Ben Kingsley

I like how Jon Walker, author of The Purpose Driven Life Daily Devotional puts it ...

In relationships the failure to communicate can be extremely frustrating.  But, the failure to commune leads us to despair.

Communication is usually about sharing information – at its most basic level, the transmitting and receiving of meanings.

Communion, however, is about sharing life. It’s about knowing and being known, caring and being cared for on a deep and personal basis.

Perhaps the most pressing need each of us has is to know that we are fully known and yet still deeply loved; that, despite our failures and weaknesses, regardless of our successes and strengths, we are still unconditionally loved.

My wife and I just celebrated our 16th wedding anniversary on Friday.  Thanks Peggy for having faith in me and for knowing me and loving me anyway!