Remarkable Leaders Series – David Whyte in Toronto

Leadership visionary and poet David Whyte is coming to Toronto for an intimate two day conversation with leaders exploring “the three marriages”. David’s new book, The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship, is a meditation on commitment. What does it mean for us to commit to our vocation, to our true selves, and to those we are in relationship with? Rather than view these three commitments as being in competition, David’s book explores how each commitment nourishes the others; how each commitment is, in fact, essential. He intersperses anecdotes from Dante, Rilke, Jane Austen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Pema Chödrön, his own life, and the stories of others to explore how different people in different times and places have met their various marriages, sometimes head on, and sometimes by running away.

So many of the sentences in this book are beautifully crafted, full of truth, and gently humorous. A few of the sentences that caught my attention:

On marriage with the self:

Sometimes the best thing to do is to hold a kind of silent vigil beside the part of us that is going through the depths of a difficult transformation. (p.310)

On marriage to a partner:

To find out our partners’ desires, we must sustain a conversation with them that helps to bring those wants and desires to light. Sometimes we have to do this even when they are afraid of discovering them themselves. The deep, abiding fear is that we will stumble across the desire in them that wants a life different from the one we are capable of giving them. Essentially, we are afraid that they may find that their desire is to love something or even someone else… The crux then, the most difficult ground in the relationship, the portion of a relationship that elevates it to the level of a religious discipline or practice, is that I must “love,” must see the very part of my partner that could take this person away from me. I must keep contact with the part of the person that is pulling him or her into the future, though I risk not participating in that horizon. (p. 251)

On taking the next step, and not clinging to where we are:

People who are serious about pursuing their vocation look for purchase, not for a map of the future or a guided way up the cliff. They try not to cling too closely to what seems to bar their way, but look for where the present point of contact actually resides. No matter what it looks like.

The point of contact is what allows us to take the next step. Sometimes the point of contact is through the next necessary small task completed; sometimes it is through understanding the depth of our exile, the disenchantment experienced in the here and now, the impossibility of it all. Eventually we realize that not knowing what to do is just as real and just as useful as knowing what to do. Not knowing stops us from taking false directions. (p.131)

I’ll be attending David’s program in Toronto October 29 and 30. If you’d like to join us, there are just a few spots left.

Excerpts on Answering Yes

I’m reading The Answer to How is Yes, by Peter Block (thanks as always to Mary Stacey for providing an excellent influx of books).

First off, I thought this book was useful even before I started reading it, because one day as I was trying to figure something out I looked up from my notebook and there was the answer staring me in the face when I saw the book’s title: the answer to how is yes.

I am only 40 pages in or so, but here are a few things that have caught my eye:

pg. 11: “asking How? is a favorite defense against taking action”

pg.12: “The engineer and economist represent mindsets that dominate the culture. The mindset of the artist is increasingly absent in our workplaces. The mindset and role of the social architect is a way of integrating the gifts of the engineer, the economist, and the artist.”

pg. 20: “The desire to get others to change is alive and well in our personal lives also. If only the other person would learn, grow, be more flexible, express more feeling or less feeling, carry more of the load, or be more vulnerable, then our relationships would improve. Most of us enter therapy complaining about the behaviour of parents, partners, co-workers, children. While we may package our complaint as a desire to help them, we are really expressing our desire to control them.”

pg.23: “We need simply to make the subtle shift from ‘How do you measure this?’ to the question ‘What measurement would have meaning to me?’”

pg.24: “Therapist Pittmann McGehee states that the opposite of love is not hate, but efficiency.”

pg.31: “What is the crossroad at which I find myself at this point in my life/work?… We will find meaning in exploring and understanding this crossroad. Our crossroad represents an as yet unfulfilled desire to change our focus, our purpose, what we want to pursue.”

These little excerpts give just a taste of the book. I’m not sure what my overall impression is yet, but am definitely finding sentences to chew on.

The Alchemist: A Transformative Leader

I posted previously about The Seven Transformations of Leadership article by David Rooke and Bill Torbert.

My colleague Mary Stacey, along with Torbert, is running “Action Inquiry: Transformational Leadership in the Midst of Action” this week at the Shambhala Authentic Leadership in Action Institute.

Thinking of that, I reread the Rooke and Torbert article recently, and the characteristics shared by the Alchemist leaders (the Nelson Mandela level of leadership) jumped out at me:

On a daily basis, all were engaged in multiple organizations and found time to deal with issues raised by each. However, they were not in a constant rush — nor did they devote hours on end to a single activity. Alchemists are typically charismatic and extremely aware individuals who live by high moral standards. They focus intensely on the truth. Perhaps most important, they’re able to catch unique moments in the history of their organizations, creating symbols and metaphors that speak to people’s hearts and minds.

I’m many leadership levels away from an Alchemist, but appreciate these characteristics as a way to notice and create the situations that will further my leadership growth, and to notice Alchemists in action so that I can learn from them. Maybe even to see a little bit of alchemy in myself.

“Think Passion, Integrity, Authenticity, Collaboration”

I’ve been reading Fierce Conversations. The preface opens with:

When you think of a fierce conversation, think passion, integrity, authenticity, collaboration. Think cultural transformation.

Think of leadership.

I’ve been slow to post lately, and part of it is because I’ve been trying to put my finger on what exactly I have been learning about working in and with groups. I know the learning is happening, because I’m seeing changes in myself as both a facilitator and a participant. As I read over Susan Scott’s principles for fierce conversation, I thought, “Hmm, maybe that’s it. I am engaging in conversations in a fiercer way [think passion, integrity, authenticity, collaboration].”

Here are, from the book, Scott’s Seven Principles of Fierce Conversations:

1. Master the courage to interrogate reality.
2. Come out from behind yourself into the conversation and make it real.
3. Be here, prepared to be nowhere else.
4. Tackle your toughest challenge today.
5. Obey your instincts.
6. Take responsibility for your emotional wake.
7. Let silence do the heavy lifting.

Reread the above list. Are you ready to incorporate one of those principles – or all of those principles – into some of your conversations today?

Seven Ways of Leading: Which is Yours?

If you saw me anytime in December, I was probably dropping the Harvard Business Review article Seven Transformations of Leadership into my conversation. I read it and couldn’t stop thinking about it, wondering what my own leadership “action logic” was, and where I saw leaders with different action logics.

Authors David Rooke and William R. Torbert say that leaders are made, not born; that there are seven leadership “action logics”; and that with intention, coaching, and practice, one can develop one’s leadership skills along the action logic continuum.

Starting at the bottom and working up to the top leadership style, they list:

• The Opportunist
• The Diplomat
• The Expert
• The Achiever
• The Individualist
• The Strategist
• The Alchemist

While the Opportunist, at the bottom of the scale, “wins any way possible” and is self-oriented, the Alchemist – the pinnacle of the leadership scale – “generates social transformations”.

The good news? Rooke and Torbert believe that anyone can move up the scale and progressively develop their leadership abilities, one step at a time.

What type of leader are you now? What type of leader do you aspire to be? What is your next leadership step?

(Thanks to Sandy McMullen and Mary Stacey at Context Consulting for passing along the article.)

The Primacy of Personal Action

It’s an introspective time and I’m an introspective person. I’m kicking off the new year with a reminder of the importance, not just of reflection, but also of action.

Robert Chambers, the grandfather of participatory methodologies in community development, writes about “the primacy of personal action” in his book Rural Development: Putting the Last First. I printed out part of this section to keep me acting, not just thinking, in the year to come:

It is action that matters. Much of the analysis in this book has been about knowing – about how outsiders perceive or do not perceive rural deprivation. But knowing does not guarantee a change of feeling; and a change of feeling does not guarantee a change of behaviour. So we come to the final, paradoxical, reversal: to start by acting. Changes in feeling and perception can come back to front, from changed behaviour and the experiences it generates. The traditions of science, scholarship and management are to begin with data collection, analysis, and planning, often protracted, often delaying action. But there are usually some obvious things that can be done at once. Not everything can or should be foreseen. It is often best to start, to do something, and to learn from doing.

Tunnelling Through to Authenticity

In conversations and research, I’ve kept coming across one idea over the last year: that for individuals or organizations to keep developing, or to move on into a greater incarnation of themselves, there comes a point where they have to let go of everything that has come before. For the individual this might mean the patterns and reactions that have served them well as their public face; for the CEO it might mean realizing that the strengths that got you to where you are now won’t be what could take you to the next place; for the organization it might mean letting go of something cherished or central in order to make room for something new.

But there is a huge fear, both for individuals and organizations, in letting go of the familiar.

Jonathan Flaum’s Manifesto “Finding Your Howl” says that the fear that holds us back in our complacent familiarity will prevent us from living into our authentic self:

To find our howl we have to pay a price… we may have to sacrifice everything, spend a significant amount of time alone, do things that we believe we can’t do, and walk away from a life that no longer fits our expanding need for freedom. This process may feel like a death. At its most intense, it may terrify us, and at its least intense, unsettle us. This is the price of finding our howl, our own one-of-a-kind authentic voice, and there is no way around it.

… We have to dig through the accumulation of our stuff, our personal history, our geneology, our culture, our choices, our fears, and our need to feel safe… we have to let everything that we examine go along the way and show up with nothing. And this is terrifying, to let go of all that we think we possess…

…The scariest part is when we are in the air releasing our trapeze and not yet touching the other, because unfortunately, it is only when we release the old completely that the new one appears.

Making Our True Move

Mary Stacey, of Context Consulting, and Arawana Hayashi, a master meditation teacher, dancer, and movement instructor, recently teamed up in Toronto to run the workshop Making Our True Move. I was lucky enough to attend.

Arawana has been running variations of her workshop “The Art of Making a True Move” for decades. Mary brings her coaching training, leadership and consulting expertise, and her strengths as a MasterMIND facilitator.

I took away from the workshop a personal realization: that the people I most believe in and look up to are people who have fully realized themselves. They are a variety of people with a variety of strengths – so it’s not that I look at one of them and think, “She’s really good at x; I need to become really good at x.” They just each have become very good at being who they are. They have fully realized themselves. They have come into a full expression of their being.

So rather than look at people twenty years older than me searching for the answer to “How can I be like that 20 years from now?”, I’m realizing that the question of authentic leadership is more something like, “How can I become more fully myself over the next 20 years?”

Otto Scharmer, who, like Arawana, is a faculty member at the Shambhala Institute, writes about the idea of attentional violence:

Attentional violence is to not to be seen and recognized in terms of who you really are–in terms of your highest future possibility. Instead you are only seen in terms of your journey of the past, that is, in terms of the circumstances of the past, in terms of who you happen to be today. People are blind or ignorant of that aspect of your self, that isn’t (fully) born or manifest as of yet.

Who is the victim of such attentional violence? It’s our highest future possibility, our essential or authentic Self.

Coming out of the workshop, I’m thinking about how to grow into my highest future possibility, and support others to do the same.

Integrity and Leadership

I subscribe to the 800-CEO-READ Excerpts blog, which regularly sends me chapter-long excerpts from some of the latest business books. This week’s was from The Integrity Dividend: Leading by the Power of Your Word.

It’s a simple concept: the most effective leaders are also those seen to have the most integrity. “Integrity means the fit between words and actions, as seen by others,” author Tony Simons says. It’s not only making sure we live in line with our values, but also that when others observe us, they – despite any filters or biases they have – will also see that we are living in line with our values.

Simons claims his book is unique in that it makes a business case for integrity (yes, integrity leads to dollars). On the one hand, it’s nice to see some studies showing a business case for authentic leadership. On the other hand, the premise -  that business leaders need to know there’s a payoff in order to choose integrity – makes me sad. To me, leadership assumes integrity, whether or not it’s worth it for your bottom line.

Leadership and Signature Strengths

I recently was reading Boyatzis and McKee’s Resonant Leadership, in which they provide four questions to determine whether someone is a “resonant leader” (p.22).

1. Is the leader inspirational?
2. Does the leader create an overall positive emotional tone that is characterized by hope?
3. Is the leader in touch with others? Does the leader know what is on others’ hearts and minds? Does the leader experience and demonstrate compassion?
4. Is the leader mindful – authentic and in tune with self, others, and the environment?

Around the same time as I read this, I completed the VIA Signature Strengths questionnaire at the UPenn Authentic Happiness website. The questionnaire consists of 240 statements to express agreement/disagreement with, and then the site tabulates the order to which you embody 24 strengths. (There is no quantitative measurement provided, so you walk away knowing your top four or five “signature strengths”, but not the degree to which these are your strengths).

Given my reluctance to use traditional definitions of leadership (authoritarian, powerful, loud) to define how I operate, I was surprised to see leadership show up in my top four strengths. However, working with Boyatzis and McKee’s resonant leadership characteristics, I’m happy to admit my leadership tendencies.

Resonant Leadership makes a strong case for taking personal time for recharging, and connecting with the things that bring you energy. After a week in the Ontario wilderness, followed by a weekend spent facilitating the Board of Directors / Staff meeting for an environmental non-profit group, I’m feeling recharged and reenergized for the next round of work to come.