In Standing in the FireI explore what it means to locate and cultivate the place within each of us from which wise choice and deliberate action comes. People have referred to this place as center, true self, presence, and inner wisdom. Whatever we choose to call it, I believe it is emerging as a new and important frontier for leadership training.
Organizations like Apple Computer, Google and Harvard Law School have discovered that leading from a place of self-knowing, calm, and compassion improves performance, increases creativity, and make us more effective at the art of influence. In the face of uncertainty, conflict, and complexity our capacity to shift our inner state from fear or aggression to calm and receptivity is a key pathway toward high performance.
Recently I had the opportunity to study with Erica Ariel Fox, a gifted teacher who stands courageously at the intersection of business leadership and personal consciousness. As we sat together over dinner, exchanging stories and ideas about leadership, we began to suspect we were long-lost siblings separated at birth. You’ll see what I mean when you watch this video. If you ever get a chance to study with Erica, leap at the experience.
For a long time I believed that the key to resolving a difficult conflict was to help the disputants arrive at logical conclusions to which they could agree. I tried to help people think their way through differences and negotiate compromise based on a rational definition of fairness. Over the years I have come to appreciate the role of heart skills — our capacity acknowledge and address the emotional dimension of the conflict in an authentic and non-manipulative way.
I can remember learning this lesson when I was facilitating a meeting between farmers and farm workers in the state of Washington. The goal of the meeting was to create a plan for newly funded farm worker housing. But within the first five minutes old battles, lingering resentments, and name-calling ensued. The long-festering bitterness in people’s hearts made it impossible to proceed with the agenda. I called for a break and when we reconvened I asked farmers and farm workers to pair up and discuss two simple questions: 1) What makes you proud about producing food for others? 2) Can you tell me a story about when it meant a lot to have a house in your life? After about 10 minutes you could literally feel the shift in the room. Through the stories being told, self-proclaimed adversaries were discovering their shared human connection. As hearts opened so did the possibility for getting something done that day.
One of the best teachers on heart opening skills is Ken Cloke, an author, mediator, and attorney. Ken’s perspective is that we who convene high-heat meetings must learn to be vulnerable and self-aware. In his recent article in ACResolution Magazine Ken offers a number of strategies for mediating from the heart. Among these strategies is to begin the meeting with questions and invitations that go directly to the heart. Here are some of the questions Ken offers:
Why are you here? Why do you care? What did it take for you to come here today?
What kind of relationship would you like to have with each other? Why?
What life experiences have led you to feel so strongly about this issue?
What role have you played in this conflict, either through action or inaction?
What would you most like to hear her say to you right now? What would this mean to you?
What would change in your life if you reached an agreement?
When intense emotions fill the room we often want to take the safe route, pretending the feelings aren’t there or maintaining a superficial frame on the conflict. It’s only when we bring empathy, heart-piercing questions, and and a willingness to move to the deeper levels that we become true catalysts for transformation.
Last summer as strolled through my garden I could see that the leaves of all my green bean plants were turning yellow. So I watered them, fertilized them, and hoed the weeds away. But they just got worse and worse. Then one day I got down on my knees and sat eye to eye with my pathetic looking bean plants. Suddenly I had an entirely new perspective on what was happening. The bottoms of the leaves were covered with hundreds of tiny yellow bugs that were eating away at the plant from below.
Sometimes we need to do what is inconvenient and uncomfortable – to get down on the ground and look really closely at the situation. The difference between standing at arms length and experiencing the issue “on the ground” is significant. Too often conversations in meetings feels a lot like the kind of detached approach I took with my garden – intellectual, comfortable, and completely out of touch with the facts on the ground.
I’ve come to believe that if you want to build a better shopping cart, talk to shoppers. If you want to solve world hunger, talk with those who are finding ways to feed themselves in the midst of scarcity. And if want to create a zero waste company, spend a week diving the dumpsters behind your production facility. Then come together and talk.Ideo’s Human Centered Design Toolkit is a great example of this up close and personal principle in action.
As a consultant and leader, giving up my status as “the expert” and handing over my role as “the authority” is rarely comfortable. And it is almost always what is needed to produce breakthrough thinking, practical solutions, empowered actors — all in service of creating a world that works for everyone.
My friend and colleague Gibran Rivera recently returned from Guatemala where he masterfully facilitated a “think tank” for Reading Village. He describes himself as “shaken up” from his experience.
It’s so easy to think about our facilitative role as a “detached and neutral party.” But Gibran reminds us — and I can certainly say from first hand experience — that so many of the gatherings we facilitate change us in small and large ways. And that’s a good thing.
In Gibran’s most recent blog he eloquently describes the ways in which his heart was “blown open” by his work in Guatemala. Full disclosure #1 — I was a participant in this meeting as a co-founder of Reading Village. Full disclosure #2 — I’m a regular reader and big fan of the IISC blog!
We live in an age of compromise. We’ve learned to be practical and to make concessions — not a bad thing. But there are times when compromise becomes a trap. It becomes a rationale for doing what is convenient, comfortable, and expedient at the cost of our integrity. “Let’s compromise” can at times become a rallying cry for pushing aside our values, abandoning our aspirations, and denying our very well being. It happens incrementally and often in the heat of organizational turbulence when our focus is on simply surviving.
In Standing in the Fire I wrote about the importance of “knowing what you stand for” as a way to locate your clarity and courage when you most need it. Recently Elizabeth Doty has written an exquisite book called The Compromise Trap: How to Thrive at Work Without Selling Your Soul. Doty provides six personal foundations that enable you to stay true to yourself. Each of these foundations is brought to life through stories of leaders who have struggled with and overcome the compromise trap.
One of my favorite chapters describes ten misconceptions about compromise. Here are five of my favorites:
1. Compromise is always healthy
2. Good companies don’t create unhealthy pressure
3. You have to go along to survive
4. You’ll always know if you’re crossing a line
5. Refusing to compromise means fighting back
Have you felt pressured to “play by the rules” in ways that undermined your integrity? If you lead in high-heat situations the answer is probably “yes, on an ongoing basis.” Here’s a good place to begin if you want to reaffirm your personal compass and reclaim your integrity – take Doty’s Personal Foundations Diagnostic. It’s free and takes just 15 minutes to complete.
I’ve written a lot about compassion and empathy as leadership capacities — particularly in high-stakes, polarized, high-emotion situations.
Ever wonder how we humans developed the capacity for empathy? Got ten minutes? Bestselling author, political adviser and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society.
Jeremy takes us through the neuroscience of empathy, developmental psychology, and social evolution in this insightful animated piece.
One of the core practices for everyday readiness that I write about in my book, Standing in the Fire is mindfulness meditation. I and several of the veteran leaders and facilitators I interviewed have used mindfulness meditation to cultivate calm and clarity – especially in preparation for high-heat meetings.
According to researchers at UCLA people who are more mindful are able to turn down the emotional response to anger. Mindfulness is a technique in which one pays attention to his or her present emotions, thoughts and body sensations, such as breathing, without passing judgment or reacting. When people see a photograph of an angry or fearful face, they consistently have increased activity in a region of the brain called the amygdala, which serves as an alarm to activate a cascade of biological systems to protect the body in times of danger. However, people who have the mindful ability to name their emotions (e.g., “I am feeling fearful”) are able to bring prefrontal cortex resources to regulate the amygdala response.
In the simplest terms, this research provides support for the idea that having a consistent mindfulness practice in your life strengthens your ability to make wise choices and take deliberate action in situations where others may be caught up in the emotional intensity of the moment.
As graduation season approaches there is a unique movement afoot. It involves MBA’s committed to leading in the interests of the greater good and living out the principles articulated in an oath. Among the principles included in the MBA Oath are:
I will manage my enterprise with loyalty and care and will not advance my personal interests at the expense of my enterprise or society.
I will protect the human rights and dignity of all people affected by my enterprise, and I will oppose discrimination and exploitation.
I will protect the right of future generations to advance their standard of living and enjoy a healthy planet.
Started by a group of Harvard Business School students, the MBA oath has already been signed by several thousand current and soon-to-be MBAs from throughout the world.
My buddy Elizabeth Doty, author of The Compromise Trap recently blogged about how the MBA Oath helps to address ten common misconceptions about compromise at work. She writes:
The MBA Oath is of immense value as a touchstone that keeps us connected with our highest and best selves. Having that clarity and courage benefits us, because it keeps us in touch with the source of creativity, vitality and self-respect that allows us to create value and reap its rewards. It is better for our businesses because it shifts the focus off clever shortcuts onto the long-term drivers of innovation and value. And it serves our society, because it activates a much broader leadership perspective in the institutions that have so much power to shape the rules of the game.
If you feel this is an effort worth your support, here are two ways to contribute:
1. Consider forwarding a link to people in your network. I’m encouraging all of my classmates and friends from the UCLA Anderson School to sign on!
Hoping to help heal bipartisan rancor, the Faith and Politics Institute invited Frank Rogers, Andrew Dreitcer, and Mark Yaconelli, co-directors of the Center for Engaged Compassion at Claremont Theological Institute to speak to congressional leaders, staff members, and others about a more constructive approach to working with the natural anger, rage, despair, and resentment that emerge in American politics. Here’s what they wrote of their trip to Capitol Hill.
Although “love your enemy” is a primary teaching within spiritual traditions, we receive little instruction on how to work with the negative emotions that our adversaries arouse in us. When fear, anger, and other reactive emotions are triggered, we often respond in one of three ways: we lash out, repress our feelings, or judge ourselves for having such feelings in the first place. In the political arena we demonize one another, returning insult for insult, while the issue at hand is lost. Consider, for instance, the name-calling and fear-mongering that overshadowed the core concerns within the health care debate.
The democratic process is vulnerable to emotional conflict by its insistence that all persons and perspectives be heard. Inevitably, people with differing passions and commitments can feel threatened and enraged by one another. Indulging in these feelings poisons us physically and spiritually, damages relationships, and destroys productive dialogue.
According to the presenters spiritual traditions offer three invitations for working with difficult emotions:
1) They offer means of defusing the grip such emotions can have on us. Contemplative practices, such as mindfulness, nurture an awareness of such emotions within us. Spiritual Traditions give us practices for de-blending, stepping outside of our emotions so we can have an emotion, instead of an emotion having us.
2) Spiritual traditions suggest that extreme emotions are rooted in authentic human yearnings, wounds, and undeveloped potentials. This is counterintuitive. Conventional wisdom says that reactive emotions should be controlled or eliminated. Rather than managing or repressing our emotional reactions, contemplative practices nurture a compassionate connection with their hidden roots.
3) The invitation of spiritual traditions is to cultivate an interior centeredness. Meister Eckhart once wrote, “God is at home. We are the ones who go off wandering.” Politics can drive us far from home, until we feel estranged from the passions and values that inspired us to enter the political process in the first place. Spiritual traditions offer a way back. When we come home to our souls, we are free to claim our personal power while remaining open to the genuine needs of others.
All spiritual traditions acknowledge that this takes practice. On Capitol Hill Rogers, Dreicter and Yaconelli led an exercise they developed called the Compassion Practice. This practice cultivates a deeper awareness of our emotional experience while fostering greater compassion in our interactions with ourselves and others.
What might it mean for us to turn to spiritual traditions and contemplative practices to help ground our political discourse? It could mean more listening and less shouting, more creative problem solving and less defensiveness; it could allow a greater realization of the work that is at the heart of all human life: serving the common good.
When iPad users plugged in last Saturday and began to surf Apple’s new iBookstore one of the books on their virtual shelf was Standing in the Fire. I’m told that it looks great on the iBooks e-reader: smooth page turning and crisp screen delivery with adjustable font, brightness indication, built-in dictionary, bookmarking, and hyperlinks from the table of contents.
One day in the not too distant future I’ll be talking with the children in my life about having written one of the first books to become an Apple iBook and they’ll ask, “Was there ever any other kind of book?” And in that moment I will feel very old.
Last summer as strolled through my garden I could see that the leaves of all my green bean plants were turning yellow. So I watered them, fertilized them, and hoed the weeds away. But they just got worse and worse. Then one day I got down on my knees and sat eye to eye with my pathetic looking bean plants. Suddenly I had an entirely new perspective on what was happening. The bottoms of the leaves were covered with hundreds of tiny yellow bugs that were eating away at the plant from below.
