Systems Part VI: Leading in Anxious and Uncertain Times

We are indeed in anxious and uncertain times. Perhaps the most chaotic and destabilizing times we have experienced in decades. The closest I can remember in my lifetime are the days and weeks immediately following 9/11. It felt then as though the ground was shifting beneath my feet, that the world had destabilized and become chaotic .

Flights were cancelled for weeks. The financial markets went haywire. Security heightened around our borders. There was so much unknown. Was this a singular strike? Is anywhere safe? My child was only 7 at the time, what kind of world had we created for this next generation? I remember being rocked to my core. Awakening at night and being unable to go back to sleep. Just a few weeks later we took our first flight and many people thought we were crazy, especially since we were flying to Portland ME, the point of entry for several of the hijackers.

I do remember finding solace in my pastoral leaders, who brought a sense of calm and non-anxious presence for many in our congregation who were losing jobs amid volatile economic conditions impacting many industries.

I also found it in the Scripture. Psalm 77 was of particular comfort:

Will the Lord reject forever?
    Will he never show his favor again?
Has his unfailing love vanished forever?
    Has his promise failed for all time?
Has God forgotten to be merciful?
    Has he in anger withheld his compassion?”

Then I thought, “To this I will appeal:
    the years when the Most High stretched out his right hand.
 I will remember the deeds of the Lord;
    yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago.
I will consider all your works
    and meditate on all your mighty deeds.”

Your ways, God, are holy.
    What god is as great as our God?
You are the God who performs miracles;
    you display your power among the peoples.
With your mighty arm you redeemed your people,
the descendants of Jacob and Joseph. v.7-15 Psalm 77

God is present in the disaster and He can be trusted. He is calm in the midst of the uncertainty. We can remember His deeds of the past and be confident He is in the midst of all of this.

I remember a picture that went viral just three days after 9/11 of President George W. Bush with a bull horn and his arm around the NYFD fire chief. Whatever you think about President Bush politically, in that moment he represented a true non-anxious presence. He was clear, congruent, and well defined. In a VUCA season, he calmed the nation.

Today, my newsfeed is blowing up, like yours, with reports of cancellations, quarantines and other radical measure to control a pandemic. And we have not yet even begun to comprehend the economic implications of all of this.

While no one leader or even group of leaders can stop this virus from profoundly impacting our nation and world, it has been discouraging to watch many of our national leaders contribute to the anxiety, rather than calm it. It seems that politics and self-interest are driving leadership decision making, not the best interests of our nation and its people. (More on this next week)

That does not mean that well-defined, non-anxious leaders are not out there, I believe they are everywhere. They are working on the front lines in health care and local government offices, in churches, schools and businesses-large and small. Making hard decisions. Presenting realistic and helpful support to their people in the face of a dynamic situation. So much unknown. We can only take next steps, and work with what emerges.

To borrow a quote from Jim Collins, who described this as “Level 5 Leadership” where both deep humility and fierce resolve were core character attributes, (my paraphrase)

“Positional office hardly guarantees Level 5 leadership, in fact it is often a challenge to look at highly visible leaders and feel confident that they are indeed humble and resolved. Rather look down and around in organizations and in the community and you will see them everywhere—on the shop floor, coaching the baseball team, running the PTA and beyond.”

In the most Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous world most of us have ever experienced, it will be necessary for many of us to step up into this kind of leadership in new ways.

Andy Crouch, in his recent essay, Love in the Time of Corona, says it this way:

“A leader’s responsibility, as circumstances around us change, is to speak, live, and make decisions in such a way that the horizons of possibility move towards shalom, flourishing for everyone in our sphere of influence, especially the vulnerable.”

This is the picture of the well-defined, humble but courageous leaders we need right now, the ones we want to follow in uncertain and anxious times.  With every decision, every communication, every move you make, you are choosing for calm or anxiety in the immediate culture you can influence.

Jesus did not promise us a trouble free life, at the end of John 16, he said:

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” V.33

Love our neighbors well, be wise and prudent, stay in community. And when you encounter high anxiety around you, be the well-defined leader needed in that moment. For in a minute, an hour, a day, a week, sometime very soon, you will need a leader to be that for you.

End Note:. When I planned this blog series last summer, I laid out 6 titles in advance. Long ago this was planned to be the final entry for this blog series. How timely.  Even providential.

Systems Part V: The Well-Defined Leader

“You are allowing the system to define you.”

These were the words spoken to me, with great love and truth, in the midst of a significant leadership challenge I was facing.

I looked at my friend and colleague, an Anglican priest with a background in family systems, and thought, “What in the world is he talking about?”

Over the next several months, he helped me to see that the emotional system I was a part of was compelling me to be someone I was not, stuck in unhealthy patterns, so that the system itself would not to have to change.

Edwin Friedman, in his landmark book A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix describes it this way:

 “I want to stress that by well-differentiated leader I do not mean an autocrat who tells others what to do or orders them around, although any leader who defines himself or herself clearly may be perceived that way by those who are not taking responsibility for their own emotional being and destiny. Rather, I mean someone who has clarity about his or her own life goals and, therefore, someone who is less likely to become lost in the anxious emotional processes swirling about. I mean someone who can be separate while still remaining connected and, therefore, can maintain a modifying, non-anxious, and sometimes challenging presence. I mean someone who can manage his or her own reactivity in response to the automatic reactivity of others and, therefore, be able to take stands at the risk of displeasing. It is not as though some leaders can do this and some cannot. No one does this easily, and most leaders, I have learned, can improve their capacity.”

 And so, began a journey for me that has taken over 7 years and is not yet done. The journey to become a non-anxious presence, one who is not easily jostled by the reactivity of the systems I am a part of or that I am serving. This is not a way to suppress or ignore our emotions, rather exactly the opposite. It is a journey towards emotional wholeness, maturity and integrity.

Emotional maturity is not simply understanding our feelings and emotions, but rather is the ability to see the systems we are a part of in order to recognize where they are healthy, non-anxious and responsive, and where they have become reactive, unhealthy and highly anxious. The well-defined and emotionally mature leader can engage in all parts of the system without enmeshing in its dysfunction or indulging the temptation to disengage completely. She stands firm and clear about who she is, without reacting to the anxiety.

Friedman defines emotional maturity as “the willingness to take responsibility for one’s own emotional being and destiny.”

He goes onto say that most people view leadership as a cognitive phenomenon—what do we need to know to be an effective leader, what I often call the ‘tips and trick’ or the ‘methods and techniques’ approach to leadership; but in reality, true leadership is an emotional process and leaders must be willing to do some very hard work to grow and become increasingly emotionally healthy and mature, to become well defined.

Integrity in the work of emotionally healthy systems is not less than doing the right thing or being honest or moral although this work does include and lead to both of these things, but rather is it is the work of integration, of wholeness. Bringing our emotional beings into coherence with our mental, physical and spiritual beings.

 My own journey towards wholeness has been lifelong, but it is only in the last few years that I have finally made real progress. And I have not done it alone, but with the help of a good therapist, an executive coach and some very good friends. I am now standing more firmly grounded and well defined in who I am and how I am made to lead and work.

I left the organization that was pressing me to remain in an emotionally unhealthy place. It was very hard and required real fortitude for me to step away, when my (unhealthy) pattern had always been to stay and rescue. But I did it. And my work now is entirely focused on helping others- both individuals and organizations -become emotionally healthy and well defined, to become increasingly coherent and integrated.

We live in a highly anxious time, especially in our country right now. Everywhere we turn, there are forces trying to define us and conform us to unhealthy emotional systems, whether in our families, our workplaces, our communities or our public lives.

The Apostle Paul (a very well-defined leader himself) tells us differently. In his letter to the church of Rome. He says it this way:

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.”

Romans 12:2-3

He is counseling us to ‘think of ourselves with sober judgement’- not too highly, but not too lowly either. And to define ourselves well to the anxious world from a place of calm and presence, and not conform to it.

This journey towards wholeness is not for the faint of heart. I have found that many leaders do not wish to undertake it because addressing their emotional selves and and the emotional systems at play in their organizations feels messy, scary and even unnecessary. But when they come to a place of real pain and suffering, a place where what they know is no longer serving them and they find themselves dis-integrating, they may be ready to reach out for help. Where are you in your journey towards emotional health and creating emotionally healthy organizations?

Tamim Partners is here to walk with you as you navigate this journey. And it may well be the most important journey of your life.

Email lisa@tamimpartners.com if you’d like to explore how we work.

Systems Part II: Navigating Complexity by Gaining Perspective

Choosing to pause and seek perspective in the face of a pressing issue or need can feel counter intuitive, but it may be the best and only path forward for leading in a complex world.

When we are faced with a challenging and perplexing problem to solve, our first response is often to become a bit anxious (or maybe a lot anxious) and quickly react, and often cause others to react with us so that we can find solutions fast. There are a number of ways we do this- through attempting to solve our way forward (engineering thinking), or optimize our way forward (business thinking) or analyze our way forward (research thinking). And these methods can be useful when the problem we are trying to solve is fairly simple and straightforward, where best practices can be utilized—how have we addressed a like problem in the past that can be categorized and responded to with familiar and tested tactics and strategies. Or the problem might be more complicated, but has enough familiarity to analyze and then respond, trying tactics or strategies that can be adapted to fit the new problem.

But when the problem is unfamiliar and cannot be categorized, attempting to address it through these more familiar means will never get us to a good outcome. It is in the place of the unknown where innovation most often occurs. 

A number of years ago, my longtime colleague and one of the Tamim Partners, Rick Wellock, brought me a DVD to watch called The Design and Beauty of the Butterfly. After watching it several times, we processed it together and he noted, quite profoundly, that there were 4 apparent elements to the transformational process.

• Perspective- the interaction in which a subject and its parts are viewed- a point of view

• Paradigm- a theory or group of ideas about how something should be done or thought about

• Structure- the way something is built or arranged, or the way a group of people are organized

• Process - a series of actions that produce something or lead to a particular result.

A caterpillar does not become a butterfly simply by becoming a bigger or different caterpillar. Rather real transformation is going on inside the chrysalis that is causing something radically different to emerge on the other side.

These four elements start with perspective. Entering into a chrysalis provides a radically different perspective for the caterpillar, who has spent most of its life singularly focused on one thing- eating and eating some more.

So what if addressing a problem or issue of complexity, where no immediate solution or even outcome can be readily defined, requires a counter-intuitive move? To pause, step back, become curious and sense not the whole solution, but rather just to a step forward to learn and then take another step forward.

 Gaining perspective requires us to be able to resist the temptation to react, become anxious and then ignite unproductive activity in ourselves and our teams. Rather, we step back and even away from the problem for a bit. Maybe only a few minutes, maybe a few hours or even a day or two. Look at other environments where we might probe and ask questions.

Years ago, Doug Wilson, Founder of Monon Capital and Sagamore Institute board member, shared with me over dinner his theory on how best to address complex issues. He required his team members to have what he called “orthogonal” experiences each year. Orthogonal, a geometry term, is defined as “ Such perspective lines are orthogonal, or perpendicular to one another. The orthogonal definition also has been extended to general use, meaning the characteristic of something being independent (relative to something else). It also can mean non-redundant, non-overlapping or irrelevant.”

It is the latter part of the definition that Doug was pointing us towards. To enter into a an experience that is seemingly independent or non-overlapping to our current circumstance. Doug believes, as I do, that most true transformational learning happens through metaphor and analogy. Perhaps this is why Jesus taught most often in parables.

It may be the best solution to your current complex issue will not be found in the tried and true, or the urge to rely on best practices, but rather to step outside of our current circumstance and seek perspective. This can be as simple as turning off your phone for 15 minutes and taking a walk outside. Or doing something new—a jazz festival, bungy jumping or hiking a new trail.

In complexity the path forward is not found in the familiar or comfortable. It is found, over time, in curiosity, imagination and creating space to remain non- anxious in the face of adversity and complexity.

Embedded in our practice is leading with presence and character by cultivating the core practices of mindfulness along with doing deep identify work so that you start by sensing both internal and external states, being grounded deeply- physically, emotionally and spiritually, and then acting from that grounded place. It is here that we have more capacity to address challenging issues over time, while maintaining a non-anxious presence in your organization.