Care, Curiosity and Exceptional Leadership in Corona Times

Ocean Point Maine September 2019

When I launched my own consulting practice a year ago, it was a time of real disruption for me and a season of transition. Stepping away from the old thing without the new thing being fully formed.

 As has often been my practice when I am navigating something new, I go into a time of deep immersion learning, even as I continue to move into the new thing. A bit of “writing the instruction manual while flying the plane”. ( I am an Enneagram 8, after all)

 My learning journey took me towards a number of things including a coaching certification in the Designing Your Life vocational discernment process, engaging premium content from David Snowden and the folks at the Cognitive Edge,  focused on navigating complexity, and  experiencing the second of two immersion experiences with Change Leadership Wizard Daryl Connor.

 And so, over the last year I have leveraged my learning and integrated it into resources and tools for my clients. Much of this seems to be particularly relevant and useful for the strange times we are now living in and through

 This week I had the chance to collaborate with two trusted colleagues around how I am serving and advising my clients and friends in Corona times.

• Exceptional Leadership in Times of Crisis, an interview with Deb Knupp, Managing Director at Growth Play.

• Care  and Curiosity in Chaos, a conversation with Michaela O’Donnell Long of the De Pree Center for Leadership  

Here are some highlights…

Seek Opportunities without becoming Opportunistic

If you had to describe the current crisis as an opportunity for exceptional leadership, how would you describe it?

Well first let’s just acknowledge the reality of the crisis. It is a big one, it is unprecedented and It is far from over. In the familiar words of Jim Collins we must first confront the Brutal Facts, not all of which we can even know yet. But as we glimpse bits and pieces of the realities we are now facing, It is from THAT place that we can begin to seek out the opportunities. I also believe and am seeing those who are truly searching for and creating the real opportunities and those who are being opportunistic. There is a distinct difference. The exceptional leaders will be firmly grounded in reality, while demonstrating and communicating hope. False optimism will not be believed. Fear-based behavior will paralyze and take an organization down or community down. And the critical thing to listen for in the exceptional leader is one small phrase: “I don’t know” which demonstrates both courage and vulnerability.

Choose Effectiveness over Efficiency

As we examine the past couple of weeks with remote working, how do you anticipate a new era of “virtualization” will positively and negatively affect organizational culture?

The positive is, as one client said to me late last week, zoom meetings can be more efficient, they don’t take as long. And that is true. They still allow us some measure of contact, but there is not much wasted time. You don’t spend the first 15 minutes of the meeting chatting while people get their coffee and get settled. I think we will learn where we can virtualize to optimize time and efficiency, but we are also already seeing that it is far from a replacement for real human interaction.

The shadow of that is that we will try to cram ever more interactions in to our day in the name of efficiency and the reality is that if we do not give ourselves room to process each meeting we will actually become less productive, less efficient. I think we will also become more transactional in our exchanges, and less relational. And what we all need right now, whether we can acknowledge it or not, is relationship.

Creating space for true connection will be a crucial success factor to sustaining or building a healthy culture in the short term, so that when we do come back together we have not lost, but rather built connection and cohesion.

Create Space for Innovation, not Business as Usual

What advice are you giving to your clients to anticipate, prepare and plan to create environments that can grow and prosper despite distress?

Colleagues of mine who run an entrepreneurial incubator and accelerator published an essay about two weeks ago, entitled Leading Beyond the Blizzard: why every organization is now a start up.  In it they used the metaphor of the Blizzard, the Winter and the Ice Age.

Their helpful purpose was to communicate that we are currently in the blizzard, reacting and responding. But if these conditions of shelter in place continue for longer than a week or two, and it looks like they will, then we enter a long winter and our planning needs to take a different perspective. So how do we capture the ingenuity and creativity of everyone in our organization to think through how we adjust adapt and innovate to move forward differently. The truth is that some businesses will not survive this. That is hard and sad and true. But many can and will if they create space for new things to emerge.

Pursue Curiosity over Command/Control

In my experience, leaders generally default to command/control style when they are in crisis and may miss out on the benefits and innovation that can come from teams.  What is your perspective on this?

This is absolutely true. Leaders, most anyway, are problem solvers which often requires a command/control style. And this is good and necessary. BUT NOT ENOUGH and must quickly pass if they are going to realize potential and see where the opportunities lie for their organization and community. I read this great piece this week in a Forbes article:

“A leader’s immediate job is not to discover patterns but to stanch the bleeding. A leader must first act to establish order, then sense where stability is present and from where it is absent, and then respond by working to transform the situation from chaos to complexity, where the identification of emerging patterns can both help prevent future crises and discern new opportunities.

This means that what your organization needs from you right now is fast and effective decision-making and communication, top-down, until order is restored. Establish the necessary (temporary) policy changes around things like compensation, travel and work-from-home, allocate resources to protect your people, make sure there’s infrastructure for people to be working remotely, and so on. There is no time to ask for input.

WHEN THE CHAOS ABATES, LEADERS MUST SHIFT TO NAVIGATING COMPLEXITY

Once strong leadership has helped the organization stanch the bleeding and calm the immediate crisis (likely a few days or weeks), you will shift from dealing with chaos to dealing with complexity. Once in that domain, where unpredictability and flux continue but instructive patterns can emerge (as Snowden says), you must recognize that you still can’t know answers in advance, but best answers and decisive action will emerge if you engage the right mix of people in planning. This is the time to set aside command-and-control for collaboration. As Snowden says, 

“Leaders who try to impose order in a complex context will fail, but those who set the stage, step back a bit, allow patterns to emerge, and determine which ones are desirable will succeed. They will discern many opportunities for innovation, creativity, and new business models.

Leaders who cannot make these shifts—from Clear, to Complicated to Chaotic and then into Complexity and back again; who have not developed the skills to pause and reflect however briefly in this moment, will be the ones whose organizations will struggle to become “exaptive” and will likely not survive this season. “

Moving from an Abundance Mindset, not a scarcity mindset.

While fear and anxiety can produce a scarcity mindset, how have you seen leaders choose to engage an abundance mindset?

I think effective leaders right now are working on contingency planning, stanching the bleeding, tightening everything they can tighten. Preparing for layoffs, and more. And they should. But the exceptional leader is also thinking about how they move into a place of caring and service. I learned of several business owners this week, even as they were making hard decisions, were able to launch a platform in their organizations that allowed for a benevolence fund to be established so that immediate needs could be met for employees whose hours may be cut back or where a spouse has lost work. Similarly, a group of churches in the Denver metro area is doing the same thing. I read of another organization whose business is closed and is able to keep paying its employees, partnering with local restaurants to purchase and deliver food to frontline workers. Keeping local restaurants in business and giving people a way to safely contribute. I am seeing sacrificial leaders, taking enormous pay cuts or reducing their own salaries to near nothing so that they can continue to pay their employees, even when they cannot work. All kinds of businesses are offering their best content online to serve others, many of whom they might otherwise view as competitors. This kind of abundance and generosity is what will help us to care for one another in ways big and small, navigating this season.

Beyond the short term, how can leaders choose to be exceptional and drive future value?

I believe it comes down to this: they will constituently and congruently be demonstrating generosity. They will seek to add value in every interaction, not for something in return but simply because they genuinely want to serve and care for their neighbors. Not because they will receive anything to do, but because in these times, it is right and just.

My favorite passage from the Hebrew bible on this comes from the prophet Habakuk 2:

“I will stand at my watch
    and station myself on the ramparts;
I will look to see what he will say to me,
    and what answer I am to give to this complaint.”

In this moment of utter uncertainty, we can “Look to see what the Lord will say”. There is hope always, however small, even in seasons of true despair. Look up and see….

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.

Injustice Anywhere is Injustice Everywhere

I recently wrote a devotional for my friends at the Made To Flourish Pastors network where I serve on the Board of Directors. MTF’s annual Common Good Conference curates a rich day designed to resource pastors and congregations as they work, serve and worship in their communities. They asked me to write on the topic of justice, framed by this question:

I see injustice, should I remain quiet?

“Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.” Isaiah 1:17 NIV

It might be easy to default to what we believe to be the ‘right’ answer to this question, which is “of course not, you should always speak up when you see injustice.”

But that is an oversimplification.

Speaking up for justice or against injustice is a requirement of the Christian life, but many of us fear doing so because the consequences may be harsh, or fear we may not be heard.  We also can speak from a reactive place which is not helpful. Speaking up against injustice must be deeply engrained in our way of viewing the world and it requires real courage.

This scripture is instructive as it lays out the life of the righteous person. We are “to learn, to seek, to defend, to take up the cause and to plead.”

Calling out injustice is not optional for the Christian, but it must flow from a discipled life where we have learned and worked and helped, not just spoken.

If we only call out injustice from a place of outrage and not from a place of wisdom, then we will be rendered ineffective. And we must realize that we are called to do so, regardless of the outcome.

As a holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel understood this, not just intellectually but also from his lived experience, a place of deep suffering and real wisdom. He knew and lived out his deeply held conviction that silence is not an option:

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” and
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”

We must be living righteous lives that give us the moral authority to speak out against injustices everywhere when we see it. This is the life of a follower of Jesus in its fullest expression.  

Prayer:

Lord, help me to see with my eyes and my heart all the injustices around me. May I ever increasingly steward my influence and power to call out injustice and work for justice in the places where I live, work and serve every day. May I move towards justice from a place of wisdom to bring real change and may I “Say no to wrong. Learn to do good. Work for justice. Help the down-and-out. Stand up for the homeless. Go to bat for the defenseless.” (Isaiah 1:17 MSG)

My next post will pick up the again on the topic of Systems with Part V: Navigating Complexity and Emotional Health. Stay tuned…