Leadership & the Capacity to Tolerate Pain

In today’s culture we hear a lot about leadership and in many ways live under the assumption that all people must aspire to some level of leadership in their lives.  Leadership does come with its benefits:  Permission is given to have influence; there is a measure of prestige and increased pay associated with leadership; leaders navigate change and shepherd visions; leadership can be a fun ride...  Often, it is also painful.  In fact, church consultant Peter Steinke states that leadership must include the capacity to tolerate pain.  This is true not only in the church world; it is also true in the business world.   We don’t hear much about this reality in leadership literature yet most leaders with whom I speak agree that pain and its partner, loneliness, are a part of the leader’s job description. 

One of the “greatest hit” articles in the Harvard Business Review is entitled Level 5 Leadership:  The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve.  Jim Collins, the author of this article, states that excellent leaders give away credit and take on critique.  This is excellent advice but in the midst of a hard go when the people around the leader have not done their job well, this is hard advice.  And it leads to the pain and loneliness leaders are required to tolerate.

When leaders work at culture change, make mistakes, engage naysayers, mediate disputes, hear critique, manage organizational failures they come face to face with the challenges and pains associated with leadership.  How leaders tolerate pain defines their leadership.  Will leaders blame others for their pain?  Will they lash out against the people they are leading?  Will they become blind to their own contribution to their pain?  Will they become destroyed by the naysayers to the degree that their capacity to shepherd the organization’s vision is compromised?  OR, will they digest (and release) the pain in order to stay grounded and focused on both the organization’s overarching vision as well as what modifications are required of them (not the others) in order to more effectively live into this vision?  Excellent leadership must include the capacity to tolerate this pain.

The Mindful Leader

“The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.”  (William O’Brien)   
I have mulled over this quote at least 100 times.  Is this true?  If it is, I am both humbled and well, scared.  And maybe we should all be.  O’Brien after all was not talking so much about consultants as he was business leaders.  If this is true – it demands of those of us who see ourselves as leaders in any way, “How are we attending to our inner condition?”  
 

My own journey of leadership has led me directly and indirectly again and again into the practice of mindfulness.  While the term mindfulness emerges from the Buddhist tradition, every religion has some version of mindfulness and the practice of mindfulness itself has entered the mainstream in North America to the degree that its benefits no longer reside solely with those who would consider themselves religious.

Mindfulness has four fundamental principles on which it rests:  Attention, awareness, acceptance and release.  Attention invites us to focus on the now, to live fully in the present moment.  Why?  Because to lead well we must have the capacity to listen deeply to the wisdom as it is being revealed to us in whatever moment we find ourselves.  In addition, to be fully present to this moment we must allow our egos to rest in order to be fully present to the other, whoever that might be.  Part of our problem of course is that as we seek to live fully in the moment, our mind stirs up memories, judgements (of self and other), associations and distractions – all of which draw us away from the moment and all of which can enslave us to the protection of our egos.

Mindfulness invites us to become aware of these memories, judgements, associations and distractions, to accept them without judgement and then to release them.  If we are honest, many of us would recoil from the thoughts, feelings and sensations that make their way through our bodies.

 The wisdom of mindfulness is this:  We cannot release that which we have not accepted.  Further, as we practice non-judgement toward ourselves, we learn the discipline of practicing non-judgement toward the other or the situation; allowing a deeper wisdom and compassion to emerge.  

Having both accepted and released themselves, mindful leaders become grounded and almost strangely calm, yet very present; they listen deeply and with compassion for the wisdom emerging in whatever situation they – and the people they are serving – are in.  This is at the center of their gift to the interventions they lead. 

Accountability That Rests On “Tell Me More”

A significant responsibility of those in leadership is to hold others accountable for their opinions and/or for actions they have taken.  Holding others accountable is a difficult task at best and at worst, it leaves those with whom we are working feeling dismayed or even destroyed.  Is it possible to hold someone accountable while allowing them to walk away from our conversation with them with their head held high?  I offer the following phrase as a starting point:  “Tell me more.”

Let us assume that you are leading a meeting and someone at this meeting has offered an opinion with which you disagree.  And let assume that the opinion that was offered was laced with an ounce or two of bitterness, possibly over a decision that did not go as the speaker had anticipated.  Our temptation in these moments is simply to respond to the statement that was made, offering information and possibly defending the decision that was made.  The problem with this approach is that as we defend our position, the speaker tends to become defensive as well.  And in their defensiveness, the speaker entrenches into his/her position.  Further, the speaker has not been effectively held accountable for the opinion they offered – an opinion sometimes based on limited information.

Alternately, let us consider the impact of the phrase:  “Tell me more.”  When the speaker offers their opinion and we respond with a curious question or an invitation for them to tell us more, two things happen:   
1) The speaker must back up their opinion with more information – this is a form of inviting accountability on the part of the speaker for the statement he/she has just made.  
 2)  As the speaker shares more about his/her opinion, he/she is more likely to feel heard, especially if we listen well.

Most people do not actually need to agree with the decision that was made.  What they do need is to feel as though they have been heard – that they have had a voice in whatever issue is being addressed.  “Tell me more” not only ensures people feel heard, in the process it also holds the speaker accountable for the opinion he/she is offering – but doing so in a way that meets the speaker’s need (to be heard) and your own need (to encourage accountability) at the same time.  For a three word phrase, this is not a bad deal at all.

Leadership & Unconditional Positive Regard

In my work, I spend a lot of time thinking about leadership and the impact of leaders on organizational life.  For quite some time now, I have found myself saying the following to the people with whom I work who are seeking to enhance their leadership and/or to become facilitators:  Love the people you are leading.  In fact, in my more bold moments I have been known to say:  If you don’t love the people you are leading, you have no business being in leadership.  This may sound pithy and trite or it may sound too “soft” for the business world, but I believe that if we allow ourselves to really live into this statement, the impact on us and those around us will be profound. 

Recently a student reminded me that the psychologist Carl Rogers more or less said the same thing when he advocated relating to one’s client through the lens of unconditional positive regard.  What Rogers believed and what I have found to be true is that when people recognise themselves as valued unconditionally they are much more likely to change than when these same people are only cared for conditionally.  Rogers, of course, was referring to the therapist-client relationship.  From my experience, the same can be said of the leader – subordinate relationship.  Leaders, like therapists, are frequently engaged in seeking to support and/or challenge another’s behaviour.  The problem is that people who do not feel genuinely accepted as they are will frequently respond to their leader with resistance and defensiveness.  The great irony is that the more we accept people as they are, the more they will feel free to change to become the person they could be.

This does not mean that underperforming is ok.  It also does not mean that we accept poor behaviour in the workplace.  It does mean, however, that the people we lead will more likely reach the high bar we set when they know in their bones that we first accept them as they are. 

Healing the Big Hurts in our Lives – Revisited

A reader shared with me today that my Blog post from several issues ago (Recovery from Big Hurts) left her a little troubled.  It wasn’t that she disagreed with the post.  It was just that it all seemed to go too fast from trauma to a soaring spirit.  I’m glad she expressed her concern because that certainly wasn’t my intent.  When I wrote that post, I had several specific situations in mind.  One of them, from initial trauma to closure was an 18 month journey.  Another was shorter; another longer. 

When we are deep into the hard stuff, many of us would like to rush through it quickly in order to escape to the peace on the other side.  This makes total sense.  The hard reality is that recovery from big hurts takes significant time.   It cannot be rushed.  In fact, rushing that recovery might mean that we are not acknowledging the depth of our pain.  And as the saying goes, unacknowledged pain is transferred pain.  In other words – pain that is unacknowledged will find its way into another area of our lives.  And who among us wants to give that much power to our original hurt?  

Another friend of mine commented to me today that only those who have suffered can really understand another person’s pain.  She’s probably right.  But that kind of compassion doesn’t come from gliding quickly over the hurts in our lives.  It comes from digging deeply into ourselves as we wrestle with whatever it is that is before us.  Eventually this digging and wrestling produces something within us that is pure gift.  We have been in the crucible and ideally, we have emerged refined.

Dealing With Difficult People

Flyers for workshops entitled “Dealing with Difficult People” come across my desk now and then and certainly a quick Google search on this title brings up a host of websites.  It always makes me wonder... Do the people who are being called difficult know this about themselves?  Who are the difficult among us and what makes them difficult?  It is absolutely true that we not so infrequently encounter people in our lives who we and perhaps even others might describe as difficult.  And knowing good skills re: how to manage conversations with these individuals makes really, really good sense.  That said, I’d like to explore the difficult people question from another angle.  For me, the fundamental question when encountering a difficult person is this:  What vulnerability in me is being triggered by this encounter?  What have I not come to peace with in my own life that this person’s behaviour is raising to my attention? 

Many of us will have encounters with difficult people that come and go so quickly, within days we hardly remember the experience.    And then there are those encounters that stay with us much too long, causing us to stay awake at night, creating illness within us...  Perhaps this person is a colleague or family member and we cannot escape the difficult encounters.  Perhaps we are tired and don’t have the energy to manage the difficult person’s insecurities or moods.  Perhaps the other person has, in fact, been inappropriate or rude and their behaviour is not acceptable.  All of this could be true.  In addition, however, we must face the question from the perspective of our own personhood.

Has the “difficult” person’s behaviour triggered an insecurity we have not resolved?  Has our way of communicating triggered an insecurity in the other person that has caused them to react with “difficulty”?   A friend shared with me today that when she recently said the following: “That person makes me so mad,” her spouse reminded her that actually she should say, “I allowed myself to make myself mad at that person.”  I have believed for a long time that the only person we can change is ourselves; our responsibility in life is to reach ever more toward a greater maturity.  One of the first steps on that journey is recognising our own piece of the puzzle whenever we might encounter someone we declare to be difficult.

Defining Forgiveness

Shortly before Christmas and on the heels of the Newtown, Connecticut tragedy, the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail ran an article entitled, How do we forgive?  While I was thrilled to see the article in the paper, the article troubled me.  While the author of the article proposed a definition of forgiveness, it was clear that those interviewed were not necessarily operating out of the same definition as the one proposed.  Those interviewed were not only talking past each other, they were also talking past the person doing the interviewing.  Much has been said about forgiveness over the past 20+ years, yet we still do not seem any closer to a definition to which we all or many can agree. 

The key points of dispute are this:

·       Does forgiveness require the offender to ask for forgiveness or is forgiveness something we do for ourselves, regardless of the repentance of the offender?

·       Is forgiveness the same thing as saying “it’s ok”? 

·       Does forgiveness equal reconciliation?

·       Can we forgive on behalf of others?

According to my own attempts at a definition, forgiveness is the opposite of saying “it’s ok.”  To forgive means there was something that in fact was “not ok.”  And while it is often easier to forgive a repentant offender, we forgive first and foremost for ourselves, to release ourselves from the pain of the event. 

But here it gets tricky:  To genuinely release ourselves from the pain of the event usually involves coming to a place where we are able to see the other as complex, capable of good and bad, just as we are complex, also capable of good and bad.  Sometimes when this happens we are able to extend the hand of grace to the other – when this happens we observe a quality in the human spirit that is so profound, it can only be described as holy. 

Notice though that so far none of this is the same as reconciliation.  Forgiveness – precisely because it is so much a personal journey – can easily be unconditional.  Genuine reconciliation on the other hand goes beyond the personal to directly include the other, it must always depend on the movement of the other as much as on the movement of the self and as such, it is always conditional.