Crosby B.C., Bryson J.M. - Leadership for the Common Good (2005)(en)

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Personal Leadership

The work of understanding oneself and others and using this understanding to achieve beneficial change is a lifelong process. We suggest three especially helpful practices for achieving such understanding in relation to leadership for the common good:

1.Discerning the call to leadership

2.Assessing other personal strengths and weaknesses

3.Appreciating diversity and commonality

These practices should help aspiring leaders focus on what many scholars, researchers, and philosophers have found helpful in responding to the highest hopes and deepest needs of leaders, as well as of their constituents and colleagues.

Discerning the Call to Leadership

As we suggested earlier in this chapter, leadership begins with being in touch with what truly matters to you. Identifying your cares and concerns and attending to the larger world around you can assist with this work. You may also want to create (or review) your personal credo (see Kouzes and Posner, 1993). In many of our courses and workshops, we have used a self-assessment tool called “Exploring Personal Highs and Lows,” which prompts participants to review their lives and reflect on patterns of success and failure (the peaks and pits). Exercise 2.5 is loosely patterned on a more elaborate charting exercise described in The Leadership Challenge (Kouzes and Posner, 2002). You may want to take time now to do the exercise yourself, in order to reflect more deeply on your own leadership call. Like Parker Palmer, we believe analyzing your mistakes as well as your achievements can help you discern your calling (Palmer, 2000).

Reviewing your own history may reveal that you have grasped opportunities for leadership—or, as Bob Terry was fond of saying, that they may have grasped you! Randy Shilts’s book about the early AIDS crisis is full of examples of people who were propelled into leadership by the experience of caring for those with AIDS, or of contracting the disease themselves (Shilts, 1988). As you consider your history, you may find that you set out to make great changes in your organization or community. You may also find that

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you are gripped by some unexpected need: the organization is falling apart and you are in a position to help. Drug dealers are taking over the neighborhood, and one day you’ve had enough and phone your friends and start talking about what all of you might do together to fight back.

You might reflect on what has made you receptive to the call to lead. Physicians such as Conant, Gottlieb, and Laubenstein made serious professional commitments to care for ill human beings, and when they encountered a mysterious and deadly disease in their patients they began doing everything in their power to mobilize professional networks and governmental agencies to give priority to understanding and treating the disease. Gay filmmaker and writer Kramer worked fiercely to wake up the New York gay community and the broader citizenry to the dimensions of the AIDS crisis, because he had already developed a deep concern for the effects of the sexual excesses of gay liberation—a concern presented in unvarnished detail in a controversial novel he had written previously.

People who attend our semesterlong seminars sometimes make dramatic career or life changes during or just after the program so as to act on their own call to leadership. Although we might like to claim credit for these changes, we think the seminar was simply an occasion for them to listen to their call and act on it. They probably had done considerable work identifying what they cared about and building commitment to it. They may have taken our seminar because they already were aware of a big gap between their deep commitment and their ongoing activities. Each of these participants was ready to pay attention to what unique contribution he or she could make to achieving the common good.

Note that at the conclusion of the “personal highs and lows” exercise we urge you to share the results with someone you trust, and listen to his or her observations. Obtaining other people’s views can deepen your understanding of the passion that energizes your leadership. The reflections of others may also help you delve into the shadow side of passion. Commitment to a just cause may blind us to the truth in another perspective. We may feel the righteousness of our own conviction so much that we’re blind to our own shortcomings. We may become so intent on helping strangers that we ignore the needs of the people around us. Robert Quinn (2000) advises us to keep in mind that we’re all hypocrites. We

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need to recognize that even as we aspire to high ideals of continuously caring for others or fighting for social good, we have spells of spitefulness, misdirected anger, and outrageous selfishness. Our evil twins emerge and stun us with their vitality.

Once you are fairly clear about the public passion that summons you to leadership, you can continue the discernment process by exploring how it matches the ethical principles that you deem most important. Additionally, you might want to assess your leadership commitment by using questions drawn from the main ethical categories identified by Robert Terry in Authentic Leadership (1993):

•To what extent does my commitment affirm human existence and development, as well as ecological diversity and survival?

•To what extent does my commitment help ensure that everyone has the necessities of living and is allowed to fulfill his or her potential?

•To what extent does my commitment promote fairness, especially in the distribution of resources?

•To what extent does my commitment affirm every member’s participation in the decisions that shape a group or society?

•To what extent does my commitment foster love—that is, care, respect, and forgiveness toward oneself and others?

•To what extent does my commitment promote personal responsibility and promote a thriving future for the earth and its inhabitants?

By reflecting on your life’s commitments, you are engaged in soulwork, the process of staying in touch with the deep center that resides in each of us and is connected to the creative spirit of the universe (Bolman and Deal, 2001; Quinn, 2000; Loeb, 1999). Soulwork both clarifies and sustains passion and probes the personal shadow: “Though soulwork can be thought of as a spiritual journey, it is not about separating from the mundane material world. . . . It is about seeking the mysterious in the ordinary. It is experiencing our unity or connection with the humblest object, as well as the most dazzling. It is not about leaving the earth, but about knowing deeply the cycles of earthly life. It is about releasing our desire to laugh and cry about the human condition” (Crosby, 1999, p. 44).

Soulwork helps us claim power as co-creators of the universe and discern the unique gift we can make to the world (Becker,

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1973). It helps us answer the question, What will I live for? Sometimes the question is put in a contrasting way: What am I willing to die for? The first question, however, is probably more helpful, since people working for the common good should hope for a long life, and since necessary sacrifices may be easier to deal with in the context of what we seek to embody.

Discerning the call to leadership may be helped by going on a retreat, or simply taking a break from normal pursuits. In 1990, Schmidheiny had time to reflect, because he was taking a break from his business career. He spent some time worrying about the future of the planet and made a speech in Norway about the possibility of creating “a world in which what was good for the planet was good for business” (Holliday, Schmidheiny, and Watts, 2002). Maurice Strong was in the audience and pressed Schmidheiny to act further on his concern by spreading the idea of sustainable development among business leaders and coordinating a business response for the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development.

Reflection may come more easily and be more necessary at life’s transition points, as was the case with Schmidheiny. Transitions are a time when reviewing commitments makes sense (Bridges, 1980).

Aids for reflection include journal writing, religious or spiritual practice, artistic endeavor (photography, drawing, painting, singing, dancing, writing poetry). Insight and guidance can come from nonfiction books, notably Leading with Soul (Bolman and Deal, 2001); The Critical Journey: Stages in the Life of Faith (Hagberg and Guelich, 1995); Change the World (Quinn, 2000); Leadership from the Inside out (Cashman, 1999). Novels, plays, and films can also awaken an audience to social concern and self-knowledge.

You may want to write your autobiography as a way of reflecting on your commitment. Include your highest hopes and deepest fears; successes and failures; people and events that have shaped you; cultural, economic, political, and technological forces that have affected you. You might convene a conversation to tap your own and others’ wisdom. Margaret Wheatley’s Turning to One Another (2002) suggests some questions to get people talking about what matters to them. Pasquale Pistorio, CEO of the Swiss company STMicroelectronics, reports that conversation with his son caused him to accept a “moral responsibility for protecting

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the environment” and commit his company to sustainable development (Holliday, Schmidheiny, and Watts, 2002, p. 127).

Assessing Other Personal Strengths and Weaknesses

Your public passion, or commitment to lead, is a fundamental leadership asset. Other vital strengths are integrity and a sense of humor; awareness of your preferred or habitual ways of learning and interacting with people; a sense of self-efficacy and courage; cognitive, emotional, and behavioral complexity; commitment to nonstop learning; authority and other resources; supportive personal networks; balance; and awareness of how leadership is strengthened and weakened by your location in major social hierarchies. (The focus here is on general leadership strengths and weaknesses. Certain aspects of each apply to specific leadership tasks and change efforts.)

Integrity and a Sense of Humor

People trust those they believe will behave in accordance with espoused values that are based on ethical principles. Integrity demands that you know what your guiding ethical principles are, and that you generally live by them across your multiple social roles. It requires being honest with yourself and others. This does not mean, however, that you should constantly worry about perfection, but simply seek to be perfected by a commitment to acting on your beliefs (Quinn, 2000; hooks, 2000). You’ll also need the ability to forgive yourself and those who don’t manage to fully walk their talk. You’ll also need a sense of humor about your own foibles and those of others. James Hillman reminds us: “The laughing recognition of one’s own absurdity in the human comedy bans the devil as effectively as garlic and the cross” (1997, p. 222). Jeffrey Luke offers a helpful discussion of integrity and notions of virtue and character in Catalytic Leadership (1998). Also helpful is David Shapiro’s Choosing the Right Thing to Do (1999).

Ways of Learning and Interacting

You may want to use such formal self-assessments as the MyersBriggs Type Indicator (http://www.cpp-db.com/index.html) or the Dimensions of Leadership Profile (http://inscapepublishing.com)

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to help clarify your preferred or habitual ways of learning and interacting with people. Both of these instruments are administered by facilitators who have been trained in helping you interpret the results. Other assessments can be self-administered and interpreted. For example, the Keirsey Temperament Sorter is available online at http://keirsey.com. These assessments are best used as hypotheses to guide further observation, reflection, and desired change, not to place yourself or others in a rigid category. They can help you understand why it’s easier to relate to some people than to others, what helps you learn, or why you don’t seem to fit in certain groups or work environments. The assessments also help you think about the strengths and weaknesses of your own approaches and of quite different approaches.

Sense of Self-Efficacy, Optimism, and Courage

Helping others pursue major change is likely to be a scary, risky, protracted business requiring a large amount of determination, persistence, and resilience. Martin Krieger’s book Entrepreneurial Vocations underlines this point (1996). Self-efficacy, optimism, and courage are crucial assets in this work. Self-efficacy essentially is the confidence that one’s efforts will produce desired results, or at least make a significant difference. Optimism is closely connected to selfefficacy. Many authors emphasize the importance of an optimistic, though pragmatic, outlook for those who would inspire and mobilize others. James Kouzes and Barry Posner call for “flexible optimism” (1993); James Collins and Jerry Porras call for “pragmatic idealism” (Jacobs, 1994). Cleveland goes further and recommends “unwarranted optimism” (2002). He says leaders need “a mindset that crises are normal, tensions can be promising, and complexity is fun” (Cleveland, 2002, p. 8). Using some of the self-assessment methods mentioned earlier in this section can help you recognize your own strengths, which constitute a base for feelings of self-efficacy and optimism. Martin Seligman (1998) and Albert Bandura (1997) offer further insights about how to develop optimism and self-efficacy. We’d like to reinforce the notion of restrained self-efficacy and practical optimism. Yes, leaders need great self-confidence and optimism, but they need to recognize their limitations as well. As the authors of Common Fire put it, leaders need to “balance hubris and humility” (Daloz, Keen, Keen, and Parks, 1996, p. 226).

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Self-efficacy and optimism enhance courage—the willingness to venture into the unknown, to go against the prevailing wisdom, to be vulnerable, to be radically innovative, to keep on in the face of adversity. Moving through fear or letting go of it is often not easy, but it’s vital to overcome the barrier to connecting authentically with others (Terry, 1993, 2001). We recommend looking back over your life to find occasions when you’ve been courageous (the highs-and-lows exercise might reveal some of these). We also recommend sharing personal stories of courageous action with a group of friends or colleagues.

Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioral Complexity

Cognitive complexity includes the capacity to see systems, to identify the interconnections among ideas, people, and organizations. It often refers to the ability to gather and organize many strands of information, to reenvision systems, to carve out new paths or directions, to take the long-term as well as the short-term view. Rosabeth Moss Kanter talks about “kaleidoscopic thinking—a way of constructing patterns from the diverse fragments of data available and then manipulating them to form different patters” (Kanter, 2002, p. 53). Robert Quinn talks about “bold-stroke capacity,” the ability to transcend a complex system and see a clear, even simple way forward (Quinn, 2000). Cognitive complexity includes comfort with ambiguity and paradox. Cognitive complexity also requires attention to differing points of view. If you are going to lead diverse people, you need the ability to accept the validity of many perspectives and truths. You’ll need to work out your own perspective and, as Drath says, see through and beyond it. In other words, you need to understand your own worldview as “useful, sensemaking and truth giving, but incomplete, not the whole of reality” (Drath, 2001, p. 149). Cognitive complexity is sustained by the habit of reflection—the practice of stepping back from the systems and worldview in which you are enmeshed, thinking about how they work, questioning assumptions, and identifying limitations of the systems and worldview (Kegan, 1994). For another take on cognitive complexity, see Hooijberg, Hunt, and Dodge (1997).

Emotional complexity, or emotional intelligence, complements cognitive complexity. Emotional intelligence includes the ability to recognize and express one’s own emotions, practice self-discipline,

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and understand and respond to the views and feelings of other people (Goleman, 1995; Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee, 2002; Salovey and Mayer, 1997). It is the basis of empathy, the capacity for experiencing the world as another sees it. Obviously, emotional intelligence is vital for building and sustaining relationships with those we seek to lead. Janet Hagberg (1995) advises would-be leaders that it’s especially important to question their negative perceptions of other people. She urges all of us to list the qualities we dislike about someone, and then consider how these are the very qualities we have trouble seeing in ourselves. She doesn’t recommend trying to get rid of the despised quality so much as confronting it and trying to learn from it. Megan Boler warns against an unquestioning emphasis on emotional control, noting that “emotions function in part as moral and ethical evaluations” (1999, p. xviii). She points out that power relations affect cultural definition and evaluation of emotions—for example, a greater value put on reason rather than emotion.

Behavioral complexity is the ability to draw on one’s cognitive and emotional intelligence in acting appropriately for the demands of a particular situation (Hooijberg, Hunt, and Dodge, 1997; Hooijberg and Schneider, 2001). It requires understanding and comfort in a variety of roles; a leader may need to adeptly balance or integrate the roles of parent, administrator, teacher, community volunteer, and follower. Leaders also need the ability to enact their roles differently according to context; see, for example, Irving Goffman’s insights about the “presentation of self” (1959). Behavioral flexibility should not be confused, however, with opportunism and lack of a moral compass. Leaders who hope to sustain integrity (and effectiveness) must adopt behavior that clearly reflects their core values.

Gary Cunningham demonstrated considerable cognitive, emotional, and behavioral complexity in his work with the African American Men Project. As county planning director he has carried out tough, complicated assignments. He had to keep in mind a diverse array of stakeholders: county commissioners, other public officials, businesspeople, community groups, schools, professional organizations, staff, service and advocacy groups. He saw problems affecting African American men as a system. He believed a breakthrough was possible but knew he would have to keep his own

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emotions in balance as he looked fully at the practices that had kept many of these men from being productive citizens. He had to accomplish a fine balancing act of managing his relations with powerful politicians and businesspeople, quirky academics, and African American community leaders, some of whom didn’t hesitate to express their anger, frustration, and skepticism that government initiatives would bring progress.

Authority, Skills, and Connections

Among the assets that each of us brings to our leadership work are authority, specialized skills, and connections. Authority may come from our position in our family or in an organization; it might come from the moral example we present. In the African American men case, Stenglein had significant authority over the time, money, and attention of county commissioners and county departments. Cunningham had authority by virtue of his job title and a lifetime of connection with the African American community, people at the University of Minnesota, and government and nonprofit leaders. Milligan had prestige and connections through his vice presidency of a local bank. The senior academics involved brought a host of analytic tools and synthesizing capabilities. Younger county staff, community activists, and researchers brought particular personal connections and research, writing, and speaking skills. In the AIDS case, an example is Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who combined medical expertise and conservative credentials to overcome the resistance of others in the Reagan administration to launching a major AIDS prevention campaign.

Commitment to Continuous Learning

An ongoing curiosity and devotion to learning contribute to cognitive and emotional complexity and acquisition of the specific knowledge and skills needed for leadership work. In addition to formal education, consider putting yourself in unfamiliar situations and encouraging fearless, constructive feedback from those who know you well. Find mentors in expected and unexpected places. Janet Hagberg (1995) recommends, for example, that a person who is at home in “mainstream society” seek a mentor from the social fringes.