human imperfections – The Leadership Professor

What makes leading so difficult?

The hardest part of leadership is knowing what’s really going on. We can’t bring people together to solve a problem or advance a goal if we don’t have shared understanding of what’s happening and what to do about it.

Humans have a strong need to believe that what they understand and see is exactly how the world is. That means we are often clueless about how much what looks like Truth to us is really personal interpretation of what’s going on. It’s as if we are predisposed by Mother Nature to not know how much we don’t know. Why?

Human limits: We can attend to only a limited amount of information and experiences available. And our values, education, experience, cognitive capacities, physical abilities, and developmental limitations influence what we see. We register some things, ignore others, and draw conclusions. All this occurs quickly and outside of awareness.

The result: what leaders see and think can seem more like Truth and the way the world really is than the individual creations and interpretations that they are. The tacit nature of all this can blind leaders to gaps and inaccuracies. It also leaves little incentive for them to question their interpretations or retrace any of their steps from data selection through decisions about appropriate action.

Human need for certainty: We’d never be able to act if we had to think all the time about what we are missing. The big problem is when people create explanations of what things mean and assume that others either see things the same way or, if they don’t, are wrong. Here is the basis for conflict and confusion.

From thought to action: People’s personal interpretations are prescriptions for how they and others should respond. If we see our unit’s budget problem as over-spending, we’ll cut expenses. If we see inadequate allocations, we’ll lobby for more. If we sense embezzlement, we’ll call the cops. You see the ease and the potential complications in all this. We’re often off and running before we’re even sure where we should be heading.

“We carve out order by leaving the disorderly parts out,” concluded eminent psychologist William James. How do we remind ourselves that this is what we are doing?

Successful leaders bring habits of the mind that make them deliberate information gathers who work to understand a situation from multiple perspectives. They respect the need for action, but know that the right response is better than a quick wrong response. They build relationships that enable others to feel safe disagreeing with them. They listen to what other’s tell them and work to confirm (or disconfirm) the accuracy of their perceptions. They test interpretations and experiment with solutions.

Leadership is emotional work. “There’s no leading without bleeding,” Jerome Murphy, professor and former Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, writes in the most recent Phi Delta Kappan.[1] “No matter what we call it — stress, agitation, loss, frustration, fear, exhaustion, shame, confusion, sadness, loneliness, hurt — there’s not an executive alive who can lead without experiencing emotional discomfort.” Anyone who has led – from the head or the foot of the table – knows exactly what Murphy means.

Leaders can’t escape this occupational hazard; however, they can be their own worst enemy in responding to it – turning inevitable job discomforts into personal anguish and self-doubt that erode focus and energy.

“In the privacy of our minds, we can make things worse by fighting our discomfort, getting hooked on our troubling thoughts, and scolding ourselves for falling short. As a consequence, we can sidetrack our work and lose sight of what really matters to us.”

The stage is set for unproductive denial (and an investment of psychic energy pretending we’re not uncomfortable) or negative self-talk (and worries about whether our discomfort is a sign that we’re a flop or, worse yet, no leader at all). “In the grip of mind chatter that sounds like a Greek chorus of naysayers, it’s not unusual to rehash the past, fret about the future, and hang ourselves out to dry,” concludes Murphy.

There are more productive ways to respond, and Murphy draws from psychology and Eastern thinking to suggest six.

1. accept the emotional discomforts at the core of leading: “In doing so, we can hold them more lightly, believe them less resolutely, and take them less personally.”

2. acknowledge distress without clinging to it: “We can have our thoughts rather than be had by them.”

3. focus on changing behaviors, not feelings: “We can accept what we’re experiencing at the moment while still working to make things better.”

4. treat self with compassion, kindness, and care. “Both intuitively and through scientific research, we know that self-compassion is central to well-being.”

5. accept human imperfection: “Self-criticism is often accompanied by an irrational but pervasive sense of isolation — as if ‘I’ were the only person suffering or making mistakes.”

6. keep faith in core values: They remind us what’s at stake and put the inevitable discomforts in leading from and toward them in perspective.

Mindfulness training can help cultivate these habits of the mind. The leadership payback is clear: increased capacities for situational diagnosis, task focus, calm value-centered action, and resilience.

Our internal dramas may still be intense, warns Murphy, but we’ll witness them from a safe, nonjudgmental place where we can respond wisely.

[1] Jerome. T. Murphy. Dancing in the rain: Tips on thriving as a leader in tough times. Phi Delta Kappan (September 2011), 93 (1): 36-41.