If you read my blog regularly, you know I believe we can learn much about leadership and life from the arts. 30 deans at the top business schools agree. They offered their suggestions for a silver-screen curriculum on leadership, ethics, power, and relationships at work. Click here for their list and something about each film.
Popcorn, anyone?
If asked, most of us would say that it’s good to speak up, tell the truth, and say what we mean. Yet we often fall well short of candor for two main reasons: fear and lack of skill. We’re afraid we’ll hurt ourselves or someone else. Do we tell the boss something he doesn’t want to hear? Do we tell our colleagues something that will upset or anger them? Should we admit we’ve made a mistake? Even if willing to speak up, if our attempts at candor are awkward, confusing or inflammatory, no one is helped.
A key element of skilled candor is describing your reality, not “the reality.” Speaking up openly and honestly isn’t the same as venting, shooting from the hip, bluster, argumentativeness, or attack – all of which prime others to resist rather than understand your message. It helps to remember the distinction between your truth and the Truth. When you say, for example, “This is how I see it,” you’re describing your reality. When you say, “This is how it is,” you claim to know not just your perception, but the Truth. No one knows your reality better than you, but anyone can claim to know the Truth at least as well or better than you do.
To describe your reality you need to know it and accept it as your unique take on the situation. A first step is reflection – looking within and asking yourself what you are thinking and feeling and why.
If, for example, you’re in a meeting and find yourself thinking, “This is all stupid. We’re going nowhere.” you could say that, but you’d be making a claim about the Truth that has little chance of being a productive contribution and may be very different from what others are experiencing. A brief reflection on what’s happening for you might reveal that you’re feeling confused and have lost track of what the conversation is about. That lets you say something like, “I don’t know how anyone else is feeling, but I’m lost. I don’t know where we’re going. Is it clearer for you than for me?” That statement shares your reality while giving others permission to see it differently. And it ends with a question asking others to take stock on how things are going.
You can strengthen your capacities for skilled candor when you:
Know yourself. Regular practices like journaling, meditation, or activities that encourage mindfulness build your capacities for self-reflection. Mindfulness is an important leadership skill, essential for monitoring your ongoing assessment of process – how you think things are going in your interactions with others – as well as content – the progress you believe you and others are making on the substance of the task at hand.
Slow down your reactions. Recognize that they are just that – your reactions.
Cool your inner critic. Resist jumping to fast conclusions and ask yourself why when you do.
Use “I” statements, if necessary, to develop the right habits of the mind. It may feel awkward at first, but it’ll keep you honest and focused on what’s happening for you.
Leadership is all about effective relationships and strong communications. So remember, the goal in all this is to find ways to engage others in honest conversations that enable you and others to learn — about what’s happening for individuals, about what’s happening in the exchange, and about how to work more effectively together.
I’m a Malcolm Gladwell fan. He has a capacity that educators treasure: the ability to review research on a complex topic and synthesize it into a teachable moment. To add icing on the cake, Gladwell also makes his teaching points usable by putting them in a form others can easily remember. Whether you buy everything Gladwell proposes or not, he gets you thinking.
BusinessInsider.com has a series on Gladwell’s Top 12 Mind-Blowing Ideas. Take a look.
Why is this important to leaders? Here are my Top 10 reasons why you can’t afford to ignore Gladwell’s work.
I am a strong believer in the power of the arts for education and development. I was pleased to see an international gathering at the Salzburg Seminars in Austria this spring on The Transformative Power of Music concur.
Music opens the mind and heart to foster the innovative thinking that today’s – and tomorrow’s leaders – need. I won’t bore you with the neuroscience, just remind you that music is a heck of a swell way to rewire your brain and enhance your creative capacities. Play with others, and you enhance your skills in collaboration, listening, team work, and more.
The Salzburg Seminar Fellows felt so strongly about the issues, they drafted a manifesto for governments, thought-leaders, funding agencies, and educators.
“We believe that music is a proven gateway to engaged citizenship, personal development, and well-being. Only through urgent and sustained action can we foster a new generation of energized, committed, self-aware, creative and productive members of society."
You can find the full manifesto, the final report from Seminar, and videos of the week’s highlights (including some great music and interviews on the latest from neuroscience) at http://www.salzburgglobal.org/current/news.cfm?IDMedia=60456
It’s well worth a look and a listen, Share it with policy and decision makers you know. And it’s never too late to start those piano lessons yourself! The ROI is guaranteed to be strong.
The Chronicle of Higher Education Online had a piece on hiring that gave me pause. It tells the story of three candidates interviewing for a senior campus leadership position. Two played it safe and maintained distance from their audience with formal titles and podiums during their public forums. The third – who had tremendous support after a day of interviews and the strongest scholarly record among the three candidates – tried to demonstrate the values that would underpin her inclusive leadership style by suggesting more informality. Guess which two candidates were seen as real leaders?
[Skip to the text under the dotted line below if you want more case details before reading my comments.]
As a leadership scholar, I am struck by three things in the story. First, the power of the implicit leadership models we all carry – and how quickly and effortlessly they surface. If a candidate looks like what we think a leader should, acts like we think a leader would, then we must be seeing a leader, right? Maybe. Or we might be mindlessly projecting assumptions that have more to do with history and stereotypes than real leadership.
Second, our tacit models are often very traditional. In an increasingly complex, global world with serious challenges that we seem unable to resolve – war, poverty, violence, disease, oppression, threat of nuclear holocaust, destruction of the environment, and more – we need diverse ways of leading that capture collective wisdom and mobilize action like never before. Real leadership is about shared purpose and innovative problem solving, not blind adherence to hierarchy and protocol. To quote Einstein: We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. Substitute leadership for thinking in the quotation, and you get my point.
Third, gender’s at play one more time. “Acting like a girl” wasn’t intended as a compliment, I’m sure – even though I love the free spiritedness and exuberance implied in a non-evaluative use of that imagery. Nor was it an objective way to describe that the informal introduction and chair moving didn’t accomplish their intended purpose. A different framing of the event might have seen risk taking, an attempt to create real dialogue, and authenticity.
I have had lots of experience in academia and seen differential treatment of male and female candidates in searches of all kinds over the years. That leads me to posit that a male candidate trying the same seating circle might have been praised for his frame-breaking behavior and his humble expression of his humanity. If not praised, I doubt anyone would have pejoratively said he’s “acting like a boy” for trying it.
It’s time to expand how we see and think about leadership.
Holding onto stereotypes and traditional views – the leader as superman, the white knight on his trusty steed, the valiant warrior, the lone hero in search of the holy grail – clouds our perspectives toward leadership and wastes energy holding onto an outdated fantasy. It makes it hard to understand how ordinary people – those who differ from the stereotype because of gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, and other reasons – can successfully wear the leadership mantle. It also blinds us from looking below the surface of leadership’s perceived aura to identify what leadership really is and how it works.
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From What Does a Leader Look Like?[1]
Quick, when I say “leader,” what comes to mind? The question is prompted by a story a colleague shared about her university’s recent search for a senior leadership position during which one candidate had an amazing day on campus and then went down in flames in the final hour.
As is the case in many senior searches, candidates spent the day meeting and meeting and meeting. At the end of their day on campus, members of the campus community were invited to a large room with theater-style seating to hear each of the candidates speak. The format was to be the same for each meeting. The search chair would introduce the candidate, the candidate would speak for 20 minutes, and the audience would be invited to ask questions for the remainder of the hour.
Candidate No. 1, a man, came to campus first. Said candidate was introduced as “Dr. Candidate,” he spoke and then took questions.
Candidate No. 2, also a man, came to campus second. He was introduced as “Dr. Candidate,” he spoke and then took questions.
Candidate No. 3, a woman, came to campus last. As he had during each visit, the search-committee chair approached the podium. This time, he said to the audience, “While I would normally introduce today’s guest as ‘Dr. Candidate,’ she specifically asked me to introduce her as ‘first name,’ so let me introduce you to ‘first name last name.’” This prompted smiles from some and raised eyebrows from others. And then it was time for the talk. Did Candidate Three stand up and begin with her prepared remarks? No, she asked everyone to move chairs into a circle “so we can really talk.” Ten chairs in a circle might not be hard. Fifty plus? Apparently awkward.
Candidate No. 3 was clearly trying to demonstrate her commitment to inclusion and show that she is a good listener, and her supporters argued that she would introduce a consensus-style form of leadership that would bring the campus together. While not disputing that she was the most accomplished scholar, her opponents criticized her for failing to behave like a leader. Some even criticized her for “acting like a girl.”
Clearly, many people have views about how a leader is expected to behave, and candidates take a risk when acting outside of expected norms. What do you think? Are we holding on to old mental models of leadership?
[1] Allison M. Vaillancourt (2011). What Does a Leader Look Like? Chronicle of Higher Education Online.
June 20, 2011, 10:40 am
We can learn about innovative leadership from Dale Chihuly. We can also see important links between innovation and collaboration by exploring his approach to his art.
Chihuly’s current exhibition, Through the Looking Glass, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston brings all this home.
I’ve been a Chihuly fan for twenty years, but this exhibit tops anything I’ve seen – and is a testament to how the artist has pushed the boundaries of his art and medium over his career. The Ikebana boat (below) was an Alice in Wonderland moment of pure pleasure and awe. It also spoke to the ongoing experimentation, learning from experience, passion for innovation, and teamwork at the core of Chihuly’s artistry.
The story goes that Chihuly wanted to test the strength of some glass and see it in water. So he began throwing pieces over the side of a bridge and later asked some young men to retrieve them. The image of their boats filled with shapes and color gave birth to the Ikebana concept, now a staple in his exhibitions.
Equally inspiring are the videos shown in conjunction with the exhibit. Snippets are available online. Others and interviews with the artist can be found at the video screening room on Chihuly’s website.
Take a look. Watch Chihuly in action. Hear him and others talk about the innovative power of deep teamwork. Flora Mace, who began working with Chihuly in 1975 on the Blanket Cylinders (glass pieces of different size and shape inspired by native American baskets and weaving), explains the synergy this way: “When I work for Dale, I almost become him.”
The image of the solitary artist – the solitary leader – is forever shattered by Chihuly’s high-energy, high-engagement model of leader as visionary, director, catalyst, coach, choreographer, teacher, and partner.
As Karen Chambers writes in Chihuly: Color, Glass, and Form:
“As director of the team, Chihuly makes the process a symbiotic relationship that draws on each individual’s expertise and energy. During a glassblowing session, the entire team is in sync, at one with Chihuly’s ideas and an integrated part of his creative process.
In creating the work, the team follows Chihuly’s instructions. He is like a choreographer who uses his dancers’ bodies to make tangible his ideas. Unlike teams in Europe, where production is the goal and each member has an assigned task, Chihuly’s team makes unique pieces and people exchange jobs.
While a Chihuly team works together with apparent ease, the dynamic is complex. Chihuly acts much like a film director – creating the concept, initiating the action, and setting the scene – but the process requires something else, a special chemistry in which he works as catalyst. In this role, he manages a process in constant flux, harnessing the three key elements of fire, gravity, and spontaneity.
Chihuly is the catalyst that makes it all work. He brings together the best glass blowers according to their schedules and his needs, creates the most congenial ambience [through music, food, and setting], introduces a touch of glamour by moving the sessions from site to site and flying in his team, challenges the group with his ideas, and after an intense session of work, a few distinctively Chihuly pieces emerge.”
I am a firm believer that we can learn much about how to lead from engaging with and in the arts. This post begins a series on the topic.
It’s a set of ideas I’ve been thinking and writing about for a long time. Quite simply, the arts “traffic in understanding,” in the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard – and understanding one’s internal and external worlds is at the heart of leadership effectiveness.
The major challenges in leading – understanding and working with those who are different from us, forging shared interests and common goals, motivating, influencing while remaining open to new learning, understanding the roots of competing interests and conflicts, finding lasting solutions to complex problems – echo life’s larger challenges.
The arts lay out these grand dilemmas in accessible form and invite us to reflect on and learn from them. I’ve been reminded of this by some recent events.
The first was a Ford Foundation conference held May 4, 2011 called "Fresh Angle on the Arts: Reimagining Culture in a Time of Transformation" – a day of discussions and performances exploring the role of art and artistic expression in times of social transformation and revolutionary global change.
Different cultures, ethnicities, and social traditions can separate us. But understanding our own history and heritage and then broadening our perspectives on other cultures through education and collaboration can take us to rich, new heights and toward common ground despite our differences.
Listen to excerpts from the CD called “Chamber Music” as performed by Ballaké Sissoko (an African musician playing a traditional lute-harp from Mali called the kora) and Vincent Segal (a French musician playing the classical cello) at the Ford Foundation conference.
Through the music of Sissoko and Segal, you’ll hear and experience quite simply and enjoyably exactly what I’m talking about – and chances are you’ll understand the importance of leading through and with diversity in today’s global world faster and deeper than you might from a lecture, essay, or class on the topic.
“Chamber Music” has been reviewed as “one of Europe’s most buzzed-about world music recording.” It is also a clear and powerful illustration of fusion without loss, synergy without dominance, differences as the springboard to innovation, shared leadership through true collaboration, and globalization without fear.
My colleague, Ira Chaleff, an expert on the study of followership, has created a great video to illustrate the importance of leader-follower collaboration and the active role of followership. You can find it on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cswrnc1dggg
When sending the url, Ira wrote:
A couple of years ago after returning from Buenos Aires, I took beginning Tango lessons. I was surprised and enthralled to find the teacher, Sharna Fabiano, spending time in every lesson to impress upon us the nature and importance of the follower and leader roles. She had us practice each role, regardless of gender, so we developed an appreciation for what our partner needed from us in our role. Sharna used creative exercises to give us a visceral feel for how to lead or follow, well or poorly. Recently, I invited Sharna to demonstrate the different ways in which the follower role can be done and the resulting positive or negative impact on the leader. To my delight, she enthusiastically agreed to participate in this project.
From this collaboration I have produced a video, "Tango: The Dance of the Leader & Follower," that utilizes the wisdom and grace of Sharna, who is the founder of Tango Mercurio and the Tango Mercurio Community Orchestra in Washington, DC and one of America’s most highly regarded Tango instructors. Through her and her partner Isaac Oboka, we gain new insights into how the partner in the follower role can bring out the creativity of the partner in the leader role. In the final sequence, Sharna demonstrates how a strong follower can steady a leader who has lost balance – something leaders in every sphere of life require at one time or another.
Ira’s website, The Courageous Follower, provides a good listing of articles on empowered followership. Enjoy!
This is the day that gives me some breathing space: a chance for a quiet afternoon in Shanghai – is that an oxymoron? – with our Executive Coach (who is travelling with us), maybe even a massage and a calorie splurge with dinner at M on the Bund. This, however, is the most stressful day for the EMBAs. Send them your love!
We start as usual with class time and two fabulous instructors.
Bill Dodson (author, entrepreneur, consultant, and business principal, and writer of the http://thisischinablog.com ) brings his unique perspective on how to do business in China with exploration of the impact of cultural differences on business partnerships and opportunities. Check out his recent book to learn more.
![clip_image002[4]](https://theleadershipprofessor.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/clip_image00241.jpg "clip_image002[4]")
After a break for tea – this is China, after all – we probe the changing consumer markets with Paul French, prolific author and Founder and Publishing & Marketing Director of Access Asia. His recent book, Fat China, says as much about the dangers of Western notions of affluence as it does about China today.
![clip_image004[4]](https://theleadershipprofessor.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/clip_image00441.jpg "clip_image004[4]")
![clip_image006[4]](https://theleadershipprofessor.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/clip_image0064.jpg "clip_image006[4]")
Lunch together at the hotel is a kumbayah moment for the cohort, after which everyone goes off alone to do their individual interviews or site visits for their China projects.
Students have been working on these projects (at least in their minds) since last summer, and have been preparing for this moment of truth.
No matter how prepared, there’s always that last minute feeling of panic, heading off alone in a taxi or on the subway in a country where you can’t even fake that you know the language by giving your English a bit of an accent as you can in romance language countries.
Here’s where the rubber meets the road – a moment of executive growth and rise to full global citizenship.
Prediction: The meetings will go well, they always do. People will navigate a place as complex as China, even though they are not sure they can. Language won’t be easy, but they’ll make it work. And having conquered the fear of the unknown through their skill and flexibility (see past blogs on the topic of fear of differences and the unknown!), the students will be stronger leaders and different people.
We promise transformation in the Bloch Executive MBA – and this is one of the learning moments where we see the fruits of that transformation in action.
There will be another solo afternoon of interviews and site visits in Beijing for students, but this is the first – and the first is always the hardest.
I’m proud of everyone. You should be too. It ain’t easy – but people make it so and are better for having done that. They model professional development at its best.
Now, will I have the Chickpea Pancake served with Anchoiade & Tapenade, Eggplant caviar, and peppery Roquette or the Twice cooked, (so juicy and crispy) Pigeon served with ‘boudin noir’ and harissa at M on the Bund???
A toast to our students (and the beautiful view) while I decide.
Days have been filled preparing for our Executive MBA international residency which begins in three days. We’re going to China. Part of my preparation involves enabling 40 experienced leaders, most with little international experience, to appreciate and respond to cultural differences without paralysis.
It’s key to their career advancement and professional development. It’s essential for all in a global world.
As we move closer to the departure date, students have begun acknowledging their fears of anticipating a vastly different world and of the unknown. Some report dreams of not knowing what to do or of being lost in the China-size crowds, others feelings of losing the control over their lives that they have at home.
These are powerful admissions – and they are right on. We all fear the unknown. Human nature loves predictability, and we all want to believe that everyone thinks and sees things just like us. They don’t and that’s OK – and we’ll be OK in a world where that is true. Accept that, and you’ve got the global citizen piece down cold.
How do we take in and use all the knowledge about cultural differences that we can gain through reading and studying without freezing our capacity to act? The quick answer: with patience, persistence, and humility. It’s like learning and integrating anything new into effective practice.
Preparation helps – the better you know something, the better able you are to call it into play when you need it. So does remembering the Joan Gallos 2 Rules of Thumb for Learning Any New Behavioral Skill:
And remember: people are people are people. When we talk about an increasingly diverse and global world, we tend to focus on differences. Comparing and contrasting how other cultures are different from ours is a good way to recognize and break out of our narrow mindsets about life and the world. But bottom-line: people share a common humanity.
Approach any meeting with authenticity and an open heart, and you will connect well with others – even if you struggle with language or customs. Be curious – ask. Relationships are built on connection and conversation. Make a mistake? Step on a cultural toe? Stay alert and respond as you would to any friend. An honest and humble “Oh, my apologies, please” will go far.
You know more than you may realize about conquering the fear of differences.