Tag: leadership

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Avoiding the Black Swan Syndrome: The Paradox of Compassionate Service

The film Black Swan has created quite a buzz. In it, Natalie Portman’s character, Nina, secures the role of her dreams – the lead in Swan Lake – only to be destroyed by the pressures that accompany doing it well. There’s an important leadership lesson in that.

We can only lead well and strongly when we retain our balance and perspective. Doing this asks leaders to navigate an interesting paradox: total immersion with measured detachment.

Leadership is all about commitment, deep relationships, and authenticity. It’s hard to be successful if you  stand on the sidelines. But leaders get in trouble when they forget they are playing a role and others are responding to them in it. Reactions and dynamics – positive or negative – that look very personal aren’t really very personal at all. In the leadership dance, we relate role to role.

Anyone who has ever been a lame duck having announced his or her decision to step down knows exactly what I am talking about.

Boston University social psychologist William Kahn in his study of caregivers identified a paradox in compassionate service that sheds insights on all this.

Caring professionals who serve others in need require simultaneous openness to and distance from those they seek to aid. They need clear boundaries to sustain objectivity, protect themselves from the stress of the work, and nurture essential autonomy in others. At the same time, good caregivers, like good leaders, need to understand others deeply to respond to the unique realities of their situation over time.

This only happens when caregivers “take in” those they serve – fully grasp others’ fears, capabilities, limitations, frustrations, anger, and needs. Learned skills in “clinical detachment” enable clinicians to bound this process – remain a full step away from being personally involved.

However, skilled professionals still risk “the strain of absorption”– accumulated stress from closeness to those in need, recognition of others’ pain and frustration, and the “constant waves of emotion” that wash up against them in the course of their everyday work. Over time, compassion fatigue takes a toll. It is easy for caregivers – and even easier for leaders – to ignore this and lose their sense of balance.

Leaders face internal and external pressures to produce and dynamics that keep them focused largely on follower needs. Leadership guru John Gardner acknowledges a universal ambivalence toward leaders: people want leaders who are powerful and capable of results. At the same time, they hate dependence and giving power to others. The ambivalence pushes followers to blindly up-the-dependence-ante and then punish leaders who don’t – or can’t – deliver quickly enough.

Shared conceptions of heroic leadership – the solitary superhero whose brilliance and strength save the day – support a leader’s stoic acceptance of the added pressures. So does the reality that all leaders serve at the will of their followers. Rising expectations bring the potential for rising disappointment.

The stage is set for leaders to forget the important distinction between taking their work seriously and taking their work too personally – and we saw where that led one fictional ballerina named Nina.

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Real Leadership is Love

Happy Valentine’s Day. Today is the perfect day to reflect on an important leadership truth. Leadership is all about love.

It’s about devotion to a cause or an organization and the deep desire to contribute in important ways.

It’s about the satisfaction from true partnership and recognition that there is power and possibility in joining with others.

It’s about deep relationships and collaboration that result in the reciprocal learning at the heart of shared mission and purpose.

It’s about appreciation for others who are vital to advancing a mission.

It’s about the maturity to separate liking someone from recognizing that we owe everyone basic human respect and a willingness to work well with them to advance a common cause.

It’s about authenticity and bringing your true self to the work.

It’s about finding joy in the challenges and the experiences. (See my previous posts on raising your joy quotient).

It’s about commitment, hard work, hanging-in during tough times, and growing from the experience.

Leadership is all about love. Is love at the center of what you do?  What would need to change to make it so?

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Mubarak Steps Down: A Reminder of the Interactive Nature of Leadership

The resignation of former President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt brings home powerful understandings about the interactive nature of leadership.

All who aspire to lead from either the head or the foot of the table can learn something important about power, influence, and authority.

Leadership is all about relationships, and it is followers – not leaders – who ultimately control the balance of power. Part of the unstated contract between leaders and followers is the leader’s willingness to accept and respect that.

Leaders focused on their dominance, ego, image, or past success can forget the fragile nature of the bargain – and we have seen in 24/7 media coverage from Egypt over the past days what the result can be.

Followers, after all, give leaders their power and authority in exchange for the leader’s willingness to provide important services like protection, direction, and the allocation of important resources. The call for leadership – more leadership, better leadership – is always loudest in times of need. 

We want leaders with the presumed knowledge, wisdom, experience, and skill to deliver. And we are willing to accord them power – our willingness to follow and to be influenced by them – in exchange for their responding to our needs.

It’s only a matter of time for leaders who can’t deliver or who lose touch with their followers’ needs. In the age of twitter revolutions, the fragile balance of power can shift in a matter of days.

It may be easier to see this tacit leader-follower power bargain when played out in public sector leadership as in Egypt. But organizational leaders, be forewarned. The same dynamic applies to you.  Anyone who has tried to lead a department or unit where subordinates have lost confidence in your ability to deliver, an organization without the support of your board, a group who doesn’t believe you understand their needs, an enterprise from the lame duck status of being yesterday’s leadership news knows exactly what I mean.  

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The Leadership Fallacy: You See What I See

Leaders need to understand their world in order to influence it.  This requires sharp sense-making skills.  Sense-making on the surface seems like a cinch: you notice something, decide what to make of it, and determine what to do about it. Humans are pretty fast at this, and therein lies the problem. We tend to overlook four limiting features of the process.

1. Sense-making is always incomplete. Humans can attend to only a small portion of the information and experiences available to them. Our non-conscious is always hard at work attending to some data and screening out others. We rarely reflect on what and how much we ignore.

Stop reading for a minute and think about what’s happening around you. Are there sounds? A humming printer? Buzzing ceiling lights? Colleagues bustling in the background? What about movements? People passing your door? Traffic visible out your window?  How about light? Objects in your periphery vision? What’s the comfort level of your chair? The feel of your hands resting on your desk/lap/keyboard? Is the room hot or cold? You get the point. We always know more than we know we do. 

2. Sense-making is very personal. Individuals’ values, education, past experience, cognitive capacities, physical abilities, and developmental limitations influence what they see. But since sense-making occurs so quickly and tacitly, the everyday explanations leaders construct feel so obvious and real to them that they seem more like Truth and the way the world really is than the individual creations and interpretations that they are.

This can blind leaders to available alternatives, gaps in their thinking, and biases. It also leaves them feeling little incentive to question their interpretations.

3. Sense-making is interpretive. When thrown into life’s ongoing stream of experiences, people create explanations of what things mean – and often assume that others either see things the same way or, if they don’t, they are wrong. 

4. Sense-making is action-oriented. People’s personal interpretations contain implicit prescriptions for how they and others should respond.

 

If  you conclude, for example, that your unit’s budget problems result from over-spending, you’ll cut expenses. If you see the problem as inadequate allocations, you’ll lobby for more. If you bemoan inattention to revenue generation, you’ll develop new programs, services, or products.  If it’s embezzlement, you’ll call the police. 

You can see the ease and the potential complications in all this for leaders.  They’re off and running before they’re even sure what’s most important and where they should really be heading.  And they’re rarely aware that this is what they are doing.  For more, check out Reframing Academic Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2011), Chapter 2: Sense-making and the Power of Reframing.

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Raise your Joy Quotient (JQ): Step II – Using your Full Self

Nothing signals leadership like confidence, and those who seek influence are warned to develop theirs. It takes confidence to stand for something. It requires confidence to stay strong in the face of inevitable resistance and to listen carefully and openly to others’ concerns while advancing your own.

Confidence comes in two measures. One is basic – the self-assurance from having done your homework: knowing the situation you face, what you believe, what needs to happen, what you plan to do, and what you can anticipate. This part is tied to preparation, resolve, and readiness for action. Determination is its close companion.

A second part is more personal – and is the direct link to joy. It involves the unabashed and uncensored use of your talents, leveraging your full self with its full range of quirks, to your efforts. This is not advocacy to shoot from the hip and let it all hang out. Leadership is a strategic art and science. Rather, we increase our effectiveness – and raise our capacity for joy – when we implement our plans in ways that don’t stress and stifle us.

Students and executives too often come to leadership training and weigh themselves down with a self-imposed, heavy leadership mantle. In their search for more skill, impact, and effective, they get stiff and serious.  Seriousness about learning and making a difference is not the same as becoming rigid or downright dour in how you handle your professional self.  Nor does it mean that you’ll succeed by learning to be like someone else.

You have your best shot of success when you bring a light heart and confidence that you have something to offer. People will want to connect with you – and leadership, after all, is all about relationships.

Here’s where leaders – and leaders-in-training – can learn from artists who often exhibit a professional confidence and public comfort with their idiosyncrasies.

I’m very big these days on the PS22 5th grade Chorus from Staten Island. (See previous post. Check the Chorus out on YouTube. Mark your calendar to watch them on the 83rd Annual Academy Awards, February 27.)

As a leadership scholar, I like studying their leader, Gregg Breinberg.  Mr. B’s a terrific musician and teacher, no question about that. But I particularly enjoy his authenticity – he’s been clear about his vision, unyielding on his focus, and relating to the kids and audiences in the same manner since the Chorus’s founding.   The teaching point for leaders is his willingness to do whatever it takes to keep the Chorus positive, on key, and performing to their best – without feeling in any way self-conscious or as if he needs to become “more professional or serious” or to acquiesce to those with more status as the Chorus’s status rises.  Those who have watched him work describe his style as that of an “overgrown 5th grader.”  He is proud to claim his own “inner clown.”

“Watch my face. I can help you,” you hear repeated across rehearsal and performance tapes – and he’ll use his face, movements, body, humor, and energy the same whether he is in front of Oprah Winfrey, a famous musician who’s come to hear the Chorus, or the kids in the school auditorium during rehearsal.

No evidence of any worries about how to lead or of that nagging inner voice that leadership students report – the self-evaluations that keep them questioning themselves and just a little off-center.  Am I dressed for success? Am I doing it right? Do I have the right stuff? How will others respond? Am I leading yet? What will my boss think?  

So prepare, and then let go and act.  Be the leader you were made to be.  Give yourself the freedom to work in ways that fit your talents and style.  It’ll make your work — and life — more joyful.

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Raise your Joy Quotient (JQ): Step I – Find your Passions, True Talents, and Contributions

It’s time to add another form of intelligence to the list.  We have IQ to measure cognitive intelligence, EQ for emotional intelligence, CQ for cultural intelligence.  Why do we not encourage people to enhance their JQ – their capacity to find and express joy through their work? We’d advance their quality of life and their leadership acumen and stamina if we did.

There’s nothing simple about raising your JQ. In the same way you can’t boost your IQ by reading one book, enhancing JQ takes time and effort. Three steps can set the process in motion.  (I’ll tackle one today, the others  in subsequent posts.)

STEP I: Find your passions, true talents, and contributions.  A high JQ isn’t hedonism.  Nor is it hakuna matata or a don’t worry-be happy philosophy – although an easy going spirit and the ability to wear life loosely are good life traits to possess.

We raise our JQ as the result of self-reflection and thoughtful experimentation over time that enable us to (a) identify our true talents and passions and (b) find ways to express those.  True is the operative word.

We are all good at many things, but our true talents coincide with our deep interests and passions. They energize us with use. Engaging in activities that use them makes time fly.  What are your true talents?  How can you identify them for yourself? 

In their chapter “The Traces of Talent” in my edited book Business Leadership (Jossey-Bass, pp. 79-86), Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton suggest monitoring four areas:

1. spontaneous reactions – the ways you naturally respond to similar situations over time. Rising successfully to the challenges of project organizer in every crisis, for example, tells you something about your organizational and executive talents. 

2. yearnings – things that have fascinated you from an early age. Architect Frank Gehry remembers building avant guard wooden structures at age 4 from wood scrapes on the floor of his father’s hardware store. At 10, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were meeting regularly at school to plan their  creative projects. Picasso was in adult art school by age 13 and loving it.

3. rapid learnings – things that come quickly and powerfully. Matisse was a sickly law clerk when his mother gave him a box of paints to pass the time. A new world opened for him, and he never looked back. He filled his days with paining and drawing from then on and was accepted into Paris’s most prestigious art school four years later.

4. deep satisfaction – consistent good feelings from an action.  In neurobiological language, this is a physiological response to the use of your strongest synaptic connections. Gregg Breinberg, music director of the PS 22 Chorus, and Gustavo Dudamel of the LA Phil (discussed in previous posts) are good examples of this.

We alone know our true talents.  We need time and a process to find them — and the confidence to believe in what we discover.  

Sometimes advice from others is helpful: it can give us an outside perspective on ourselves.  But be forewarned: not always.  It may encourage us to short-cut self-discovery or be unduly influenced by the contributions important others want us to make.  “You can’t make money with an art degree, so major in business.” “Be a teacher. You’ll have summers off with your children.” “You’re good at math. Take a job on Wall Street where bonuses are still big despite the economy.” 

A joyless life is one spent convincing ourselves that we should like what others value in us more than who we really are.

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Finding your Competitive Leadership Advantage: Joy

Joy is not the first thing we associate with leadership. Influence, power, strategy skills, achievement, change management, tolerance for complexity – absolutely. Joy? Rarely makes anyone’s Top Ten list.

Experience and years of seeing talented and dedicated executives burdened – or burned out – by the demands of their work have brought joy to the top of my list of leadership requisites. It’s every leader’s under-appreciated, competitive advantage – and the best way to wed great accomplishment with health and balance. 

What’s the role of joy in your work life? How can you find more? 

That’s not an easy question for many of us to answer, nor is it one we often contemplate.  Professional training in all fields focuses heavily on skills,  knowledge,  acumen,  practice,  responsibility – learning more, doing more, doing better.  Joy takes a side seat, if even allowed to the table.  Without joy, the stage is set for a career characterized by stress, strain, and an ethic of just keep pushing harder.     

To illustrate my point on the power of joy – and to add joy to your day – take a look at a leader-in-action video.  As you watch,  think about the leader’s power, influence, impact, efforts, and achievement. Then take a look at his joy. What do you notice? 

Hint:  Joy drives everything – and it has made great things happen.

The leader is Gregg Breinberg, music teacher and director of the fifth grade PS22 Chorus at a large public school in Graniteville, Staten Island, New York. Gregg founded the chorus in 2000, and the world will have a chance to see the fruits of his labors when the group performs at the Oscars in Hollywood later this month. [See Anne Hathaway’s surprise visit to the 11th Annual Winter Concert to invite the group.]

I’m a relative new comer to the PS22 Chorus, but they’ve been an internet phenomenon with more than 28 million hits since Gregg began his postings more than five years ago.   Anne Hathaway said she’s been following the PS 22 Chorus for years – and yes, they have brought her a lot of joy. 

So take a look and a listen. The kids are adorable. The music is great. The leadership lesson, profound.  This is one of the group’s best – and had the flu not derailed me, I’d have beaten the Huffington Post to press in reporting on their terrific rendition of Ariel Pink’s “Round and Round.” 

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Enhancing Global Leadership: Studying China I

All interested in contemporary business leadership need to study of China, not just stay abreast of current events on the front page of the newspaper.  The business landscape is rapidly changing, China is at the center of the changes, and we had best recognize that and be prepared.     

Yesterday was our first global leadership class, and the course is off to a good start.  China is our living case study this semester (and we will travel there together in spring) for building cultural intelligence; expanding international business acumen; and learning about shifting global powers, economies, and marketplaces.  Some observations over my next few posts from our discussions.

China’s complexity:  China is a complex country, with a complex history and culture that infuse its current political, economic, and policy choices in ways a casual observer might miss.

Recognizing what it means, for example, to have been one of the most advanced and innovative nations on the planet – gunpowder, the compass, moveable type, paper making, silk production, nutrition studies, veterinary studies, metallurgy technologies, rice cultivation, pasta, paper money, pharmacology, and more trace their origins to ancient China – gives us clues to the urgency in China’s national aching to be a strong and dominant world player again.  It also enables us to appreciate why and to reconcile the seeming dichotomies in China’s mix of communism and capitalism – its “Socialism with Chinese character.”   

Read about the history of the Opium Wars, the relationship between mainland China and Taiwan, and China’s loss of territories and land over the ages by invasion or as a result of internationally-supported fiat using a cultural lens of face-saving.  You learn something important about the power of trust in foreign relations – and why transparency in China’s contemporary global diplomacy might not come easy.  

Look at the behavioral and philosophical foundations of Legalism in China and of how that can help account for the authoritarian and brutal aspects of the Cultural Revolution or for incidents labeled in the West as human rights violations. 

Combine Confucianism, Daoism, Communism, and Capitalism for a feel of the complexity and variety of personal ideologies and ethical frameworks in China today.   The list could go on. 

I’m not a history buff, so I always appreciate the reminder of how much nations are like people. 

Research — and any good psychiatrist — will tell you that we all come by our behaviors and worldviews  honestly as a result of a combination of early life experiences and what nature has given us.  Thinking deeply about China’s history and its given natural givens – including an isolating physical terrain with huge mountains on three sides and an ocean on the fourth – puts the country’s actions today in a new perspective.   

We can’t know China today without understanding its past.    We can’t know business leadership without knowing both.     

The magnitude of the task:  For those new to the task of studying China — of learning to see China, past and present, through Eastern and Western eyes — it is a big task. 

It will take time, effort, and patience to fully wrap minds around the complexity of a nation that can traces its history hundreds of thousands of years.  The speed of the transitions occurring in China today only magnify the challenge of sorting all this out for business and for policy.    

Where to start:   Read and talk. 

For readings, begin with Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones.  Hessler is a journalist and a beautiful writer.  He seamlessly weaves contemporary stories of a variety of compelling characters in China today with gripping vignettes and snippets of history.  How everything connects is mastery, and every word or fact is essential to Hessler’s narrative.  High praise for the book’s artistry, and it is still a hard read for many.  But the reasons why are exactly why you need to read it.  The mix of history, unknown places, names we can’t easily remember or that require us to sound out every syllable, characters that challenge stereotypes, mini-language lessons, and the backs-and-forths between stories of now and then create a visceral feel for readers that mirrors the experience of China today.   

And talk to everyone.  African cab drivers in Washington, D.C. have given me insights into China’s investments and strategies better than any journalist or researcher. Ex-patriots who have successfully lived and worked in China can identify cultural elements like few else.  Look around. You’ll be surprised how many people you know have links, experiences, and connections to China. 

We’ll bring in diverse speakers over the semester – economists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, Midwestern governs, scholars, citizens interested in cultural relations, consultants, artists, Chinese students studying at our university – to share their take on the complexity.  We’ll get very different perspectives from the different vantage points and as a result of the unique experiences of different professionals.  And we’ll learn from sorting through the differences and inevitable contradictions.  Simply speaking, China today – and yesterday – is just not simple.   

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Educating global leaders, global citizens–learning to see through cultural lenses

Business leadership today is global. There’s no debate on that. Not everyone will become a player in a multi-national company – and some may never do any business outside the United States. However, we are all global citizens in an increasingly flat world who need to appreciate that our leadership decisions and choices may be local in operation, but they are always global in impact.

How do we teach people to be productive global citizens? Do we even know what being a good global citizen today means?

The questions have been on my mind all week as I prepare for the first class in Global Management, the course surrounding our international residency. I’m taking our second year Executive MBAs to three cities in China (Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin) this spring, and the course is designed to enable them to make the most of that learning experience.

The syllabus and mechanics are in order. My scholarly area is management education; and I’ve got enough experience, pedagogical savvy and developmental theory under my belt to design a pretty integrated and nifty course.

China is a rapidly changing nation of great accomplishment, influence, mystery, and paradox to the Western eye. I’m no China scholar, so I’ve asked distinguished professionals with on-going, hands-on experiences in China to join me in helping students unravel the paradoxes  and mystery as they learn about China’s history, culture, economy, law, and business environments.

I’m sure students will enjoy and learn from this. But I have bigger goals for them – and figuring out how to accomplish those is what’s kept me on edge.

I want our students to learn to see China through Eastern and Western eyes. More important, I want them to understand why that’s so important, so difficult, and so vital to their professional development in an increasingly diverse work world.  All that is not going to come simply from reading cases and articles,  interacting with our distinguished guests, or even travelling abroad.  It’s going to require time, a new level of openness to experience, self-reflection, and some deep digging to identify their own lenses and cultural blinders.  Oy! And I only have five class sessions in KC and eleven days in China to accomplish this.

I know only too well these are high expectations. Some twenty plus years ago, Jean Ramsey and I joined with colleagues to explore how to create educational experiences that broaden others’ understanding of and comfort with diversity and differences, as well as how to deconstruct the dynamics in the learning. We wrote about that in Teaching Diversity: Listening to the Soul, Speaking from the Heart; and we concluded that exploring differences, working to build emotional and cultural intelligence, and getting people to a place where they can name differences without triggering the human urge to evaluate (or devalue) them is complex and emotion-laden teaching.  And developmental growth of this kind takes time.

Activities, for example, can seem touchy-feely for those who live in their heads and are anchored in their local worlds, threatening to those with quick evaluative and ethno-centric lenses, or simplistic to people who just don’t get it. In those cases, primitive displacement can get triggered – along with some nasty comments come course evaluation time!

But hey, every professor knows if you’re looking for love in the classroom, you’re looking in the wrong place.  Good teaching challenges like nothing else, and sometimes it takes years for students to realize what they really learned from their work with you. 

So, wish me luck. Class is Friday, 8 am.  I’ll keep you posted. 

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Creating Communities of Shared Purpose and Contribution: Still Surprised

I just finished reading a new book by Warren Bennis, Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership.  I loved it for a number of reasons.

First,  Bennis is the father of applied leadership studies and a writer whose prose sings with humor, grace, and wisdom.  I always learn from Warren Bennis and from how he frames experience.  I expected to do the same from this – his book #30 – and I wasn’t disappointed.

I’ve got Post-its marking pages with good reminders and advice on topics like, garnering power through proximity (70), recruiting effectively (116), staying engaged in times of crisis (123), networking like a pro (131), the power of forgiveness (134), staff empowerment as “executive constellation” (146), leader renewal through self-reinvention (150), trust vs. charisma as a leadership cornerstone (184), the imperative for enhancing adaptive capacity and ongoing learning (193), and grace in aging  (all of Chapter 9).

Unlike some reviewers, I enjoyed digging through the stories of Bennis’s successes and failures – his crucibles to transform experiences into leadership muster – for truths that spoke to me.  That’s what a good memoir does.  So caution: this is not a book heavy on advice about how to lead.

No, Still Surprised is a book that encourages readers to think about their life experiences and choices, what they’ve made of and from them, and what work is left to be done.

I was surprised, for example, how quickly the book hooked me into reflecting on my own graduate school days in Cambridge.  Some stories sent me easily down memory lane:  thinking about the dynamic early days of the Sloan School at MIT (where I took courses while at Harvard), or remembering the excitement in discovering that a field like organizational behavior existed – and being thankful for wonderful graduate school chums and faculty who fed my excitement and who have remained close friends since (and because of) those earlier years.

Other Bennis stories brought back poignant memories of people – some of whom are no longer with us — who played a role (direct or indirect) in shaping my career choice, professional interests and directions, and values.  The diverse cast of characters during those intense NTL Bethel summers, for example, made learning challenging and fun.  Our eldest son is named Chris so no more need be said about the place that Chris Argyris, an extraordinary teacher and mentor to me and to my husband, holds in our hearts.  My dog is named Douglas McGregor as a tip of the hat to the man whose classic, The Human Side of Enterprise, is still vital, important, and undervalued in today’s bottom line-oriented work world.  And reconnecting with Ed Schein is always a highlight of any trip back east for important life reasons.

But the real power of the book came from Bennis’s ability to capture the electricity, the evolving dialogue, the community of inquiry, the hope,  the shared interests, and the commitment to social change and human development that characterized the Cambridge scene for me.

I had forgotten all the early 99 cent breakfasts at The Tasty, the noisy greasy dinners at Buddy’s Sirloin Pit, the late night coffees at Café Algiers and the like – the regular coming together with colleagues to share new insights on our evolving professional selves and our plans for how to better use our new skills.  Are we Model II yet?  How can we learn to reflect-in-action? What is real collaboration?  The conversations and meetings – formal and informal — about intervention theory, professional effectiveness, tacit characteristics of organizational life, models about self-fulfilling prophecies and defense mechanisms, applying ethnomethodology, opportunities for planned change, and shared field-work projects were lively, frequent, and learning-filled.

Faculty, students, managers, consultants – we all talked with and to each other, no status separations, working together in Ivory Tower offices or on the shop floor. The simple currency for invitation to participate was a passion for the issues and something to contribute – and newcomers were welcomed and mentored.  The regular Sunday night meetings in his Boston home that Bennis describes in the book is one example of this larger phenomenon.

This was a time and place for me marked by a vibrancy and an unapologetic commitment to issues of practice – to the leaders, managers, followers, and communities whose lives and work could be made better as a result of our thinking, writing, coaching, musing, and consulting.  We weren’t learning just for ourselves and our career advancement.  We were driven by a larger purpose – a sacred purpose.  We wanted to make things better.  And our teachers, mentors, and role models like Warren Bennis, helped us believe that was possible.

That unshakeable faith in human nature and in a better future is at the core of Still Surprised. And it is not now – nor was it back then – the faith of a Pollyanna.

Those who taught and led the neophytes – people like Warren Bennis, Chris Argyris, Ed Schein, Dick Beckhard, Don Schon, and others — understood the inefficiencies, pain, and down-sides of organizational life.  Many has seen first hand the evils of war and injustice, and they set out to do something about that.  They brought open minds, entrepreneurial spirits, and irrepressible optimism to the challenge – convinced that new ways of organizing, leading, and managing were possible.

They were carriers of America’s historic faith in progress and initiative. They believed in democracy, openness, and the worth of every individual.  Above all, they believed in learning and experimentation. They knew they did not have all the answers – or even all the questions. But they were confident that both were waiting to be found.  Their faith and hard work spawned an exciting time, a revolutionary intellectual movement – a paradigm shift – that changed forever how the world understood people, work, leadership, organizations, and change.  Their efforts gave rise to the organizational and applied behavioral sciences, and they developed a powerful array of ideas and practices for understanding and improving organizations – team building, change management, coaching, performance feedback, organizational design, managing diversity, empowerment, participative management, EEO efforts, to name just a few — that we have come to take for granted today.  Most important, they helped people like me believe in ourselves, our potential, and the potential of those around us.

Still Surprised challenged me to remember all that.  May it do some of the same for you!  It reminded me of the power, energy, and intellectual stimulation in a community of like-minded souls – and of how rarely we think to create those for ourselves.  But it’s never too late, and there is much work left to be done even as the days grow shorter for us all.   Contribution is what leadership is really all about.  What will yours be?