Tag: responsible leadership

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Wear Life Loosely and Still Meet the Deadlines

I love Bernie Siegel’s advice to wear life loosely.[1] It’s a way of being that speaks to my soul and releases what feels like my creative best.

I’m happiest when I can wrap the magnificence of life loosely around my shoulders like a comfortable, old shawl – and tackle head-on whatever comes my way. I’m a bear to myself and others when I can’t.

I can’t fully define what it means to wear life loosely, but I sure know how it feels. Calm. Exhilarating. Productive. Joyful.

Wearing life loosely involves at least three things for me:

1. Mindfulness: being in the moment and enjoying it totally, without feeling time or performance pressures

2. Playfulness: a lighthearted approach to whatever I’m doing that includes a sense of appreciation and wonder, a willingness to impishly push boundaries and rules of restraint, and plenty of giggles

3. Feeling responsible for only myself: a release from excessive worries and fears for others and the world – real and imaginary.

Although it may seem paradoxical, I work very hard at staying loose. Living life loosely does not come easily, but everything seems to work better when I can.

I grew up in a hard-working, blue collar family. My father held two – sometimes three – jobs much of his life to make ends meet, and I had my own high-top stool in his basement workshop from as early as I can remember to help him however I could. My mother was disabled and rarely left our home – and I assumed adult caretaking roles at an early age.

I came by responsibility, intensity, anathema to wastefulness, and a predisposition for over-achievement honestly: I know how to take care of people and business and myself and get things done. I’m not complaining – that’s something of which I am proud. But I carry a legacy that must be managed: the inner child only runs free when everything is in order.

Wearing life loosely reminds me that perfect order is never arriving: a life mantra of que sera sera is more realistic.

How do you wear your life? Is its mantle loose enough for you to achieve your goals with ease?

Get looser and laugh about it:  Laughter and humor are keys to the good life. We all need to laugh more. It’s just that simple! Laughter and humor augment our creativity and productivity, and there’s ample evidence they are good medicine, too.

Humor, for example, gives our creativity a perfect workout. It employs many of the creative right brain’s most powerful attributes: understanding situations in context, getting the big picture, combining different elements in new alignments, and adding surprise and novelty.

Researchers have used humor as a measure of managerial effectiveness, emotional intelligence, and innovation – and those who use it well score high on all three.[2] Humor can reduce workplace hostility, relieve tension, communicate difficult messages, and lessen status differences.[3]

Humor cushions the most stressful bumps in life. Mark Twain once said, “Humor is the good natured side of a truth.” He demonstrated this in his famous response to news accounts of his passing away: “The news of my death has been greatly exaggerated.”

Humor encourages us to take ourselves less seriously – and that is especially important in situations involving difficult people or problems.

Above all, humor is a way to illuminate and break frame – to demonstrate that any one take on a situation is limited, arbitrary, and open for deeper investigation.[4]  After Churchill lost the 1945 election to be Prime Minister, his wife Clementine suggested it might be a blessing in disguise. Churchill replied, “That may be, but I wish it were not so well disguised.”

So laugh a little – or a lot. Laughter releases nature’s pain-reducing, relaxation-promoting chemicals called endorphins. You know what tickles your fancy: humor books, corny jokes, movies, improvisation games, comedy tapes, time with witty friends. Engage and enjoy!

Laugh with friends and colleagues. You’ll connect in deeper ways and both benefit from the body’s release of the bonding hormone called oxytocin.[5]

How do you wear your life? Is its mantle loose enough for you? What adjustments do you need to make for a good life? To meet those deadlines with productivity and grace?

[1] Bernie S. Siegel (1998). Prescription for Living. New York: HarperCollins.

[2] Daniel H. Pink (2006). A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. New York: Riverhead Books.

[3] Fabio Sala (2003). “Laughing All the Way to the Bank.” Harvard Business Review (September, 2003).

[4] Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal (2017). Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice and Leadership (sixth edition). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Wiley.

[5] Amit Sood (2013). The Mayo Clinic Guide to Stress-free Living. Boston, MA: DaCapo Press, p. 243.

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Leadership Lessons from Mom

Happy Mother’s Day! I’ve not thought much about the links between motherhood and leadership, but today gives good reason to.

People struggle to understand leadership and how to do it. Take a lesson from mom and a process you’ve known your whole life. You’ll see leadership in a whole new way.

Like good mothers, good leaders are those who . . .

  • Create – and with a leap of faith and the deep giving of self, give rise to that which did not exist before
  • Hold and protect until the newly born is able to stand alone
  • Exhibit qualities important for the development of others, such as affection, nurturance, and belief in human capacities to learn and change
  • Teach, encourage, and socialize to important values and norms
  • Reward accomplishments with increased freedom and responsibility
  • Balance respect for differences with equity and fairness to all
  • Convey they have a tiger in their tank so that they don’t need to let it out often (as in Don’t make me call your mother!)
  • Are open, accepting, and approachable but never a buddy
  • Earn respect for their actions over the long haul
  • Love what they do and those they work with.
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We Like Our Leaders Perfect

Americans have a yearning to believe not only in a hero’s good deeds but in his goodness as a person.[1]

The quote is from a provocative piece in Newsweek about Greg Mortenson (of Three Cups of Tea fame) and his quick fall from grace following allegations by 60 Minutes and an expose (Three Cups of Deceit) by Into the Wild and Into Thin Air author Jon Krakauer of fabricated claims in Mortenson’s memoir and about his charity’s school-building in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as serious questions about his non-profit’s financial dealings and management.

I’ll let you read the details and sort through the hundreds of blogs, posts, websites, news stories, and online sources about the story to get to the truth.

I’m more interested in what all this says about us – and about why Mortenson’s grand story, as Krakow notes, went unchecked for years.

Plain and simple, we prefer our heroic leaders perfect, saintly, and on a pedestal.

It’s hard for us to look too close because we’d have to see them as human and acknowledge that imperfect or flawed people can still do great things.

Hampton Sides ties our preference for “neat” heroes to the quintessential American longing for the guy in the white hat – the perfect personification of our nation’s strengths and Manifest Destiny through a monochromatic Puritan lens.

I see it another way. If heroes are perfect, then I’m off the hook. Ordinary people like me don’t have to step up, speak out, take risks, or take a chance. We can just wait for the next perfect ones. And when their humanity begins to show, we can use our new-found social media capacities to take them down at break-neck speed too – or, as we do with our political leaders, throw them to the pundits and vote them out of office as soon as we can. Once free of these disappointing human beings, we can search for another perfect leader and again place all our hopes, dreams, and needs on that person. And the beat goes on.

There’s a simple alternative that will serve us better. We can all look for the leader within and act. Accept the fact that despite our foibles and imperfections, we can do great things – and in the process, learn  compassion for the imperfect others attempting to do the same.

There’s something deeply heroic – deeply American – about that.  

[1] Hampton Sides (2011). Shattered faith: What the fall of Greg Mortenson tells us about America’s irrepressible longing for heroes. Newsweek. May 2, 2011. pp. 5-6. Available online at http://www.newsweek.com/2011/04/24/shattered-faith.html

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Responsible Service: Key Learning from the Current World Crises

News from Japan grows darker by the hour, and happenings in the Middle East and Northern Africa tell no better story.

All raise questions about the meaning of real leadership, the trust and transparency that must be part of all healthy leader-follower relationships, and the importance for leaders to accept their responsibility to serve the larger good before they serve themselves.

It is tempting when title or influence dub us the leader to think that the job is all about us: what we want, what we can do, what we want others to do. That couldn’t be further from the truth. A leader’s work is to put ego and self aside so as to facilitate the power and possibility of shared commitment, shared vision, and creative solutions to nagging problems that are better than any a leader or a follower working alone could devise.

That’s the magic at the heart of leadership. Two (or more) heads are always better than one.

When leaders serve for personal gain, when they deny others the honest information or influence they need, when leaders act to preserve their power and pockets, when they make decisions to guard their reputations or ego at the expense of others, they are far outside the leadership realm.

Let’s not forget that truth. We see it so clearly today in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and other Middle Eastern hotspots. And when we look closely at the crisis in Japan, there are plenty of questions about the lack of transparency and about how and why decisions are being made (or haven’t been made thus far).     

It’s easier to judge when we stand as critics, viewing crisis or deadly conflicts from afar and evaluating the choices and ethics of the leaders involved. But what about how we enact our own everyday leadership?

How will we remember that leadership is all about responsible service?  If we do, we’ll avert our own crises – and deny our critics the pleasure of all those negatives judgments from afar.