A Seattle Times op-ed this week calls on citizens who are “enlightened leaders with foresight, not extremist ideologues” to stand up and run for public office. I agree! But what characterizes enlightened leaders with foresight? Bodhisattvas with vision? I’m not sure that clarifies what’s needed. Let’s give it more substance. I have a perspective on the leaders we, most urgently and whether we run for public office or not, need to be.
To start, let’s explore the opposite of ‘enlightened.’
I have easily surpassed the 10,000 hours mark for sitting in meetings with other people trying to work through hard problems. I’ve been inside of private, public and non-profit institutions, sometimes at the low end of the pecking order and sometimes higher up. And for the last 10 years, I’ve kept a roof over my head by suggesting new ways to solve problems together by focusing on organizational culture.
My biggest take-away after 30 years of observation is that how a group comes together to frame issues, deliberate and develop a path of action is the greatest determinant of that path’s quality, creativity and impact. If there is ever a time we need all hands on deck to create clear-headed, truly innovative paths of action, it’s now.
We all feel the ‘unenlightened’ group dynamics in a room: we cringe at bullying behaviors, tune out when someone runs the same endless script, work around palpable but unstated anger, grow weary of fixed positions, ruminate about others judgmentally, and say more about what we really think only after the meeting.
Please raise your hand if you’ve had some of these experiences while meeting with a group of people attempting to solve problems together. Lemme count…..1, 2, 3, 4...7,500,000,000….ok, that’s everybody.
Meetings dynamics are the direct result of the inner work of the individuals sitting around the table. If someone has a deep-seated fear of being wrong, a driving needing for certainty, a simmering urge for external approval, or any other universal, very human, but often unexamined need or fear, then they will carry that into any room where two or more are gathered. Guaranteed.
Worse, when those fears or needs aren’t conscious, when people haven’t invested much time in self-reflection, the energy of those unmet needs takes up all the air in the room, especially when those people have the most positional authority. Of the umpteen organizational development books I’ve read, every one reiterates that it’s the internal climate of the highest positional leader that has the greatest effect on the climate (aka culture) of an organization.
I read a retrospective piece about Hillary Clinton a year after the 2016 elections. The writer asked whether she’d ever turned to counseling or therapy for support, a reasonable question given everything she’s lived through personally and professionally. She said she hadn’t. It’s “not how I deal with stuff.” I wondered if she also thought the risk of looking like there is something wrong with her as a woman trying to succeed within a patriarchy was too great. All true enough, but I was shocked.
And then I just felt despair for the tragicomedy that is our culture -- a culture that stigmatizes psychological analysis and intentional self-reflection as some kind of worthless navel gazing. Or a culture that prizes relentless avoidance of anything that looks or smells like vulnerability. The thought that a woman her age, who has attempted more hard stuff in a week than most people do in a lifetime, would avoid the most important investment a leader can make to lead well was devastating. Worse, and ironically, it seemed like a kind of insanity.
But I’ve gotten slightly off course. Let me clarify my primary hypothesis.
I believe the only way to address the dysfunctional, time-consuming, inefficient, creativity suppressing, quality eroding group dynamics inherent to any collaborative endeavor requiring groups of humans is to ask the individuals participating to sort through their chaotic inner wilderness, claim their personal wounds that color every interaction whether they are aware of it or not, and bring as much humility and curiosity into the room as they can muster.
I have sat with hundreds of individuals, leaders all, tasked with governing—that is, effectively convening staff and citizens to create pathways to equitable, compassionate action in the midst of what can feel like intractable problems. And I have watched the ‘unenlightened’ wasting of intelligence, skills, and potential because we were afraid to name the elephants in the room, because someone’s unclaimed anger shut everyone else down or because most around the table felt unsafe to share a minority perspective or speak their truth.
If we continue to lead with this massive handicap, inside of government in particular, we have absolutely no hope of excavating our way out of this rubble and finding as-yet-unseen solutions to the never-before experienced challenges we now face.
In 1999 Desmond Tutu published No Future Without Forgiveness. After winning South Africa’s first democratically-held elections and to heal from apartheid’s atrocities, Nelson Mandela asked Tutu to lead a Truth & Reconciliation Commission. The Commission adopted what was called ‘the third way,’ which was a compromise between the extremes of the Nuremberg trials and blanket amnesty. The third way would ‘grant amnesty to individuals in exchange for a full disclosure relating to the crime for which the amnesty was being sought.’ Tutu, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1984, knew South Africa must find a way to forgive each other to create a country together.
I believe we have a similar path to forge around forgiveness, but the starting point this time is ourselves. We, each of us, has come into a life of suffering and loss. We, each of us, has tried to navigate a discordant world the best we can. Along the way, in a culture allergic to vulnerability, we needed to hide or deny our deepest wounds. There was no ‘crime’ in this, it was just our survival response. Yet the global crisis, and the exponential fear it has generated, has pulled our wounds to the surface. We feel them in our sleepless nights, in our painful relationships, in the acrimonious conflict everywhere, in our inability to see a way forward. These wounds need us to see them, feel them and tend to them.
I see a way forward that starts with forgiving ourselves for being like every other human and mindfully tending to what hurts on the inside. From this place, and only from this place, can we sit in rooms (or zooms) together and lead as ‘enlightened leaders with foresight’ and perhaps, if we’re lucky, weave our society together again in a way that is inherently life-giving, not just for some and not just for now, but for all and for the long-term.