Every time that I share my story...
the pain and the suffering as well as the comeback and success...
multiple people tell me how inspired, motivated, uplifted, and empowered they feel.
One of the greatest challenges that confronted me when I assumed the role of head of school was the contrast in personalities between my predecessor and me. In many ways we were polar opposites, including our general affect, how we interacted with others and in the amount of quiet, private time (with the door closed) that we wanted or needed to function effectively in our jobs.
At the time, I really didn’t appreciate this issue. To me, I was who I was and I assumed that everyone else would simply get used to dealing with a new boss. In hindsight, I feel that I could and should have taken more time to understand my personality and, by extension, leadership profile and how that may impact those around me, especially when they were used to something very different. While personality differences between leaders are to be expected, when they represent a major shift then there can be a difficulty in adjustment for everyone involved. And that difficulty became apparent soon enough in my situation.
One of my favorite leadership training sessions is based on the True Colors Personality Assessment. In this system, people generally identify as being one of four colors: blue, green, gold or orange.
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Corporate life has earned a well-deserved reputation as being cold, calculated and non-emotive. Bosses seem to have picked up that there is little room for emotions and connection behind their business suits and spreadsheets. This approach, an outgrowth of the “boys don’t cry” school of thought, maintains that work is work. It should be a place of logical, rational thought, where you don’t give into emotional thinking. And you certainly don’t display any emotions you do feel to those around you because it’s both not professional and leaves you too vulnerable.
A new school of thought, getting increasingly more traction, argues that emotions and vulnerability are part of who we are. If we want true authenticity and power at work, we need to be willing to feel and acknowledge our emotions in our everyday activities.
Of course, this does not mean that we can or should allow our emotions to seize control of situations and dominate our thinking. It simply offers us permission to acknowledge how we feel and use those feelings as a way of taking our emotional temperature and take proper action when we feel sad, anxious, stressed and the like.
But it would be a mistake to think of workplace emotions only from a negative standpoint, as in how to handle our emotions when we’re feeling out of whack. Positive emotions deserve more attention as drivers of workplace connection, collaboration, motivation and engagement. Leaders who learn how to channel positivity and infuse it into their teams will see significant results in such areas as creativity, productivity, and retention.
Such positive emotion often starts with gratitude.
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When I knew that I would be moving on from my role of school Headmaster five years ago, I considered two primary pathways forward. One was another school leadership position. The other was to become a leadership coach and consultant. A variety of factors would point me in the latter direction, which I have been traveling on for the past five years. But this was only possible due to my willingness to open up to new possibilities and not allow myself to become stuck along the one path that I had come to know so well.
In their timeless presentation on the perils of leadership (Leadership on the Line, HBR Press, 2002, pp. 218ff,) authors Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky caution leaders to worry less about the form of their work and focus instead on the substance or essence of their contribution. We tend to come to think of ourselves by the form of what we do (“I am a mayor”, “I am a business executive”, “I am a professional athlete”, etc.) and struggle to make sense of things when our positions and status change, voluntarily or not. Suddenly, the stay-at-home mom with an empty nest, the non-profit leader who had not been renewed, the politician on the wrong side of an election, the retired technician or the laid-off laborer find themselves disoriented, with a reduced sense of purpose and unclear direction.
Without question, such periods can be very difficult and confusing, particularly when they occur suddenly and are imposed from without. But when a person chooses to identify first by who they are as people and what motivates them in the service of others, they can more easily and confidently move forward.
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I have two clients that are a block away from each other in NYC. The walking time between them is measured in seconds and often I can schedule things to allow me to go from one to the other in short order.
But there are times when I have to schedule them on different days, which would be less of an issue if I didn’t live an hour away from them.
This past week, I took things to a new level. I visited one client on Tuesday and the other on Wednesday. In between, I flew down to Florida for an early morning talk to over 300 leaders. Including local commutes to and from the airport, my journey from one client to the other, though themselves separated by only one block, exceeded 1900 miles.
Talk about a long walk down the block!
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The statistics are staggering. According to the website Statista, the current number of social media users worldwide sits at over 2.5 billion and will grow to 3 billion by 2021. Facebook leads all social media platforms with 2.2 billion active users (80% of Americans have Facebook accounts), while messenger apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are actively used by 1.3 billion people each.
When in Social Space, do as the Socialspacians do.
But Social Space is not for everyone. Nor should it be. I just wish that someone had told me this a bit sooner.
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We live in a paradoxical world. On the one hand, we are more connected than ever before. Social media and our portable devices makes posting and reading content, liking, commenting, and sharing, easier and faster than ever. We know what our contacts are doing in real time and can “join them” virtually from the comfort of wherever we are and whatever we’re doing at that moment. Email and a host of messaging platforms also keep the virtual conversation going around the clock.
Yet, there is something about all of this connecting that leave so many of us wanting and unfulfilled.
Part of the issue, no doubt, is the superficiality of how we connect and engage. Though our networks are larger and more diverse than ever before, the quality of those connections is simply not there. So much of communication depends on the things that technology cannot replace, like non-verbals, proximity and the like.
But for many of us, a bigger issue with Networking 2.0 may be the inauthenticity and contrived realities that it fosters.
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