Some leaders are making significant changes in how they think and act since COVID-19 turned the world upside down. This client’s story highlights lessons for many of us. When she was ten years old Sonia’s family immigrated to the United States from the Middle East. They had little money and spoke little English. With help from their community and from supportive agencies, they settled and thrived.
Every client I work with complains that they need more effective cross-organizational collaboration. They say that collaboration is more crucial than ever, due to increasingly complex environments and the speed of change. Yet people still work in their silos and spend more time competing than collaborating. As I listen to their grumbling, I wonder, “Why are we still dealing with this?” After all, the need for cross-organizational collaboration wasn’t invented yesterday.
I can’t blame you if you greet this post with skepticism. Leadership and poetry seems like an oxymoron, like rain and San Diego. I’m even a little surprised you are still reading. But here are lessons from two senior executives who recently used poetry to align their teams and build healthy cultures.
I hate to say it, but several people I work with have annoying habits. Some interrupt too much, some don’t say what’s really on their minds, some are so detail-oriented they make my teeth ache. But I too inflict an annoying habit on others: I often indirectly ask for recognition. This ‘addiction to approval’ is a habit I’d like to break. What’s wrong with seeking approval? Not much if done in small doses, but I’ve become dependent. Do I really need to ask my wife to praise me for taking the trashcans to the curb? Yes. So with the idea that I am not the only person on earth cursed with this affliction, I herein submit my self-improvement process. Perhaps you or others might benefit from my efforts: I’ve tried unsuccessfully to stop asking for recognition before, so I sought help from Carrie, one of my coaching colleagues. Her challenging questions and insights yielded surprising results.
Ann was upset with her boss. During a leadership program I was conducting she complained that he scheduled team meetings every Friday at 5pm. Oh, I said, 5pm on a Friday does sound like an unproductive time to meet. When I asked what her boss said when she confronted him, Ann responded that it was impossible to do that because he doesn’t like to be challenged. She even got angry with me when I said it wasn’t impossible to confront him. Rather, I said, she simply didn’t want to live with the consequences of challenging him, despite knowing it was the right thing to do. Ann sulked the rest of the afternoon. By the way, Ann is a vice president of her company.
A client from Amsterdam used to watch me facilitate leadership programs for his company’s executives. At the end of each session I’d ask him how he thought it went. Mark would look very serious and say, “Robert, not everything is AWESOME.” He’d pronounce ‘awesome’ in a Dutch inflected fake New York accent, and we’d both crack up laughing. Even though it was funny, Mark was sending me a message. In Mark’s culture, drawing attention to oneself and one’s work is discouraged. In fact, to express approval, Mark would often say to me, “it could have been worse.” Some praise!
A dear colleague and I were talking at lunch about the usual subjects – our work, our families, the miserable state of the world. We commiserated about our aging parents growing more frail. I said, “It is what it is,” and my friend replied, “No it isn’t.” I repeated, “Yes, it is what it is,” and she repeated, “No it isn’t.” After a few more rounds of this craziness, I said that though it may be cliché, the phrase indicates acceptance of a particular situation. She countered that this might be true in some cases, but that I should listen more carefully.
In a freak accident eight weeks ago, I was hit by a truck and pinned against a highway guardrail. The impact broke my femur in half and fractured my knee. Wheel chair bound for four weeks, I’m now halfway through a 6-month recovery period. Needless to say, I’ve had to rely on others a lot. And, like many people, I’m really uncomfortable asking for and receiving help. Yet a recent coaching engagement has helped me understand how impactful this discomfort can be on an executive’s, and on my own, influence.
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