Learning To Lose Is Part Of Learning To Live

Posted July 26, 2010 By David Irvine

Chandra, our fourteen-year-old daughter, who plays competitive soccer, pointed out an article to me this past week in Canada’s MacLean’s magazine, entitled “How A Team Loses Actually Matters” (July 26 edition, pp. 48-49). It’s a good article that reflected on the World Cup in South Africa this summer. “The World Cup,” Stephen Marche stated,” produced one winner and 31 losers, many more if you include all the teams that never made it to the tournament. And while Spain will go down in history, the rest will be forgotten. Which is a shame. The losers, after all, make up the bulk of competitors and the way they lose is so much more revealing than the way they win, each defeat a minor insight into national characteristics. To steal from Tolstoy: all victories are alike; every defeat is miserable in it own way.”

The article lead to some thoughtful discussion in our home about the importance of learning how to lose in life, which includes learning how to fail. I’ve heard it said that circumstances don’t determine a person, they reveal them. The way you lose, or stumble, or fail (or whatever you want to call it) provides some insight into your nature. For sports fans, how you deal with the loss of “your” team also reveals aspects of your true character.

To steal from Marche: Anybody can join in a victory parade. Only failure reveals true passion for the game and passion for life. But the lesson goes even beyond winning and losing. True living means that our lasting worth comes from inside. Attachment to external sources (such as a sports team or whether you win, or achievements and whether you “succeed”) for our sense of identity is fruitless. Winning or losing is temporary and will pass. Success and failure teaches us that everything outside of ourselves, including our possessions, our achievements and accomplishments, and our roles, are all temporary. Learning to lose is part of learning to live.

Categories: Leadership and Culture
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Finding Balance And Health In Your Culture: Wisdom From A Yogi

Posted July 12, 2010 By David Irvine

Did you ever have a bad day where everything seemed to go wrong? Although our tendency is to blame something in our external environment, it is the state of mind that you bring to your work or your life that determines whether the day is “bad” or “good”. You can train your nervous system to be depressed or angry or pessimistic, just as you can train yourself to be hopeful, loving, and optimistic. That is, you can teach yourself to let life get you down or choose to use whatever life sends you to find a lesson that will move you forward.

The same is true with cultures. Have you ever been in an environment that is not as productive as it could be or living up to it’s potential? How often have you been in an organization where you found that there is far more talent, brainpower, wisdom, and resourcefulness than the job required or even allowed? Just as people can be ruled by emotions, cultures can take on an emotive “state,” because cultures are made up of people.

Culture is essentially an interplay of energy and yoga, the practice of moving into stillness and focusing your energy, can be instructive in understanding organizational culture. According to yoga there are three basic qualities or energies: rajas, tamas and sattva. Rajas is the energy of action, change and movement, while Tamasic energy is associated with a state of inactivity and inertia, heaviness and darkness. Sattva is light and uplifting and indicates a state of harmony and balance.

In order to find balance, we must start on a journey towards sattva We do need rajas and tamas energy, but in their proper proportion and at their proper time. If we didn’t have rajas we would not have energy to move towards sattva.  If we have only tamas, we become “lazy” and never get anything done. However, we all want more balance and harmony in our lives, both corporately and personally, so we must ingest more sattva both mentally and physically.

In Yoga, as in life, the greatest obstacle to our growth towards a state of sattva is the continuous fluctuations of our minds.  The mind is always busy and it can flow in two directions – upwards towards sattva or downwards towards negativity. Patanjali, a great yoga sage from 200 BC gives a simple method for turning to sattva. He says when negative thoughts are encountered we must immediately replace them with the opposite positive.  Simple, but not easy! This is a practice of the mind. It is hard work and takes practice!

This has many implications for corporate culture.  We must not entertain negative thinking.  Gossip, slanderous talk and negativity of any kind work to undermine a positive mental framework, and makes most of us ineffective and generally miserable. A first step, and something infinitely practical is to breathe. A simple practice of mindful, deep breathing can be performed in any office, anytime of the day, in any meeting, at any moment, and thankfully it can be instituted without scrutiny or negative consequence.

We all make a difference to the environments we live and work in. Having ways to connect with sattvic energy can be a way to positively impact those around you. A healthy, balanced culture starts with you.

Note: Thanks to Jeff Lichty, my Yoga teacher (www.ashtanga-yoga-victoria.com) for writing this article with me!

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Entitlement: Greatness Run Aground*

Posted July 3, 2010 By David Irvine

I have noticed that every time a great culture is built, there appears to be an opposite and equal reaction to greatness: entitlement. It seems to be human nature. If you give your kids a lot, they want more. I grew up with telephone party lines, with one line for up to five or six residences. There were times when you had to wait 1/2 hour to make a phone call. Now I get impatient with my cell phone provider when I get a dropped call and have to redial with the push of one button. It used to take a winter to travel across this country on chuck wagons and horses. Now, as expectations have been raised, I find myself getting upset if a plane is thirty minutes late. Living in a great country, with world-class health care, education, law enforcement, and political systems seems only to increase our craving for more. Meet our needs with a high standard, and we raise the bar with a demand for more. I’ve seen the same dynamic in organizational cultures. The more the organization gives us what we want, the more entitled we feel. The best cultures I have worked with all experience the challenge of entitlement.

The reverse of this also seems true. My mother lived through the depression in a 900 square foot shack with ten siblings, enduring years of unimaginable poverty, and was void of entitlement. When she was close to death I asked her how she felt about dying. “After seventy-eight years, I accept death. I was fortunate just to have lived!” Joyce did not even feel entitled to life itself. Hard times are an ally in battling entitlement.

All the recent attention to building great cultures, empowering employees, and developing leadership capacity so people feel engaged seems to have unintentionally reinforced our love of entitlement. Living in great cultures has somehow fostered a belief that we have a right to get whatever we want without any obligations in return. Doing our own thing and expecting rights without service is self-serving. In the name of a great culture, we see people ask for such things as more pay, more freedom, greater recognition and privilege, more flex time or a risk-free environment without any reciprocating accountabilities.

This is simply wrong. Just because we are attempting to build cultures of trust that encourage you to find your authentic voice doesn’t mean you will get everything you ask for or have absolute security. Cultures of trust require a partnership, a commitment to a dialogue, not acts of concession. Accountable, authentic cultures of trust are based on reciprocal agreements. There are no licenses granted.

At the heart of entitlement is the belief that “my wants are more important than the culture and the culture exists for my sake.” At some point each of us needs to grow up and discover that our self-interest is better served by doing good work than by getting good things. Entitlement also rests on the belief that something is owed us because of sacrifices we have made. In reality, entitlement claims rights that have not been earned. It diminishes self-respect and constrains our freedom. The only way to reclaim what we have lost to entitlement is through acts of commitment and service to an entity larger than ourselves – the culture we work and live in.

When you see entitlement in the culture you live or work in, there are four steps to counter it:

1.     See entitlement as a sign of growth and greatness. You won’t find much entitlement in poverty and highly bureaucratic systems that have been suppressed for years.

2.     Identify the value or values you want to replace entitlement (e.g. self responsibility, service to others, gratitude).

3.     Find the allies in your culture who live by the values you are committed to and support them to foster these values with others who trust them. Like parenting, you only influence the values of people with whom you have a strong, trusting relationship.

4.     Get the values you want to instill off the wall and into people’s hearts through conversations and clearly defined actions. Then make a promise to live and work in accord with these actions, while being open for ongoing feedback and learning. Then shine a light an actions that are self-responsible, committed to service, and exude gratitude. Tell the story. Keep the renewed values fresh, making it difficult to be entitled.

*Thanks to Peter Block (Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest, Berrett-Koehler Publishers) for his inspiration behind many of these insights.

Categories: Leadership and Culture
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