Authenticity and Art: Making the Connection

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My father was a “closet artist.” He had a beautiful, artistic side that was repressed because our culture led him to believe that to be successful you had to have an office job, so he was an administrator. Suppressing his artistic, authentic self nearly cost him his life, sending him into an early retirement from the office job and into a decade of depression. It was not until he returned to university at the age of 65 to study art that his spirit awakened.

I am working on a project with the world-renowned artist, Murray Phillips, to teach the leaders in an organization how to use art to be more connected with their authentic selves and those they serve. We had a brilliant conversation this week about the role of art in one’s life, about the value of connecting with our artistic self, about honoring the artist within us, and about how all this makes us better people and better leaders.

“You don’t say that someone is ‘very’ physical,” said Murray. “We simply are physical. It is not a matter of degree. It’s part of the human experience. So why should we say that a person is ‘very’ spiritual, or ‘very’ artistic? These too, are part of the human experience.” Everybody is artistic because everybody has something to express. Try not expressing anything for twenty-four hours and see what happens. You may find yourself losing energy, becoming despondent, or you may even feel like you will burst. You will then need to write a letter, draw a picture, garden, or embark on a project.

“Art,” according to Murray, “is a language, a language that we can learn. It is a mistake to think we can communicate everything verbally. In the language of art, words don’t exist.” This is why art can be used to express a range of emotions – grief, joy, inner peace – that words cannot reach. As we learn this language of art we connect with our authentic self and the world around us in new, expanded ways, thus deepening our capacity to influence others with greater presence, and most importantly, enjoy this experience we call human more fully.

One of the indicators of a hurried, troubled, stressed world is that we disconnect from art and then stop noticing the beauty, wonder, and awe of life. This  then limits our full capacity  as human beings. Being disconnected with our authentic self, with our humanness, separates us from each other and from the environment. What we separate from we neglect or destroy.

What are you doing to learn, deepen, and express the language of art in your life? What are you doing to stop and notice beauty around you? When was the last time you were in awe?

For a taste of Murray Phillips’ beautiful work (along with John Gilliat’s brilliant guitar playing), take five minutes to stop and watch: http://johngilliat.com

Enlarging The Lives Of Others: The Work Of The Best Leaders

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As we “spring ahead” and begin to think about the coming season of growth and renewal, I have been contemplating how we can encourage and support others by “enlarging” them. In the following article I offer some suggestions I hope will “enlarge” your outlook and actions.

“Believe in your heart of hearts that your fundamental purpose, your reason for being, is to enlarge the lives of others. As you enlarge the lives of others, your life will be enlarged. And all the other things we have been taught to concentrate on will take care of themselves.” – Pete Thigpen, Former President, Levi Strauss

Last week I had the privilege of touring the plant of a client who hired me to help improve the culture of his organization. As we wandered around, the CEO introduced me to everyone we came across – in the halls, the offices, the labs, and on the shop floors. But he didn’t just know everyone’s name and title. He made a point, whenever possible and appropriate, of making a brief – and positive – comment about everyone. When he introduced me to the janitor, the caretaker’s eyes widened and brightened as the CEO told me how he puts pride into everything he does and that he’ll be greatly missed when he retires next month after more than a quarter century of service. Every employee smiled as they were introduced and the CEO said something positive about the unique contribution they individually made to the well-being of this company.

This CEO understands a fundamental responsibility of leaders: to enlarge the lives of every one of their employees.

As I think of my own staff, I realize that I often take them for granted. I give them work to do, put pressure on them to deliver on their accountabilities, and attempt to give them support to do their work. But do I actually make a conscious effort toenlarge their lives? We all get into our routines, our habits, our mundane patterns. In a world of incessant demands, it is easy to lose touch with the people around us and the real work of leadership.

Here are seven ways to enlarge the lives of others:

  1. Care. Enlarging the lives of people isn’t a technique. You can’t fake it. People will see right through you. We all get busy and forget to notice people. Your staff will forgive you for forgetting. What they won’t forgive you for is not caring. Enlarging the lives of people involves caring about people, not manipulating them. People are uplifted and better by being around people who care about them.
  2. Serve. Serving means having a commitment to people’s growth as much as finding the resources to help them get their job done. Serving means making the success of others more important than your own. Serving means making others look good and being willing to not take the credit. Great leaders know that you can’t necessarily make people happy, but you can help them take pride in themselves and their work – by seeing their worth, beyond what they may see in themselves.
  3. Make Time. Enlarging the lives of others takes time. Take time to learn names. But more than that, take time to learn about what matters to people you serve, the names of their family members, and the kind of things they do when they are away from work. Leadership is more than just wandering around. It’s tuning in. It’s paying attention. It’s being in touch. Carry a notepad and make a note of what’s important to the people on your team.
  4. Challenge. If you are going to enlarge the lives of others you have to push them beyond their comfort zone. You have to set a standard that stretches them. And you have to encourage them. “You can do this;” “I trust you;” and “I believe in you;” are enlarging statements. Then model the way. When was the last time you encouraged someone to go beyond what’s easy? When is the last time you did something for the first time?
  5. Accountability. Collin Powell, the former US Secretary of State, once said that“everyone on a team knows who is and who is not performing and they are looking to you as the leader to see what you are going to do about it.” You don’t enlarge the lives of people when you let them off the hook or hold back from having the difficult conversations. Set clear standards and hold people accountable. It enlarges the lives of everyone.
  6. Safety. Enlargement is about creating an environment where people can grow. Bruce Lipton, a cellular biologist, says that a cell has only two options in life: to grow or to protect. If the cell perceives its environment to be toxic it will go into protection mode. When it perceives its environment to be nourishing, it will enlarge. To enlarge the lives of others, you must create an environment that is physically and psychologically safe – safe to work without harm, safe to make mistakes without fear, safe to be honest without retribution, safe to be yourself without judgment.
  7. Appreciation. Appreciation is about acknowledging (both privately and publicly) effective, productive action. Appreciation is recognizing people when they take special care in a delivery, when they go out of their way to fix a glitch in a product, when they make a customer feel extra special, when they send the order out early, when they go the extra mile. Appreciation isn’t empty praise. Appreciation is genuine recognition when someone makes a difference. It’s about catching people doing things right rather than succumbing to the seemingly natural tendency to criticize. Say thank you. What you appreciate, appreciates.

When you are mindful and intentional about making these actions a habit, the lives of people around you will naturally enlarge. As you help people grow in this way, it will inevitably come back to you in the form of commitment, loyalty, and results. As you enlarge the lives of others, your life and your organization will be enlarged. And all the other things we have been taught to concentrate on really do seem to take care of themselves.

What are you doing to enlarge the lives of others? Your staff? Your co-workers?  Your customers? Your family and friends? I’d love to hear your success stories.

The Truth About Leadership Training

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The problem with most leadership training is that we think we can actually “train” someone to be a leader. Training is about skill development. You can “train” someone to cut grass, fix a carburetor, or make a latte at Starbucks. But, leadership? Can you actually “train” someone to be a leader?

The problem behind leadership training is the assumption that leadership is merely a set of prescribed skills that can be taught.

Our work around leadership development builds on a simple premise: leadership cannot be reduced so skills or techniques; leadership comes from the identity and integrity of the leader. You can learn a bunch of tools as a leader, which most leadership training programs offer. But what we’re interested in is the tool user – the person below the surface of the tools and the skills. Who you are as a leader will always speak louder that any tool or technique or skill you learn in a leadership training program.

Our research, with thousands of employees in hundreds of organizations, indicates that what people are looking for in their leaders today is realness. Good leadership, first and foremost, is about being a real human being. Then, from that realness earns you the credibility to influence. Leadership is about presence, not position. Your very presence becomes an attraction when you seek substance, depth, and character.  In an age where you must attract, rather than control or coerce, you must be a person who is attractive. You earn the ability to attract by understanding and developing yourself. Leadership development is more about personal development than it is about leadership development. To diminish this commitment to ongoing, life-long self-awareness and development to a simple “training program” is like thinking of the human body as simply a machine.

Does leadership training have a place? Of course, as long as you don’t think that leadership can be percolated down to set of skills that can be taught. You can learn some very useful skills and tools for reaching people, impacting others, and acquiring an ability to influence others. But it must be combined with the development of being more fully human – being real as a person. The best leaders we know are good people. And you can’t learn to be a good person in a training program. Being a good person requires a commitment to spending your life learning about yourself, serving others, and cultivating strong character. Leadership is ultimately about development, not training.

Personal Leadership: What Is Enough?

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I work with some amazing leaders who, in their own unique ways, are quietly and diligently making a tremendous impact on the world. And almost all of them are exhausted. Why is that? We could certainly blame it on technology and how accessible we are to the demands of others. We could probably all benefit from a refresher course in time management. We could all get clearer about our priorities. Certainly a decrease in resources in the organizations we work in could be a contributing factor. Maybe we just live in a more demanding time.

What I submit is that one of the core reasons that people are so tired today is that we have lost connection with the experience of “enough.”

  • How much is enough service?
  • How much is enough accomplishment?
  • How much is enough money?
  • How much is enough security?
  • How much is enough success?
  • How much is enough exercise or rest or food?
  • How much is enough of anything?

In a world that demands that more is better, I think it is imperative that we grapple with these questions because the world’s standards of enough are not working. If you don’t have an inner experience of being enough, no amount of offering, success, money, or stuff in your life will ever make you feel satisfied, filled, or large enough. What is enough? If you do not know, within yourself, that you are enough, you will die of weariness, because there will always be more to do, more to have, and more to be.

Alternatively, when you know you are enough, beyond what the world tells you, then your giving, your achieving, your expanding and creating, comes from overflow, not emptiness, and the world will nourish you as you, in turn, nourish others with your presence.

My personal leadership challenge for you is to ask:

  • How do you come to know your worth away from your work?
  • What does “enough” feel like to you?
  • How do you know how much is enough?
  • How do you know you are enough?

 

How To Achieve Good Leadership: Success Beyond Success

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Good leadership starts with understanding your goals. And understanding your goals means you need to be very clear about how you define success. Below are some reflections on success that I trust will be valuable to you.

Whenever we speak of success, there are always two levels of success. The first is outer success. The second is inner – or authentic – success: success beyond success.

If you set a goal (e.g. to win a game, get a promotion, make a certain amount of money) and you achieve that goal, you are successful. But this is outer success, what the late Stephen Covey would have called your personality.

Inner, or what some call spiritual, success, is something quite different. Inner success is the kind of person you became, and the contribution you make to the world, in pursuit of your goal. Inner success is what Covey would have called your character. Inner success is independent of whether you actually achieve your goal. You can be hugely successful from an inner standpoint and still fail miserably at the outer success (case in point: Eddy the Eagle, 1988 Olympics).

Outer success is fleeting. It lasts only until the next record is broken or the next gold medal is won or the next headlines are written. Inner success, on the other hand, is far more sustainable and lasting. Inner success can last a lifetime and beyond, with a legacy (for example, my father’s character lives in me more than a quarter century after his death). Inner success is what gives you self-worth, self-respect, and sustained confidence.

In my workshops I use this exercise: Think of three people you admire. They could be real people, such as Nelson Mandela or your grandmother, or mythical characters such as Hercules or Santa Claus. For me, they would be my mother, my father, and Viktor Frankl.

Now think of the character traits that make each of your chosen characters admirable to you. For example, I admire my mother for her wisdom; my father for his compassion, and Viktor Frankl for his resiliency and dignity.

I then have my workshop participants compare these admirable traits with the typical success markers of our culture, the kind of traits featured in Fortune magazine. After doing this exercise with thousands of people, I have yet to see anyone choose characters they admire with qualities such as fame, beauty, power, youth, or wealth. It is fascinating that culturally we gravitate unconsciously to things that ultimately mean so little to us.

It is fine to have a goal of outer success, but from an inner, spiritual perspective, the purpose of having that goal is not to achieve the goal. The purpose of a goal of outer success is to inspire yourself to become the kind of person it takes to achieve it. Then, whether you achieve outer success or not, you can still have inner success, or success beyond success. This is authentic success: living your life in accord with your values – in the service of others.

To make this idea of “inner” and “outer” success real, I think of the words of Jenny Bocock, daughter of the famous Wimbledon player, Bunny Austin, who lives not far from me. Jenny writes:

“Dad said to me that when we die, God is not going to ask us how successful we have been, but how much we have cared for people. I was told this when he was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame.” (He was in the top ten tennis players of the world for 10 years. He reached the finals of Wimbledon twice and was on the winning David Cup team four times.)

“People afterwards remarked on how this must have taken pressure off of me. It did. I sometimes wonder if some children of celebrities who have committed suicide might not have if they had this sentence in their lives.

What does success mean to you? What are you committed to? How does your own striving for outer success impact your leadership capacity, your ability to influence others? How about your striving for inner success? What’s the difference? What difference does it make in your leadership?

The Truth About Good Leadership: Start By Being A Good Person

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In Jim Collin’s classic book, “Good to Great,” he showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. It’s not only a good book. It’s a great book.

In the pursuit of greatness, which Collin’s book undoubtedly will inspire, don’t forget the foundation: goodness. In a world that reveres the pursuit of greatness, basic values such as kindness, consideration, honesty, compassion, dependability, respect for others, and hard work, are undervalued. How often do we see the winners of gold medals, leaders of successful companies, and the Stanley Cup champions venerated in the headlines of our national newspapers? Compare these kinds of recognized accomplishments with people revered for being a good person, for simply exhibiting qualities of strong character.

In my workshops I use an exercise: Think of three people you admire. They could be real people, such as Abraham Lincoln or your grandmother, or mythical characters such as Hercules or Santa Claus. For me, they would be my mother, my father, and Viktor Frankl.

Now think of the character traits that make each of your chosen characters admirable to you. For example, I admire my mother for her wisdom; my father for his compassion, and Viktor Frankl for his resiliency and dignity.

I then have my workshop participants compare these admirable traits with the typical success markers of our culture, the kind of traits featured in Fortune magazine. After doing this exercise with thousands of people, I have yet to have any choose characters they admire with qualities such as fame, beauty, power, youth, or wealth. It is fascinating that culturally we gravitate unconsciously to things that ultimately mean so little to us.

What I’m saying is that the roots of great, authentic leadership are being a good person. Don’t go for greatness until others view you as exhibiting the qualities of “goodness.” There’s nothing wrong with the inspiring path of “greatness,” if that is what is important to you. But if, on the journey to success by the world’s standards (what I call outer success), you lose contact with inner success, (the realization of goodness in your life), what will you be left with?

You want to be a good leader? Start with being a good person. Then you’ll have something to stand on in the pursuit of greatness.