Category Archives: leadership

Be a Connecting Node

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How would you describe American political culture today?

What about the culture at your workplace?

In your family?

Are dissenting voices welcomed?  How do those in authority wield their power?  Do the led have a say in decisions and policies that affect them?  Are their needs and interests taken into account by those who lead?

What role do you play in each of these systems?  How do you contribute to the function, dysfunction, morale, and relationships in these interconnected, overlapping, inextricable and sometimes tenuous systems?

How much of these cultures do you own, do you take personal responsibility for?

I have written before about the interaction between a system and its individuals.  In each of the systems I name above—our nation, your workplace, your family—you are a single individual, a node [a point at which lines or pathways intersect or branch; a central or connecting point].  You are connected, directly and indirectly, to every other node in all of your systems.  Thus, you connect each of your overlapping systems to every other one.  So do I.  This is how we are all connected, every single one of us, and our planet.

Thus, what you do affects me, even if I have never met you, even if we live on different continents, in separate generations, speaking mutually unintelligible languages, and vice versa, for all of us.

Octavia Butler said it best:

All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.

So how do you change what you touch?

Do you make it better than it was?  Does the change you make make you better in return?

If the only lasting truth is change, then what do we want tomorrow to look like?  What about next year?  What kind of world do we want our grandchildren and their grandchildren to inherit?

Are you a node that connects, using your power and love to thicken the ties between your adjacent nodes and systems, making them stronger and more resilient?  Who is healthier, stronger, and happier for you having touched them?  How have they then extended that health, strength and joy to others?  How have you resisted destructive forces and stood in the way of systems disintegration?  Whom have you protected?  What did it cost you, and what did you gain?  What have you earned?  How will you persist?  What and who hold you up?  On which nodes do you lean, from which do you draw strength, and how then do you pass that strength on?  How do you influence and co-create the culture around you this way?

Or are you a destructive, severing node?  How do you go around blowing up connections, weakening relationship infrastructures?  Maybe you don’t see it this way. Perhaps you see your work as culling, pruning, removing extraneous nodal debris, clearing the path for a more righteous supersystem to rise.  What does this cost you?  Is the benefit worth the price?  Who are your coconspirators in this effort?  How do they change you for your connections to them?  How do you expect your connections to other destructive nodes to evolve?  What is your impact on your systems cultures, being this way?

I suspect we all possess both poles of nodal potential.  Probably most of us go about our days in relative mindlessness, speaking and acting as our surroundings and culture dictate, by convention and custom.  We suppress the inner dissonance that arises when our personal instincts run counter to prevailing winds of rhetoric.  We fear losing connections if our personal nodal identity reflects a different light or sounds a different note from the collective thrum.  The status quo feels easier to uphold.

I posit to you today that our systems are disintegrating fast, eroded by myriad destructive nodes, spreading like slime mold on a global petri dish.  I argue that our collective political culture suffers much today from these destructive nodes, and connector nodes struggle to nurture ties and maintain relationships.  In such times, we may feel tempted to give in, to allow our inner rage monster to tantrum, to succumb to swelling, destructive, disconnecting culture.  Indeed, it is hard to resist.

And yet, we continue.  We march on.

Culture is created and maintained in each day to day interaction between all members of a system. Any individual may choose, at any time, to maintain the status quo or make a shift. It is the accumulation of multiple small shifts, simultaneously and in series, that moves a system to a new, improved state.  Each day we awaken, we have a choice—an infinite series of choices—to make a shift toward connecting and strengthening our intertwined systems.

Do not wait for someone else to go first.  Make the choice yourself, today, right now.  Be a connecting node.  Speak and act, post online, and show up in person, irrefutably, as a connector.  Make your touch productive and generative, inclusive, empowering, and communal.  See how this changes how others show up to you, and how that changes you for the better still.  Then watch the slime mold recede before your eyes as connector node energy amplifies and restores balance.

Slime molds recur.  Connecting nodes hold the line.  We need you.

What I’m Learning About Equity

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My friends, I am humbled this weekend.

A year ago I agreed to present on culture change to the inaugural WEL cohort, a group of 18 amazing women physician leaders.  I had no idea at the time what an honor and privilege this would be.  This would be the last in person meeting of their 18 month training on Wellness, Equity, and Leadership.  Having just completed my own 10 month leadership training, I empathized acutely with the bittersweet bonding and pending farewell among these sisters.

For two days I received infinitely more than I offered, and I saw again how membership in a mutually respectful, supportive, and empowering tribe can transform any individual from star to superstar.  Truly, these women were superstars before this tribe was formed; but whereas before we probably only needed dark sunglasses in their presence, now we need welder’s masks.

Gender, race, socioeconomic status, mental health status—these factors among others are all subject to unconscious bias and thus discrimination, in all arenas of society.  These WEL women will have a hand in changing that for the better, of this I am certain.  I’m so proud to know them all.

The night before my presentation, I messaged my friend who has helped me think more deeply about these issues in the past year.  I wrote, “It reminds me of your idea of approaching inclusion first, which I now see as wide psychological safety.  As you said, there can be a room full of white men and all may not feel included. And in my mind, that precludes true, open and honest collaboration and productivity.  It prevents any forward movement toward diversity or equity. When we don’t feel safe we revert to scarcity and survival thinking.  We look out only for ourselves.  Nothing good happens here.”

What about the one Old White Guy (OWG) among women, how does he feel?  Dr. Clif Knight, Senior Vice President of Education for the American Academy of Family Physicans and WEL steering committee member, owned this distinction this week.  He reported his recent self-identification as ‘a HeForShe.’  My heart leapt for joy.  Later I took him by the lapels and shook him (gently), practically yelling that I was so excited, and wished for him to recruit all of his OWG friends to the cause.

I thought again about my friend above, also an OWG.  I know him to be kind, generous, respectful of women and a genuine ally.  What about his idea of working on inclusion first?  After a long, deep conversation with one of my new WEL friends, with whom I’m also thinking about equity issues for Asian-American physicians, a new insight dawned on me, and I wrote to her: “Practicing inclusion INCLUDES the OWG ‘oppressor’! 😱  If we talk only about him needing to include others, while we make him feel excluded himself, how can we ever expect to enroll him in our cause or even behave in the way we ask? We do how we feel. And when we feel threatened and marginalized, especially from a place of loss, we act accordingly…”

Another new WEL friend, Dr. Dawn Sears, has already taken this idea to heart and made an impact in her community, elevating women’s and men’s awareness of gender disparity in medicine, and helping them fight it together.  Check out her powerful presentation to colleagues here, full of evidence as well as unsettling personal stories.  In it she directly and kindly addresses the men in the audience, informing and inviting them to join the fight, for all our sakes.  She names the contrarian men who have held her up on her professional journey, defying gender bias and paving their own HeForShe way for others.  She includes men in order to enroll them in the movement.  I encourage all to view the talk—find out how you, as colleague, patient, and all around good citizen, man or woman, can help improve the system for us all.

Once again I thought about my friend.  I wrote to him again:  “I wonder if I inadvertently made you feel excluded, or at least ‘other’d’ when I asked you to read Feminist Fight Club*.  DUH, the intended audience for that book is women.”  He was gracious and encouraging in his response, and I look forward to continuing our conversation for a long while.

Tonight I feel wildly optimistic.  So many strong, visible, articulate, creative, powerful and loving people all over the place, all working to make the world better for all of us, WOW.  We will make a difference, my friends.  We are not only allies; we are accomplices.  If we go together, we can do anything.

Onward, friends.  We’ got lots to do.

 

*He made an earnest, good faith effort, and did not finish the book.

All Good Things Must End

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moon path LOH

Setting moon, Sylvan Dale Guest Ranch, Loveland, Colorado.  Photo courtesy of Dr. Karen Cornell

Friends, Leading Organizations to Health has graduated Cohort 11, the Class of 2020.

Ten months ago I started at my Hogwarts, the leadership training program that has definitely made me a better leader.  But more importantly, it made me nine amazing new friends and a much better person.  Today, on the last day of the last retreat, it all came together in the most beautiful way, and I am beyond grateful.

These ten months were the best elective educational experience of my life—they really gave college and med school a run for their money.  We immersed in a curriculum dense with abstract concepts of interpersonal communication and organizational change management.  We then translated the theories into tangible skills in an experiential learning lab, applied to specific challenges brought by my 7 cohort mates and me.  Over four in-person retreats and monthly Zoom calls, we shared, supported, and coached one another in the tenets of relationship-centered leadership.

We bonded in a similar way to residents on call:  Gathered for training, bringing different backgrounds and perspectives, participating in a common curriculum but each with a unique learning path, eventually to disperse and practice in different settings across the country.  We eight now share a connection of stories and struggle that nobody else can know.  We are a tribe.

Thus, I grieved the goodbyes long before we arrived in Loveland this last time.  But I also trusted our master facilitators to help me manage this, by both their loving and authentic presence and the very structure of the program, which is founded on contemplation and self-awareness.  I also felt an abiding faith in the friendships we all grew this past year.  As with my best friends from college and medical school, I knew we would maintain contact and connection, just in a different way.  We can’t stay in the nest forever—now is the time to fly.

In thoughtfully constructed journaling exercises and discussion groups, we reflected, consolidated, and synthesized ten months of learning.  We also examined our personal and professional evolution over this time, growth and movement in fluidity and complexity.  We explored aspirations and imagined the future state of this work in our natural habitats.  Finally, we sat in a closing circle.   Having each shared our own reflections, the group offered each friend observations, affirmations, and well wishes in what I can only describe as the most loving communion.  Each person’s strengths were articulated and amplified.  We acknowledged one another’s challenges.  We celebrated each other’s engagement, perseverance, contributions and triumphs.  Finally, sustained mutual support was extended around the circle, wholeheartedly and without qualification.

In my opinion, we formed the kind of community that we all want to lead.  Tony and Diane led us all by example, deliberately, artfully, and mindfully.  They live the principles they teach; they lovingly and patiently showed us the way.  In the end we discovered our own capacity to each write our own next chapter(s).  By making us feel seen, heard, understood, accepted and loved these ten months, our teachers inspired us to do the same for others.  And that is the strongest foundation for building our houses of positive change agency.

Now we go forth.  We’ got this.