Category Archives: leadership

Diversify Your Network

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NaBloPoMo 2018:  What I’m Learning

Are you friends with a plumber?  My friend Dennis is, or was, as of c.1997.  I forget his friend’s name, let’s call him Frank; they knew each other in high school.  Dennis and I were both medical students when I met Frank.  Looking back he must have thought I was a little strange.  I asked what he did for a living, and when he told me he was a plumber I interrogated him, hard.  “What’s that like?  How do you train, is there a school (I was a straight-through biology pre-med who knew next to nothing about trade schools)?  What are your hours like, are there days when you don’t work?  How do you figure out what the problem is?”  I was just so curious—I had never met anyone who did that kind of work, and it was so different from anything I knew.  He didn’t talk to me for long.  We were at Dennis’s birthday party and Frank quickly found other friends to connect with.

I’m so grateful to work in medicine, where I get to meet people from all walks of life every day.  In the exam room I have met coders, lawyers, teachers, construction workers, professional dog walkers, stylists, food critics, financial columnists, hedge fund managers, engineers, HR directors, leadership coaches, musicians, and myriad others…but I can’t remember any plumbers.  I love when I have time to ask, “What’s that like?” and “What do you spend your days doing?”  I always learn something new, and the best days are when I find some parallel between our work lives.  My husband the orthopaedic surgeon remembers patients by their x-rays.  I remember them by their social histories.

The Harvard Business Review sent an article to my inbox today entitled, “How to Diversity Your Professional Network.”  It cites studies that show “people who are connected across heterogeneous groups and who have more-diverse contacts come up with more creative ideas and original solutions.”  Reading it triggered an avalanche of memories and cognitive dot-connecting, hence my story about Frank.

First, I’m reminded of my first coaching call after accepting my new role at work.  Coach Christine asked about my ‘allies,’ the people whose counsel I value and who will hold me up and accountable through the growth process and pains that are leadership.  She pointed out that allies are not always people who agree with me.  They can be my challengers, my opposition, my rivals.  Through them, I am forced to grapple with my own integrity; they serve as the crucible for my values.  This idea helps me stay open to people whom I might otherwise dismiss.  Diversify.

Second, I remembered of The Big Sort, by Bill Bishop.  It’s thick with data and research, but the part that struck me hardest was the idea that our ideology becomes more extreme when we spend time with like-minded people.  I suppose you might think, well yeah, duh.  But when you consider how this affects decision making on the individual, community, and policy levels, it’s a little scary.  In his description of research by Cass Sunstein and colleagues, Conor Friedersdorf writes:

But for all the benefits of agreement, solidarity, and spending time with like-minded people, there is compelling evidence of a big cost: the likeminded make us more confident that we know everything and more set and extreme in our views. And that makes groups of like-minded people more prone to groupthink, more vulnerable to fallacies, and less circumspect and moderate in irreversible decisions they make.

Groupthink.  That reminded me of Originals by Adam Grant, a book I have listened to at least twice now.  As I have thought incessantly about culture and how to nurture a healthy one where I work, Grant’s advice on hiring for contribution rather than fit holds my feet to the fire:

Emphasizing cultural fit leads you to bring in a bunch of people who think in similar ways to your existing employees. There’s evidence that once a company goes public, those that hire on cultural fit actually grow more slowly because they struggle to innovate and change. It’s wiser to follow the example from the design firm IDEO, and hire on cultural contribution. Instead of looking for people who fit the culture, ask what’s missing from your culture, and select people who can bring that to the table.

So what does all this mean?  I have decided to take it as validation of my curiosity and desire to learn as much as I can from a vast array of different people.  Whether I know them socially or professionally, whether our diversity is race, culture, politics, religion, or music preference, there is always something that connects us.  The search and exploration are what make life colorful and fun.

I wonder whom I’ll get to meet tomorrow?

The Hard Conversations

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NaBloPoMo 2018:  What I’m Learning

Life is about learning.  Learning requires acknowledging lack of skill, knowledge, understanding, or all three and more.  Boundaries, curiosity and non-judgment make it so much easier; too bad we tend to lose these natural traits (or they are trained out of us) early in life.  Then we have to relearn them as skills.  What happens when we reacquire boundaries, curiosity and non-judgment?  We get much better at having the hard conversations.  What makes conversations hard?  Not sure?  Just think of the conversations we avoid.  What are we actually avoiding?

I resist apologizing when I don’t want to admit that I misunderstood, that I made wrong assumptions that led to behaviors that hurt people, that I was not my best self.  I worry that people will think less of me and not trust me, not include me in the future.

I avoid giving negative feedback because I don’t know how the other person will take it.  Will they crumble in a heap of self-flagellating despair?  Will they lash out and attack me, verbally or physically, threatening my safety?  Will they disparage me to others, try to split our colleagues between us, sow discord and undermine our culture?  I worry that I will lose control of the situation.

We resist conversations about politics, religion, and issues like abortion because they can escalate in a nanosecond, filled with emotional tumult.  These are precisely the exchanges during which we blow past all of our boundaries for civility, language, tone of voice, and rhetoric.  We lose all interest in understanding what the other person thinks or, more importantly, how they feel.  We stop relating.  We judge everything out of their mouths as oppositional, ignorant, and unworthy.  We worry that we will lose our status, self-efficacy, agency, or our friends.

* * *

My friend Earnestine * has migraines.  Over the years she has worked out their patterns: timing, location, aura, duration, and triggers.  She hydrates, protects her sleep, and, most importantly, manages her stress with vigilance.  This way she generally avoids medications and keeps her symptoms under good control.  Recently she got caught in an unavoidably stressful situation with family.  A migraine hit her like a Mack truck out of nowhere.  She could barely walk, stumbling around, hanging onto walls and railings.  Her speech may have been slurred.  Thankfully she was able to escape to a friend’s house.  Her childhood friend, also a sufferer of headaches, offered her a handful of pills—her own prescription medications.  Earnestine struggled for the right words, and not just because her head was splitting.  If she refused, would she offend her friend, who has just rescued her from serious family chaos?  Would she trigger indignation, anger, resentment, rejection?  E found her personal values and boundaries tested, unexpectedly.  She felt ambivalent, as the core values of connection with a friend and right use of substances clashed.  She desperately desired relief from her pain, and she also needed to set an example for her boys, who were watching her response—what would she want them to do if one of their friends offered them ‘relief’?  Somehow through the fog, she found a way to acknowledge her friend’s generosity, and also explain that she was not comfortable taking someone else’s prescription medication.  She maintained her boundaries and stayed curious to monitor her friend’s and her boys’ responses.  Since that time, she continues to hold her friend in non-judgment, understanding that although she would not ever do the same, her friend’s intentions were loving.

I tell this story because I see it as a perfect example of boundaries, curiosity, and non-judgment in action:  Holding space for one’s own needs while attending to the needs of others and our relationship with them (both her friend and her sons).  Earnestine practices honoring her boundaries, which can, in some ways, be equated with her core values.  When they are challenged, she can stay in curiosity and explore the feelings that get triggered. She can withhold judgment on the feelings and simply experience them in the present moment, asking what they are trying to tell her.

This combination of boundaries, curiosity, and non-judgment, practiced regularly in small, everyday things, prepares us to face the harder situations and conversations with greater confidence.  We can trust ourselves, even if we don’t walk into any given situation knowing the right answer, to find it when we need it.  On the other side, these skills help us look back with fewer regrets, because we brought our best selves at the time.

I have learned to recognize opportunities to practice these skills, and now I resist apologizing, giving negative feedback, and talking about politics a lot less.  In fact, these are precisely the scenarios in which I can really test and hone my skills—sharpen them and improve my relational dexterity.  I almost look forward to them—sometimes.

It’s all a continuous journey, is it not?  Will we always face our fears with heroic courage and the perfect words and behaviors?  Hell. No.  AND, every day is a new chance to try.  What hard conversation might we come closer to doing better tomorrow?

*Not her real name

Walk a Mile

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NaBloPoMo 2018:  What I’m Learning

These last 5 years, I have had the privilege of caring for designated leaders of all kinds—business leaders who also lead their families, their faith communities, their professional societies, and myriad other entities. I have studied and presented on the intersection of health and leadership, the reciprocal relationships between self-care and care of others.  Each day I ask probing questions of my patients’ habits of thought and action, and they answer with honesty and candor.  It’s particularly fulfilling when I hear, “Huh, that’s a good question, I’ve never thought of that before.”  In those moments, I feel I bring value beyond interpreting blood pressure and cholesterol results.

I’ve been interested in leadership for a long time, and had opportunities to lead in various small ways through the years.  In January 2018, I was given a more visible title and designation than I had ever had—YIKES.  I was surprised and unsuspecting, though not totally unprepared.  And, like parenting, nothing can quite prepare you fully for the experience.  I spoke to a leader in my organization about a year ago, who expressed loneliness in his position.  I admit that I half dismissed the idea, thinking there should just be a way to balance collegial, friendly, and leader-led relationships.  I think I was about a week into my new role when I fully, viscerally, understood his perspective and humbly admitted my own loneliness.  I felt guilty and a little ashamed for my reflexive disregard for his confession of vulnerability—because even if I did not fully dismiss his experience, I did judge it.  And that speaks more to my own fear of loneliness and isolation than it says anything about him.

Thankfully, I did not wallow in guilt or shame for long.  “How fascinating,” I thought.  Being judgmental like that is not consistent with my core values.  These ten months have been a practice in navigating and managing that loneliness—cultivating relationships in new ways to maintain connection while simultaneously practicing the required discretion in information sharing.  Often I have felt profound humility (and now more embarrassment than shame) at how I thought I knew so much about effective leadership, mostly from the point of view of being led, and only sometimes as a leader myself.

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This fall Brené Brown saved me from further self-flagellation over my lack of skills and understanding of what it takes to be a good leader.  The thing I admire most about her is how she walks the talk of vulnerability and courage.  She shares her mistakes, missteps, and learnings so openly, and anyone who reads her books or sees her presentations gets to profit from it all.  I will always remember where I was, because I laughed out loud in sheer relief, when I heard her read from her latest book, Dare to Lead:

Over the past five years, I’ve transitioned from research professor to research professor and founder and CEO.  The first hard and humbling lesson?  Regardless of the complexity of the concepts, studying leadership is way easier than leading.

When I think about my personal experiences with leading over the past few years, the only endeavors that have required the same level of self-awareness and equally high-level ‘comms plans’ are being married for twenty-four years and parenting.  And that’s saying something.  I completely underestimated the pull on my emotional bandwidth, the sheer determination it takes to stay calm under pressure, and the weight of continuous problem solving and decision making.  Oh, yeah—and the sleepless nights.

I thought, well, if Brené Brown still had stuff to learn after assuming a new leadership role, then I’m doing okay!  I am both freed from self-imposed, unrealistic expectations of perfection, and also still responsible for continuing to practice self-awareness, humility, and honesty.

I have learned to look harder at the cynical stories I tell about my leaders, and seek to understand better the divergent and competing interests they must balance every day.  I can withhold judgment of their motivations until I have more information, and if I’m not entitled to all the information, I can decide how much I trust my leaders to act in my best interests, or at least in the best interests of the organization.  I can hold myself accountable to my own standards of honesty, candor, and integrity.  I can ask and challenge, inquire and resist (or accommodate), all with curiosity and respect, and making the most generous possible assumptions of others.

How lucky am I to have this remarkable learning opportunity?  To practice the skills I have observed, admired, and studied in others for so long, to own them.  I have walked a mile in these new shoes.  I have a few shallow blisters for the journey so far.  But the shoes are the right size, and the leather is softening.  I’m still feeling fit.  The path will wind and climb, and that’s okay.  I don’t walk alone; I have mentors and role models walking ahead and by my side.  So bring it!  We’ got this.