Tag Archives: Leading Organizations to Health

A Community of Champions

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Spoiler Alert:  Big Bang Theory Series Finale!

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When was the last time you felt totally safe, at work, to address the central relational challenges that hold you and your team back from your best performance?

How often at work can you really assess and evaluate your own interpersonal skills, their impact on those around you, and on the organization as a whole?

How much time and energy do your teams waste being stymied by relational issues, stuck in redundant, dysfunctional power struggles up and down the organizational hierarchy?

How do you feel in your body just reading these questions?  Perhaps tense and frustrated?

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We, the eight participants and two faculty members of Leading Organizations to Health Cohort 11, reported palpable heaviness upon convening for our second training retreat last Tuesday.  Despite the Colorado spring bursting with blooms, wildlife, and vast clear blue skies, dark clouds hung over our collective consciousness, each for our own reasons.  Throughout the week we shared stories of successes, challenges, conflicts, power and powerlessness.  We practiced appreciative inquiry and relational coordination, and explored the insidious impact of unearned privilege.  We spent three days in intense skills training, supporting one another through viscerally gnarly role plays and open, honest feedback about how we impact the group.

In the midst of all this deep work, we also shared meals, walks, a horseback ride, and life stories around a fire pit and drippy s’mores.  As we debriefed around the circle on the last day, something had shifted:  overall we now felt refueled and energized.  The air buzzed with the anticipation of learners on the verge of integrating our emerging skills, excited to bring it all home to practice.  The clouds had parted.  We will keep in touch through peer coaching groups—our newly established, intense-support network.  In my heart, I feel we are really becoming a family.

 

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I headed to the mountains straight from the session, for 24 hours of processing and decompression (and more washi tape card-making).  More and more I marveled at what a rare opportunity I have in LOH, to be led and learn to lead in this relationship-centered way.  For these ten months I am immersed in a professional learning lab, experimenting with different ways of speaking, acting, and being, safe among fellow professionals also grappling with this skill set.  It just does not get any better than this!

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On my way down from the mountains, I listened to an interview with Bonnie St. John on Ozan Varol’s podcast, Famous Failures.  She is the first African-American to win medals in Winter Paralympic competition as a ski racer; she is a lower extremity amputee.  She is also an author, an entrepreneur, and a former member of the Clinton administration.  Her story is inspiring, please take a listen!  At the end of the interview she describes asking a former coach about how he built champions.  He said he never built individual champions; rather, he built communities of champions.  You can only push one person so far, he said; but an allied group of people will hold one another up, push each other harder, make each other better, take one another farther.

That is exactly how I experience LOH—my best self is challenged and called forth in the most loving and professional way.  We hold space for all our struggles, allowing the learnings (epiphanies, in my experience!) to emerge.  It is deeply and literally inspiring.  Though I already do so much of this inner work on my own, there is a profound and unparalleled synergy from learning in this group—we serve as one another’s pit crew for the journey toward our better selves at work and in life.

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Nobody succeeds alone.  In the series finale of The Big Bang Theory (my favorite TV show of all time, which I missed while at LOH!), Sheldon (the obliviously self-centered genius) finally realizes this.  During his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he acknowledges his sudden and profound appreciation for his family and friends, crediting his success to their unconditional love and support, and recognizing them in front of an international audience.  LOH made this finale even more meaningful to me than it already would have been.

It is always through the struggles that we grow.  When struggle together, any and all successes are amplified exponentially.  My nine new friends will make me immeasurably more successful, both professionally and personally, than I would ever be without them.  God bless them all, and may the work we do together ripple out for the benefit of all whose lives we touch.

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Wide Open Spaces

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What to write on vacation?  Depends on the schedule, no?  Happily, on my Rocky Mountain escape this week, time lolls wide open.  How rare and precious to have these days with no commitments, no agenda, and a true feeling of detachment!  Wow.  How refreshing, nourishing, relaxing, and challenging.  No patients to see, meetings to attend, immediate work crises to solve.  I feel at once liberated and anxious—as if I enjoy the bright Colorado sun now, but there must be some black cloud looming over the ridge to the west.  *sigh*

The LOH retreat positively saturated me last weekend—mind, body, and soul.  I had Hippie Zealot Conference High, for sure.  And as so often happens, synthesizing learnings and insights proved challenging off the mountain and in real life, especially with only four intense days of re-entry before leaving again for spring break.  But now I have time and space—physical and mental—to process, hallelujah!

It never ceases to amaze me, the cosmic collision of ideas and insights that simultaneously shape my personal and professional development.  It’s like I feel the universe’s Michelangelo, Van Gogh, and Einstein hands sculpting and unifying my consciousness at all levels—it’s awesome!!

Weeks prior to LOH, my own coach Christine and my coach friend Donna each independently introduced me to the work of Jennifer Garvey Berger, expert in adult development and leadership coaching.  She incorporates ideas of complexity and systems, central tenets of LOH training, in her philosophy.  I started listening to her book, Changing on the Job, the week before LOH started.  My friends came to Berger’s work separately (they don’t know each other, which I intend to remedy soon), and the temporal overlap of their new learning with my own makes my heart leap—my friendships are, without question, divinely inspired.  The central learning for me so far is recognition of my current and aspirational states of development as a person in all aspects of life.  I look forward to acquiring and practicing more skills for growth—it is a lifelong process!

Two weeks ago, while searching links for my Thank You post to Ben Zander, I came across Rosamund Stone Zander’s book, Pathways to Possibility, the follow up to their co-authored book, The Art of Possibility, still my favorite book of all time.  I started PtP days before LOH; the synergism of ideas almost overwhelmed me.  I finished it last week and holy cow, this is advanced practice personal development.  The stories we tell, the ones that rule our relationships and lives, can be so deeply entrenched that even when we recognize their dysfunction, revising them feels almost impossible.  In my personal life, I recognize intellectually that I hold onto some seriously destructive stories—ones that cause chronic and palpable suffering not just for me but those closest to me.  I lose circulation in my figurative hands, my emotional grip on these stories is so tight, and I still refuse to let go of them.  It is positively frustrating and fascinating.  I know this stubborn intransigence has untoward effects on my leadership capacity and style at work, however indirectly, because I firmly believe that ‘how we do anything is how we do everything.’  It just kills me—like a padlocked steel door in the long hallway of self-awareness, behind which live insight and psychological freedom—I know I have the key somewhere, I just can’t find it yet.  I will return repeatedly to integrate the practices in this book, like I do to AoP.  And, I get better every year at holding myself with a little more compassion.  We’re all here doing our best; I am no exception.  Nobody is better supported in this work of self-discovery than I.  So I journey on mostly joyfully, surrounded by fellow wayfinders, working on ourselves for the benefit of us all.  Onward!

Spring break writing

I started this post with at least two other ideas to write about, but I’ll hold off.  I have four more days here in the mountains.  More time and space to think on, manipulate, and start to apprehend all of these ideas and learnings of late.  My thank you cards, washi tape, journal, and laptop are spread out over the coffee table.  My favorite movies play on DVD and cable as pleasant and entertaining background ambiance.  What a gift and a blessing are time and space.  May I savor these days with deep and sustaining gratitude.

This Is My Hogwarts

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My friends, I belong.  This weekend marked the beginning of a ten month training program in communication, leadership, connection, and creativity.  9 of us made it to Colorado after the bomb cyclone (Patrick, we missed you—can’t wait to meet you in May!) to launch Cohort 11 of Leading Organizations to Health (LOH).  Our teachers, Tony Suchman and Diane Rawlins, led us through three days of introspection, skills acquisition and practice, and formation in community.  It all happened at the Sylvan Dale Guest Ranch in Loveland, surrounded by mountains, river, wildlife, and a rich history of family and hospitality.

We are training in relationship-centered care and administration, helping one another embody our best relationship tendencies, so we may help our organizations function at higher levels of connection and effectiveness.  It’s too exciting!

I walked into the lodge at Sylvan Dale, saw the vaulted ceiling with the icicle lights, and immediately thought of Hogwarts.  I came to this place, called by something to the Why of my soul, to be with others like me.  We are here to train, to hone our skills for good.  Within the first session I realized I can totally be myself in this crowd.  Here, I’m no longer a lone voice focused on relationships ahead of everything else, no longer the only one who cannot help seeing how the nature of our relationships permeates every interaction, every decision—and how we recreate them in every moment.  No more self-editing and explaining, tip-toeing around what matters most to me.  I can fully inhabit my relationship convictions here, in this space and among these new friends.  I feel an ease of purpose and values in this group that I come to, like a deep well, to fill my bucket and irrigate my garden of personal and professional growth.  Here, I am not a black sheep.

I now have 9 new people-nodes to connect and integrate into my existing relationship webs—a new and emerging system.  We share stories with common themes, new insights, and mutual support.  These ten months we will form and evolve as individuals as well as a community.  It’s a type of love, really…  At least that’s how it feels to me.  Hooray!