We are capable of enormous powers of self-sabotage.  This is ever a danger to undermine our contributions, though our circumstances shift over the years and seasons. 

Here is a list of signals that you might be self-sabotaging, in the Jeff Foxworthy (“You might be a redneck if…”) spirit:

• Embracing known lies as excuses
• Seeking pleasurable distractions
• Choosing to do lesser work than you’re capable of, and being satisfied with first efforts
• Thinking too much about what others think of you
• Frequent procrastination on a significant project
• Assuming a failure is fatal or cannot be used to move forward
• Stalled because you’re spending more time imagining fearful situations than potential payoffs
• Failing to cheer others on and celebrating their good work; letting jealously and envy rule your mind
• Wallowing in anger about minor matters
• Choosing to stride alone rather than going with others when appropriate
• Habitually failing to get appropriate rest and recovery
• Absorbing criticism, even constructive criticism, as personal attacks
• Consciously ignoring wisdom from experience
• Staying ‘safely’ in convention and majority positions which you know are limiting
• Choosing noise and chaos to avoid difficult internal emotional work
• Redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim
• Trying to please the wrong audience
• Demonizing all emotions, aiming to be completely rational
• Unwilling to create sustained changes for a new season or opportunity
• Avoiding uncomfortable-but-growth learning
• Preferring pleasure over joy
• Addictions of many kinds; the compounding interest works against your best capability
• Seeking to control all things rather than working with what you can control
• Looking for cost-free and effort-free solutions
• Interpreting all information by how it affects your self-identity

What if you recognize something here is true about you?  (In candor, I could create this list because I have done all of these, and often.)

Repent. 

I’m not speaking of wailing guilt and shame, but the way the New Testament speaks of repentance.  The Greek word in the NT translated at ‘repent’ is “metanoia” which means “change of mind.” 

We need to change our mind when we self-sabotage.  That’s a decision, followed by actions which are consistent with your new way of thinking.  No one can do that for you.  All good things are on the far side of that decision.

Repent, then lead yourself forward.

I want to adopt the mindset of a tree. A grand old tree is the metaphor for the life I want to lead that positively influences the next 300 years.

We read in Psalm 1 that the blessed man – whose delight is meditating on God’s law day and night — is “like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.” There is profound tree imagery from Genesis to Revelation.

The structure of a tree reflects both the past and the present. Did you know that less than 5% of the mass of a tree is alive?  The leaves, flowers, the thin layers of xylem and phloem under the protective bark, and water/mineral absorption layers in the roots are alive.  Everything else is residual history of previously living tissue.  The past shapes and supports the living.  Damages sustained in storms and by insects will slowly be repaired by living tissue.

Trees send their roots deep and wide for water and minerals. Their roots cling powerfully to the earth. Given a choice to ram my car into a tree or a telephone pole of the same diameter I would opt for the telephone pole. Rare is the wind strong enough to push a tree hard enough to pull it out of the earth.

Trees hold their head and branches skyward, reaching for the sun. A mature, healthy oak tree can have 200,000 leaves. During 60 years of life that oak grows and sheds nearly two tons of leaves. About 70% of the nutrients a tree takes from the soil will be returned in the leaves.

Trees are rigidly flexible. Trees endure seasonal heat and cold, wet and dry, winds, insect and disease. Trees don’t pack up and move to new locations in good time or bad.  They are where they are, and no matter the weather they stand firm.  Yet trees are flexible.  Their leaves adjust position to better capture sunlight.  Limbs and branches can sway and bend without breaking.  Trees are resilient benders; they quickly recover their original position.

Trees provide security and food for other plants and animals. Vines, moss, lichens, many insects, small rodents, and some predators view trees as refuge. They produce abundant flowers, fruits, nuts, and seeds, scattering them to the world. The produce oxygen from carbon dioxide.

Trees are anchors of ecosystems. They can purify water. They hold soil in place, limiting water’s power of erosion. Decaying leaves and needles shift the pH of the soil to match their preference.  Trees change the temperature of the surrounding air; the transpiration of water shapes the microclimate around trees. They shape the wind. Solomon is said to have planted trees to transform the desert. Workers ringed rocks around the base of the tree to condense moisture from the air when the desert cooled at night, dripping into the rocky soil to sustain the tree.  Over the years the trees grew and changed the desert into forest and fields that could be cultivated. The Assyrians, Persians, and Romans all knew one of the fastest ways to destroy an enemy’s homeland is to cut down all the trees.

Every tree is unique, and can stand alone, yet trees thrive best when they are together with other trees. Trees communicate with other trees through chemical signals, both above and below ground.

Even in death a tree leaves a legacy that nurtures and sustains. Their wood is valuable. Dead trees become home to different insects and animals than live trees. Decaying trees enrich the soil of forests. The roots of a tree continues to stabilize the earth for many years after its death.

So what must I do to be tree-like?

• Send roots deep into wisdom
• Hold my head and hands up to heaven
• Patiently endure
• Bear fruit generously
• Anchor and interact with the ecosystem where I have been planted
• Provide space for others to live and thrive
• Translate my past into present strength

Leaders are in the education business, because leaders need to pull people – team members, bosses, customers, partners — along with them.  Pushing people is partially effective, but requires positional power. Educating people is a key part of persuasion and influence.

The word ‘educate’ comes to English from Latin: ducere, meaning to draw or lead, with the prefix e to indicate “out of.”  Education is not pouring into, but drawing out.  It’s not cracking open the skull and stuffing in facts.  Education requires that we use information, questions, dialogue, and experience plus feedback to shape the way a person thinks and behaves.

Therefore, education will never be an efficient process.  There are efficient ways to give people information.  There are efficient ways to begin dialogue.  Yet education is about a whole person, requires their participation and cooperation, and touches the mystery of how the mind works.

Sometimes people have created a loose connection between education and indoctrination.  Working from formal definitions:

Education: imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.

Indoctrination: teaching or inculcating a doctrine, principle, or ideology, especially one with a specific point of view.

Observation: If we approve of the curriculum and worldview, then we call it education.  If we don’t, we condemn it as indoctrination.

Education is an open mindset; indoctrination is a fixed mindset. A test to consider:  An educated person may develop a separate worldview from his teachers, disagree on many matters, and still be friendly and learn from one another.  An intense focus on indoctrination yields a situation where departure from the doctrine is labeled heresy and destroys fellowship.  Indoctrination as a strategy does not create mature individuals who continue learning and growing.  People hell-bent (I use that word purposefully) on indoctrination do not tolerate a student exceeding the teacher.  The only cooperative part of the indoctrination process is obedience and rote learning.

Education must be a mix of information and experiences.  Sharing stories is crucial.  Few will remember your seven brilliant bullet points, but they will remember the well-told story that touched their heart or made them smile.  Better yet, share a story which made them see differently!  Inspiring, transforming leaders weave stories and information together.  They give people context where they can fit in the facts and information. 

Your leadership will go to new levels when you see yourself as an educator.

The ability to see a situation in a different way is a powerful leadership tool.  It’s called “reframing.”

Marine infantry are taught how to take out tanks.  Tanks are loud, powerful, intimidating – but they have weaknesses that can be exploited.  They use the expression “Hunting Tanks is Easy and Fun.”  This is brilliant reframing: a Marine thinks of himself as the hunter having fun, rather than a puny human about to be crushed.  

For centuries no army could withstand heavy cavalry charges, until William Wallace created a defensive wall of 20 foot long spears.  The Nazi military machine simply went around the impregnable French Maginot line using speed and mobility to their advantage. 

Johnson & Johnson reframed their contaminated Tylenol debacle into a new packaging campaign which made their brand even more trustworthy. 

Multiple companies have turned the challenges of increased regulatory requirements into a business advantage – they excelled and systematized to a point where competitors could not keep up.  Instead of the regulatory burden dragging the company down, it created a business environment where only the very best could compete at all.

These are all cases of reframing.  The difficulty plus a creative solution became the means of greater success.

You’re going to face difficult, seemingly impossible situations as a leader.  It takes some creative thinking and boldness to find an approach where the difficulty is the seed of the beneficial future state. 

Here are some tips to think differently about a problem situation:

• Make the difficulty 10x bigger, and 10x smaller, and ask what’s still true.
• Shift your perspective up, down, left, right, closer and farther away. Reverse the situation and look at from the top down and bottom up.  Insights emerge when you consider problems from multiple vantage points.
• How does the strength of the problem become its liability or weak point?
• Fire needs fuel, heat, and oxygen.  Take any one away and the fire goes out.  What are the foundational elements of the difficulty you face that could be neutralized?
• What new technology capabilities are emerging that could change the environment where the difficulty currently thrives?  What new technology lets you do an end-run around a Maginot line?
• What processes could be added to solve a problem?  What processes need to be disrupted to create a solution?
• What difference does geographic location make? 
• Are the relationships that can be strengthen (or weakened)? 
• What are unlikely things that can be put together?  Uber = personal cars plus an app.

The key is to think about the problem in a fun way.  Play with it in your mind.  Don’t make it a horribly frightening “tank” but something entertaining.   This is a learnable skill, so practice on small things and you’ll be ready for the big crisis.  Remember, “Hunting Tanks is Easy and Fun!”

Every leader needs to intentionally surround himself with people who can bring out his best potential.  There are all kinds of “draining” and “weakening” people in your life – simple fact of life.  You’re called to lead and serve some of them.  That’s another fact of life.  To lead to your full potential, and continue growing your potential, you need a specific set of people around you.  There are five types:

Teachers – for learning specific skills and capabilities.  You do not yet have all the skills you need, because life is a grand adventure.  Teachers can be in-person or at a distance.  An online teacher may not even be aware that they are teaching you in particular.  Over time you’ll have many teachers. 

Coaches – for improving your performance with the skills you have.  Everyone needs feedback and ideas for improving.  Coaches generally need some personal interaction.  

Mentors – for wisdom and example through life-on-life interactions. Mentoring is highly relational and cannot be accomplished without presence and transparency.  Mentoring is distinctly different than teaching and coaching, but many of your mentors will provide instruction and coaching.

Partners & colleagues – these are your peers and fellows, running life’s adventure with you or alongside you.  Insecure and immature leaders see them as zero-sum competitors (“There can be only one!”).  Wise leaders understand that a network of partners and colleagues can accomplish much, much more than a single individual.  Watch them, study them, work together on problems and projects – learning all the while.  Much of the potential joy in our work comes through associations with partners and colleagues.

Teachable people – there are simply some things which you cannot fully learn until you teach others.  Teaching is a good for your leadership development.  It expands your thinking, sharpens your communication skills, and gives you opportunities to practice interpersonal relationships.  Craftsmen grow and develop as they share their craft with the generations coming along after them. 

A network of these five types of people is essential for maximizing your leadership potential. Do an inventory of the people in your life and take steps to fill in the gaps. 

3000 years ago Solomon wrote: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9) There are new technologies, but not new behaviors.  Every leader facing a “new” business, organizational, technological, social, or political situation can be assured that there are lessons to learn from history. 

Studying history – almost any history – will strengthen your ability to discern patterns in the swirl of current events, and parse signal from noise. 

I recommend leaders follow a 3-part practice:

1. Write out observations of current events and issues
2. Find parallels in a historical time
3. Study that history to identify what worked, what didn’t, what could be emulated, what should be avoided, and what was required of leaders

I can illustrate this with an example.

In July 2018 I made these observations about current events:

• Socialism has become interesting, even enchanting, to millions more US citizens
• US political leaders are stoking the fires of concern about Russia
• China’s president has arranged to hold extraordinary powers in a one-party state

I asked the question: What period of history might have some similarities, and what historical figures? 

I realized that Europe in the 1930’s has similarities:

• It’s the early phase of socialism and communism being tried as a political and economic system.  They are widely admired by intellectuals (who were not being given, or chose to ignore, information about what was really going on in Russia).
• European royalty and civic leaders are worried about the Bolsheviks and whether a similar revolution could topple their entrenched royalty-and-class structures of power.
• Adolf Hitler becomes the Fuhrer, anointed with ultimate personal authority in a one party state.  Many leaders go the appeasement route after wearily burying millions of dead soldiers from the recently ended WW1. 

I chose to re-read volume 2 of William Manchester’s epic biography of Winston Churchill, which covers 1932-40.  (Tip: biographies are a great way to absorb the leadership lessons of history!)

Churchill was outside the British government’s power circle, and one of the few who recognized the dangers of Herr Hitler.  He comprehended the appeal of socialism as a counter to the limiting attributes of the rigid class system.  [Note: It was during this period that he wrote most of his “History of the English-Speaking Peoples,” a 4 volume 10 million word analysis beginning in pre-Roman times.  I suspect that his study of history gave him clear insights into the pattern of his day.]

There are plenty of lessons to apply:

• Recognizing the truth, and speaking it consistently to people who don’t want to hear it, is both necessary and personally costly.
• Consistent preparations for the next war (not the last one) require focusing on the strategic but non-urgent objectives.
• You need a network which can give you accurate information, rather than relying on “authorized” channels of communication.
• It’s far easier to stop evil earlier than later.
• Leaders who fail to keep commitments with others leaders crash suddenly, and hard.
• There are only imperfect leaders.

Tap into the rich volumes of history preserved for us.  Let the record of those who have gone before you give you insights, resolve, perspectives, and courage. 

We often talk about juggling multiple projects and responsibilities.   In fact, we brag about it.

I know a thing or two about juggling — balls, clubs, torches, machetes, eggs, bowling balls, and yes, even a non-running chain saw.  I never did cats, mice, or hand-grenades.

Smooth juggling depends on muscle memory, consistent throws so you know where to catch a ball, and staying relaxed.  Juggler’s understand that you’re only tossing one item at a time, in a predictable arc, catching in a predictable spot in 3D space, and then moving to the next toss with a predictable arc, and so on.  Toss, catch, toss… Predictable, repeatable, relaxed speed.  You can juggle with your eyes closed.  It looks impressive, even mesmerizing, to someone who doesn’t understand how it’s done. Juggling can be enjoyable and satisfying.

What most of us do when “juggling multiple projects and responsibilities” is more like heaving a bunch of things in the air simultaneously and dealing with the random fall of the objects.  There’s no consistency in your throw arc, muscle memory isn’t helping, and you tighten up rather than relaxing.  Heaving is stressful.  Bystanders are alarmed for their safety.  No one can do it for long. 

Juggling is a possibility when the work is familiar, repetitive, well-encapsulated.  Figure out what portions of your work fit this pattern, and you can become an efficient juggler.  The best leaders always look for ways to pass off that kind of juggling to someone else or eliminate it through automation.

Sometimes we have little choice but to heave stuff in the air and deal with the consequences.  Explore options. Maybe you can allocate the heaving among more people so each person is only heaving one or two items – not ideal but manageable for a time.  The best option is to convert heaving into juggling by giving awkward and unfamiliar work to others who are comfortable and familiar with it. 

In every case, it’s about managing time-slices and energy.  Analyze your situation and decide if you’re juggling or heaving, then take appropriate action.

One of the biggest reasons why your top talent considers leaving your organization is that they perceive they will have better challenges elsewhere.  They’re often frustrated with the type of work they have been assigned.  In a word, they’re bored.

Good leaders are gardeners, paying attention to what each person needs to thrive and produce the best for the organization.  Some people are wired for creating new things, new processes, new business models, new interactions. Others are great at maximizing a process or business, scaling, refining process efficiency. 

You need both types of people in a global economy of evolving expectations and technology options. 

Consider the S-curve way of portraying business operations – new things begin, there is a growth phase, and then it plateaus to a point where you need to transition to a new S-curve to sustain growth:

Match the top talent you have (or need to find) to the phase which is best suited for them.  If they’re the creative inventor type, they’ll be bored out of their skulls in the scale/compete phases where the execution depends on detail and incremental process design.  If they’re the process-oriented type then you aren’t likely to get the breakthrough game-changer input you need in the startup or transition phases. 

You might be saying, “I know people are good at both.”  How fortunate for you!  Many people are reasonably good at contributing in all these phases – but your top talent is exceptionally good in one or the other.

Don’t let your top talent get to “I’m leaving because I’m bored.” Think carefully about the assignments you give them. 

Leaders must be expert in asking excellent questions – it’s how we engage with people, draw them out, and one of the best ways to help them. 

Asking better questions is simply a matter of checking your assumptions and practice. Here are six helps:

1. Rotate your perspective:  What concerns does your customer have? Your boss?  Your peers?  Others in your work team? 
2. Test different timescales:  Near term, longer term.  What new problems will come later?  Once you make a decision and begin to act, what forces will come up as counter?  (As they say in the military, “the enemy gets a vote on your plan.”)
3. Put on your Project Manager hat:  Ask about scope, duration, and resource needs (and what level of focus).
4. Query about options/alternatives:  Compared to what?  What else might be considered?  Inquire about plan B. What assumptions were made?
5. Check the emotions involved: Ask how people feel about it – scary good or scary bad?  It’s not enough to get the facts, ma’am, you should test emotional content.
6. Use the WW___A strategy (“What would ____ ask?”): Pay attention to what other leaders ask, and how they ask.  Become a student of other leaders.  Some people are so good at asking questions they no longer are conscious of why they’re asking.  Observe, and when they ask a particularly good question, ask them why they asked it. 

Don’t be fearful of asking many questions. Conscious practice will lead you to get better at this critical leadership skill.

You’re going to get critical feedback, because you’re not perfect and your boss isn’t perfect, either. 

Yes, sometimes critical feedback is unfair or not entirely true. 

Yes, you’ll remember it longer than you remember praise and commendation.

Yes, sometimes it’s delivered in a poor or unprofessional way.

But… critical feedback is the granola breakfast cereal of champions, chewy and healthy. You don’t have to like it.  The truth is that we all need to be managed, and none of us like it.

Therefore, make it your ambition to get the most out of critical feedback.

It’s a gift, so don’t whine and say Thank You

Think of critical feedback as a condensed review of a complicated situation that is saving you time figuring out things on your own.  No matter the format (verbal or written), express your appreciation.  Recognize that for most people the act of giving critical feedback is hard and unpleasant. 

Let yourself feel some emotion for a few minutes

Any kind of feedback which we don’t instantly and fully agree with is going to generate an emotional response.  You’re human.  It’s ok to be angry, sad, disappointed, frustrated, scared – for a few minutes.  Work through it. Time-box it.  This is an essential step in processing feedback.

Write it out

Get out some paper and pen, and write out what you heard.  Break it down to pull out elements of the criticism.  Don’t trust your memory to deal with all this.  Get it out on paper so you can review it with some detachment and distance. 

Seek kernels of truth in the popcorn fluff

Maybe it’s all true, maybe not, but begin with the assumption is it all correct.  Look at your breakdown of the feedback and decide if there is any part of it you want to discount.  Guard yourself against excuse-making and rationalizations at this stage.  In my family we say, “Excuses are lies we tell ourselves.” 

Plan to improve

Given your analysis, ask, “So what next?” You can’t change the past, but you can make decisions about what will be different next time.  Is there prep work you need?  Better processes or more discipline?  An improved relationship?  Better communication? 

You would not have read this far is you planned to wallow and whine about the unfairness of it all.  So what will you do next?  I especially recommend you go back to the person who gave you the critical feedback and share your plan. 

Remember, reframe critical feedback as an opportunity to accelerate your growth.