I’m as prone to “bad days” and “crappy attitude” moments as anyone else. These have near 100% correlation with focus-on-myself. (Journaling helps you see this pattern, and your triggers.)
I invite people to do this experiment:
Step 1. Focus your eyes on your belly button.
Step 2. Run as fast as you can.
(Please try this experiment in a soft grassy area.)
Focusing up and out is the key for me. Helping people shift their focus up and out is strong leadership work.
It was a heartfelt cry, not a statement: “I’m lonely. I’m really lonely.” His face wrenched tight, and he peered hopefully into my eyes. I’ve seen the look before. I’ve been there myself.
He’s not the first leader to wrestle with the reality of loneliness in challenging leadership transitions. He’s not alone in thinking “Why did I expect leadership to be wonderful?” He’s not the first to wonder how he was misunderstood or misrepresented. He, like so many, ponders who he can talk with about these deep feelings without people losing confidence in his leadership.
The truth: Loneliness is necessary to effective leadership. The challenge is to embrace loneliness as a gift, rather than fight against it the wrong way. Every leader faces loneliness. Many try the wrong approaches to escape loneliness, to the point of abdicating leadership roles when we desperately need them to lead.
Leadership forces a structural kind of loneliness by design. You need a kind of distance from a group to lead them well. Leaders need to know their people but avoid being sucked into the crowd. Former peers often misunderstand why a leader acts differently than they did “before.” Leaders often feel alone and distant, even when surrounded by others and busy with all kinds of good work.
Loneliness is not optional, even if you display a brave social face. Certain decisions come down to YOU. Your only choices are to decide or abdicate. Those decisions, and your behaviors, will occasionally be misunderstood and misrepresented by some people. These realities create an inevitable loneliness.
Loneliness is the common experience for all leaders. Winston Churchill could not have successfully led Britain in WW2 had he not endured a lonely decade of preparation, operating out of power and influence after being blamed for the disaster at Gallipoli. Abraham Lincoln’s letters show he was intensely lonely during the American Civil War, faced with horribly difficult decisions. Steve Jobs learned during his lonely exile from Apple after his board of directors fired him; those lessons and greater self-awareness were vital to his success when he returned to Apple. These are dramatic examples in history. There are a million more “ordinary” leaders who endured significant loneliness and later became deeply grateful for it.
Avoiding loneliness is hazardous. Of course, you should have friendships and mentors. Of course, you should pursue healthy solitude, to improve your capability to be truly with people to serve them well. Yet, you’ll still experience loneliness. Avoiding loneliness leads to greater problems:
Find purpose and meaning in the loneliness! Embrace it as a gift, rather than fight it as a horror. Gird yourself and stand firm. Lean into your lonely moments. Expect loneliness to be hard AND worthwhile.
The transforming power of loneliness
Loneliness keeps our pride in check and gives us space for honest self-assessment. You have strengths and weaknesses, assets and vulnerabilities. During the lonely times you discover your true friends and allies. What others think (or we imagine they think) becomes less important. Loneliness done well, not bitterly, helps us be more generous with people even as we see their masks and insecurities. We recognize the loneliness of others with empathy.
Loneliness is a crucible for clarifying your vision and calling. Loneliness forces us to evaluate our bedrock principles. The intensity of loneliness is a powerful filter for signal from noise and clamor.
Lonely times are preparation for future leadership. We get space to process our emotions, so we can accept new challenges. Especially as we anticipate a coming difficulty, we need time before we can say, “Let’s go. Bring it on.” Loneliness expands our ability to be effective while we’re uncomfortable. Loneliness is practice strengthening our minds, hearts, and sinews for even harder fights to come.
Finally, perhaps most importantly, loneliness shapes your relationship with God — the only Person who knows your fears, doubts, and pain.
Seven practical helps during the lonely times:
Embrace loneliness as a gift that transforms you into a better leader for bigger challenges.
We humans interpret the present and make decisions based on our personal experiences and how we frame the past. A large part of our worldview is essentially a narrative about the past – what happened, why, who were the good guys, and who were the bad guys. Let’s walk through history to see the power of narrative, and then pivot to organizational leadership.
An ironic quip in the Soviet Union: “We are certain of the future. The past is always changing.” In 1981 I asked my college friend Sergei about Stalin and Khrushchev; he acknowledged they had done evil things. I asked him about Brezhnev, the premiere at that time. He shook his head, replying, “I don’t know, he hasn’t died yet.”
Indeed, apart from mathematics and some scientific disciplines specifically useful for weapons programs, the USSR regime brutally suppressed any historical information that did not fit their preferred narrative. Maoist China did the same thing. I witnessed this pattern first-hand in Venezuela in 2002-2004. George Orwell made the theme of a totalitarian state controlling the narrative about the past a central element in his novel 1984. The main character destroyed facts about the past by tossing them into the “memory hole.” Communist and Fascist leaders alike know that governing the narrative about the past is crucial to maintaining control. Many people have observed that the dominant history is written and passed along by the victors.
The pattern is not limited to “evil” authoritarian governments. The US, France, Germany and Japan all shaped how the history of WW2 is taught in their schools. Today Americans shudder at the conquest ethic and the colonial practices of Western European nations (which were commonly done by every expansionist empire for thousands of years, on at least 4 continents). Many settled peoples were killed or forced off “their” lands, and exploited. It was a practice going back in related forms for several thousand years on at least five continents. Near where I grew up the Shawnee and the Delaware tribes were displaced as European settlers moved west past the Ohio River. The frequently warring Shawnee and Delaware had pushed out several other tribes from the area about 120-150 years earlier. There are large earth mounds at Marietta, Ohio from a sophisticated civilization that predated the Shawnees by about 2400 years, built on top of what looks like an even older agricultural community site. In all these kinds of situations, where do you start and stop your timeline to form the narrative about who is good and who is bad, and what happened why?
What narrative gets told and is accepted about the Industrial Revolution, pollical events in the 20th century, labor unions, mercantilism, corporations, “Robber Barons” (or “Industrialists”) like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller, the racism and religious beliefs of country founders and prominent leaders, the role of judges, protests against standing laws and governments, entertainment, books, medical practices, and on and on and on? Consider how much energy and effort goes into political campaigns to control the narrative. I once interviewed a political consultant who said that when a campaign gets a voter to cherish a preferred narrative, it would very difficult for anyone to persuade them otherwise. Labels and group names are powerful tools in shaping a narrative about the past. The narratives can and will be re-shaped over the years as well.
A useful test is to ask “Had the historical events turned out differently, what narrative would be told?” If Gandhi’s efforts had not led to end of the British Raj, what stories would be treasured about him? If Abraham Lincoln had not held the US together, would there be a massive monument with his likeness in Washington, D.C.? These illuminate the “who benefits” question.
Another lesson from historical narratives: Most people gravitate to simple narratives that leave out messy details. Read “Mein Kompf” and you’ll see how Adolf Hitler narrowed the downfall of Germany to an impossibly narrow set of causes, and ultimately persuaded millions of people to “forget” well-known truths about what had happened in their lifetimes.
Your organization, your industry, your competitors, and your customers all have narratives. A subset are cherished by one “side” or another.
Historical narratives are a ubiquitous part of business:
Strong leaders, aware of the power of narrative, consciously use it in persuasion. Even when you are aware of revisionist history narratives, you can still be victimized by them. Be particularly aware of the simplistic narrative that leaves out nuance and inconvenient facts.
Sometimes the world changes dramatically in the middle of your project or change program, to the point where you question what should happen next.
An excellent historical example occurred during the Lewis & Clark expedition from St. Louis as they searched for a water route to the Pacific Ocean. They were commissioned in 1804 by President Jefferson and had the best of men and supplies for the expedition. The expedition took their keelboat up the Missouri River, and then up tributary after tributary for over a year. Then they reached the Continental Divide at the Rocky Mountains. No more river route. You can’t canoe over the Rockies.
Lewis, the leader, still wanted to get to the Pacific. The native tribes told him that it was only a 3-day journey over the mountains and then there was a big river that flowed west. The expedition struggled for six weeks getting over the Bitterroot Mountains – one the most rugged areas in North America, by any measure – at the beginning of winter. They hauled all their supplies and a large boat over multiple mountains, including a 7200-foot pass. Most of their horses died from exposure. Lewis didn’t lose any men (one man had died much earlier, in what is now Iowa) and eventually they were able to make their way to the Columbia River and reach the Pacific Ocean. They endured a hard winter on the coast, then made the return journey to St. Louis.
(The L&C expedition is a remarkable study in leadership. Their diaries are detailed but I recommend Stephen Ambrose’s more readable account, “Undaunted Courage.”)
So what do you do when the world changes affect your mission or project? Three options:
All three require skilled leadership – clear thinking, aligning work to priority, and constant communication with stakeholder up, down, right, and left.
There, I said it. I detest the conventional “if you don’t finish every project YOU’RE A FAILURE” thing we say in our heads about others, and ourselves.
Hear me clearly, ok? If you don’t finish critical-to-succeed projects, it’s a problem. Starting, starting, starting, and never finishing anything is a problem.
Reality: Some projects deserve to be stopped. Some ideas don’t work out. Some experiments tell you to try something else next time.
Fact: The person who finishes every project is either themselves perfect (highly unlikely, dude!), a liar, or lacks the boldness to try risky new things.
A set of unfinished projects in your portfolio, along with those which yielded valuable results, is evidence you are trying, iterating your way through work that matters.
Bonus: Some of those unfinished projects will come around again in the future, and you can return to them when the time is right.
I’m an info-junkie. Getting more information gives me a peculiar kind of rush; I don’t saturate easily.
This creates a problem. I must fight the temptation to read/listen/watch more than actually do and practice. Books, podcasts, and videos take you to the brink of experience, but are not a substitute for experience and practice.
I believe in continual learning and exploration. The world is a big, exciting place! Every craft and discipline goes deep and wide.
Yet it is our behavior, not the breadth of our knowledge, which drives most of our success. Repeatedly do what you know, and practice the core elements of your craft. Bruce Lee reportedly said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who had practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
It’s rarely a lack of knowledge which causes you to under-perform when it counts.
This is a story of learning to shed stuff that matters less.
In the mid-90’s I kept a pile of VAX email printouts on my desk. These were mail messages related to requests, projects, and “wouldn’t it be nice to…” ideas that weren’t urgent enough or important enough to spend time on most days of the week. “The pile” was my version of a backlog list. I generally wanted to please everyone and said Yes to everything, so the pile steadily grew larger.
One day Marv Hardisty came into my office and commented that the pile was getting larger. “What is it?” he asked. (This was very uncharacteristic of Marv, who did not pry.) I explained. He grimaced at me. He scooped up the pile, opened a file drawer, and unceremoniously dropped it in. He shut the file drawer, turned to me and said, “If no one asks you again about anything in the pile after a month, throw it away.”
Indeed, no one followed up in a month. I had almost immediately started a new “pile” but soon stopped. About 6 months later I moved to another office and tossed out the original pile with a big smile on my face.
It’s a common refrain for leaders: “Do, Delegate, or Delete.” Only a fraction of what comes your way deserves your energy and attention. What you choose to do, do very well.
Mankind’s greatest invention is the organization.
Organizations allow individuals to contribute to accomplishments FAR beyond what any individual could do. This is the multiplication power.
Organizations also consume a “tax” from participants. There are certain kinds of overhead and administration costs. This is the subtraction function.
Leaders navigate in this landscape. Great leaders find ways to amplify the multiplication power while accepting some required subtraction. Great leaders focus and re-focus people’s attention on the multiplication result and train people to manage the subtraction.
“Watch the knife, not the hand. The knife can be in either hand.” This advice saved me from serious injury once in a street fight in Cleveland.
I had also absorbed other lessons about fighting:
Let’s pivot to organizational dynamics. The fundamental rule: Listen to words, but watch behaviors to understand what’s really going on.
I do not advocate unethical behavior. Inside ethical behavior, be wise to power patterns used consciously and unconsciously by people around you.
For example, everyone will publicly support certain programs and initiatives. No one openly criticizes the king or queen, or their decisions – that’s reserved for private and “safe” conversations. But their behavior will tell you the extent of their agreement. Watch the pattern where senior leaders push subordinates into roles and responsibilities associated with someone’s pet project, often labeling it “delegation” or “development.” Though that’s often true, they’ve also usefully created a political cutout if something goes awry. I knew a man who always ensured someone else was directly responsible for doing the work, so that problems and criticism rarely tracked back to him.
Another common pattern: A leader suggests delegating the responsibility to a more junior person inside your group rather than hers, thereby keeping her group focused on preferred work. This is usually accompanied by significant flattery and praise for the capabilities of said person. Protect your team’s interests, while also saying Yes well. Be generous and willing to help, while carefully avoiding being dumped on because you weren’t willing to say No or suggest an alternative. I know a man on university tenure track who checked his generous impulses by stating, “I can only accept 1 big and 1 small committee assignment in the academic year.”
A third pattern: Smiling, warm comments in the leader meeting, followed by complete lack of attention or follow-through. If you (as a peer) bring it up again, they’ll say, “Oh yeah, we need to work on that,” and … nothing happens. They might do something with limited energy if/when the senior leader brings up the topic again.
Recognizing the patterns helps your effective leadership posture: Working generously but not foolishly, understanding underlying agendas and competing priorities. Listen to words, but watch behaviors to understand what’s really going on.
When you introduce a change, or even propose a change, part of the resistance is the “But it’s more work, and we’re already too busy!” sentiment. It happens every time.
Every change requires behavior change.
Every behavior change requires more work and discomfort at the start.
Every person experiences this.
Every group experiences this.
The mistake I’ve made too often is to reject their premise. I only strengthened their resistance.
The proper leadership response to “But it’s more work, and we’re already too busy!” is “Yes, it will be at first.” Then segue to the payoff and benefits of the initial work.