Reflection work

Leadership is about ideas and actions. Put simply, it is about implementing new ideas into creative

actions to achieve desired results. Doing so, however, is far from simple. We know leadership re-

quires considerable skills and abilities. It requires knowledge and insight—about one’s organization

or entity, its people, goals, strengths and market niche. Yet, something more is needed. Leadership

also requires a kind of awareness beyond the immediate, an awareness of the larger pictures—of

paradigms that direct us, beliefs that sustain us, values that guide us and principles that motivate us,

our worldviews.

This article will, first, briefly examine how the concept of worldviews is used in leadership study

and the contexts in which it arises. Second, it will critically look at worldviews, recognizing that they

are not always coherent and that our belief systems are often fragmented and incomplete. Third, it

will argue for the relevance of the concept worldview in leadership study as a way to explore vari-

ous visions of life and ways of life that may be helpful in overcoming the challenges we face today.

Fourth, it will examine how national and global issues impact worldview construction, especially

among the millennial generation. Our conclusions set some directions for leadership action in light

of worldview issues.

W O R L D V I E W S A N D

L E A D E R S H I P : T H I N K I N G

A N D A C T I N G T H E B I G G E R

P I C T U R E S

JOHN VALK, STEPHAN BELDING, ALICIA CRUMPTON, NATHAN HARTER, AND JONATHAN REAMS

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JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP STUDIES, Volume 5, Number 2, 2011 ©2011 University of Phoenix View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com • DOI:10.1002/jls.20218

JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP STUDIES • Volume 5 • Number 2 • DOI:10.1002/jls 55

as well as the effect of dispelling earlier assumptions of an overriding homogeneous and uniform worldview embraced by all.

At this point the concept of worldview is often used interchangeably with terms such as mental models, par- adigms, organizing devices, contexts, and operating systems (Beck & Cowan, 1996; Klenke, 2008). A worldview is seen as serving a particular function, encompassing deeply held beliefs about reality that shape and influ- ence how individuals think and act. Worldviews deter- mine priorities and reinforce one’s view of reality and of what is true and right (Barrett, 2006; Ciulla, 2000; Hames, 2007). Yet, where it has focused specifically on worldviews, leadership study has confined it largely to religious and spiritual worldviews as applied to indi- viduals and groups or organizations (Hicks, 2003; Lindsey, 2007). It has left numerous secular world- views largely unexamined.

The concept of worldview does surface within lead- ership development. It is recognized that a person’s life context shapes how one develops—altering one’s life context alters one’s course of development (Luthans & Avolio, 2003). Further, each person interprets and as- signs significance of meaning to different events, which in turn become a lens through which we view the world around us (Avolio, 2005). These are what Gadamer, Weinsheimer, and Marshall (2004) called prejudices: points of view that define our immediate horizon of un- derstanding. Self-awareness, or learning to identify and understand one’s own worldview, becomes a cornerstone of leadership, for a leader’s worldview impacts an or- ganization and those that operate within it. From the perspective of leaders as change agents, this becomes particularly important. Leaders assist others in creating and making sense of their experience and in so doing “reconstruct reality” and “recompose truths” (Drath, 2001, pp. 144, 147).

How Robust Is the Idea of “Worldviews”? As scholars begin to incorporate the idea of worldviews in leadership study, some may ask whether the concept itself is sufficiently robust at this point for leadership study. Setting aside for the time being the particular content of a worldview, as well as the degree of one’s commitment to a

The Concept of Worldviews in Leadership Studies Multiple ways of knowing and cross-cultural literacy are goals of leadership. As such, leadership study requires broad awareness in order to build bridges of understand- ing. It necessitates worldview literacy and the ability to communicate in plural and diverse settings. Essentially, it encourages awareness of one’s own view or vision of life as a means to better engage with others. Awareness of diverse views or perspectives is necessary so people can engage in common cause in a multifaceted world (Drath, 2001).

Worldview is a concept that requires an interdiscipli- nary, multidisciplinary, and perhaps even transdiscipli- nary approach to fully understand its tenets and application. It is overtly and robustly defined in certain disciplinary areas—religious studies, philosophy, and anthropology—but is only slowly surfacing in leader- ship study (Crumpton, 2010). Here, it is used with lim- ited clarity and consensus, with only some semblance and points of agreement.

Lack of worldview definitional clarity and precision within leadership study should not be surprising given that leadership study has undergone significant para- digm shifts. Leadership study emerged within the con- text of modernity and its emphasis on objective rationality. But it came to be influenced by postmoder- nity and its emphasis on multiple ways of knowing, and language and knowledge construction. Today, much of leadership study embraces what is often re- ferred to as glocalism, an emphasis on thinking glob- ally and acting locally (Antonakis, Cianciolo, & Sternberg, 2004; Burke, 2008; Northouse, 2010; Schwandt & Szabla, 2007). Leadership study recog- nizes that increasing cultural and racial diversity have been brought on by globalism. Further, technology has opened the door for alternative ways of viewing the world and the necessity of new leadership practices such as global or cross-cultural leadership and intercul- tural communication (Chhokar, Brodbeck, & House, 2009; Rondinelli & Heffron, 2009). As such, the im- portance of exploring similarities and differences be- tween worldviews has surfaced. With it comes fostering self-awareness (what is my worldview?) and the under- standing of others (what is another person’s worldview?),

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Knowledge of words spoken does not automatically imply understanding; that they make sense to someone else. Our powers of comprehension or even inference are not infallible.

A worldview is also dynamic—it changes over time. Jaspers characterized “the construction of worldviews as a continuous, lifelong process stimulated by the ex- perience of disturbance” (cited in Webb, 2009, p. 15). What one believes and values today can be quite differ- ent tomorrow. Measuring something that does not hold still is difficult (Aerts et al., 2007). Kegan refers to these as “a succession of holding environments” (cited in Webb, 2009, p. 50). Aerts et al. (2007) maintain that any worldview is “fragile” (p. 10). Broekaert (1999) em- ploys the more optimistic term openness—every world- view is open to revision or even replacement. Worldviews are dynamic; they can evolve (Vidal, 2007). Webb (2009) credited Jaspers with insisting that a worldview is indefinite and fluid, a work in progress.

Woodrow Wilson (1952) wrote about leadership as an academic administrator. But did the same thoughts and attitudes prevail in his mind later during his years in public office? We know certain leaders change their views because they attest to that change and lead dif- ferently thereafter as a result. In other situations, of course, the change might be subtle or even unconscious. But do changes in some of the views one holds entail a wholesale change in the worldview one holds?

Many people today are unaware of or have doubts about their own worldviews. Sociologists refer to this as anomie, based on the Latin, “being without coherent wholeness” (Webb, 2009, p. 1). Some seem not to care whether or not they have a worldview. Noonan (1990) alleges that U.S. President Ronald Reagan was quite oblivious to his own worldview. Henry Adams (1999) said much the same thing about President Ulysses Grant. Neither man was known for being particularly introspective. Yet each president in his own way was a leader. Is awareness of one’s own worldview, therefore, a precondition for leadership?

It can, nonetheless, be argued that everyone has a worldview of some sort ( Webb, 2009). Worldviews are socially constructed over time (Vidal, 2007). The com- munities to which people belong—religious, social, ed- ucational, and political—influence what they espouse (Smith, 2003; Wacquant, 2006). Yet, just as no two

given worldview, a question remains as to whether the very idea of discussing or incorporating “worldviews” en- hances leadership study (Webb, 2009). An investigation into worldviews might begin with an epistemic question regarding the detection and examination of a worldview. Can one infer the presence of worldviews? If so, what can be inferred based on the evidence?

Laing (1967) concluded that the study of the experi- ences of others will indeed be based on inferences since no one has direct access to the minds of others. Never- theless, in ordinary experience, people do believe there is something there, which suggests there is something there to interpret. People seem to have reasons for what they do, even if those reasons turn out to be difficult to establish. Reasons for action are linked to worldviews.

Dennett (2005) impugns folk psychology, wonder- ing how anyone can know what somebody else might be thinking—or whether they are thinking at all. He main- tains that it is next to impossible to really know some- one else’s worldview. Even if one does claim to have a worldview, he or she may well be mistaken as to its structure and content. He or she may also not neces- sarily act in light of it.

Dennett’s claims notwithstanding, perhaps most ob- vious to the notion that a person has a worldview is what he or she might say about it. Friedrich Nietzsche (1887/1956), among others, speculated that humans give reasons for their behavior not because those rea- sons did in fact lead to particular decisions, but because of the desire to rationalize behavior after the fact. Do people admit to a worldview to avoid the truth about a basis for action they would prefer to disguise or dis- avow? Might avowals of a worldview be evasions or ra- tionalizations, disguising what really goes on in the human mind? Nietzsche was quite suspicious of peo- ple’s testimony. In fact, Lansky once referred to the “doubting of surface rationalization that so dramatically characterizes virtually all of Nietzsche’s work” (1999, p. 179). The suspicion is that reference to one’s world- view might be a smokescreen of self-justification, whether conscious or unconscious. In other words, as- suming to know someone’s worldview based solely on what is reported about it can be problematic.

Language itself can be a barrier to effective understand- ing of the worldviews of others (Aerts et al., 2007). This holds even when two people speak the same language.

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increasingly elaborate and complex—arguably exceeding any one individual’s powers of explanation. Understand- ing worldview complexity becomes another challenge for leadership study (Aerts et al., 2007; Webb, 2009).

There may be more challenges. What role, for in- stance, do factors such as lust, pride, or greed play in determining worldviews? We know they can play a formative role in leadership action, but how constitutive are they in determining beliefs and values? Do they con- tribute to worldview incoherence, or even worldview schizophrenia, potentially creating discrepancies be- tween espoused belief and concrete action? These factors may be internal to the individual but nonetheless in- fluence and shape external behavior.

Worldviews and Their Implications for Leadership It was the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Won- derland who said, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” To rephrase only slightly, if you do not know your own beliefs and values, any will do, as will any road or virtual highway. But thoughtful minds are more discerning. A Lutheran “Here I stand” or a Gandhian “Be the change that you want to see in the world” requires careful reflection in order to achieve the world we need or want, for the world we need or want is crucially linked to our world- view—our beliefs and values. Leadership for action re- quires reflection on our worldviews.

In light of the challenges posed in regard to use of the concept of worldview in leadership study, world- view development, or “know thyself ” as the Oracle of Delphi decreed, is crucial for studying the past, assess- ing the present, and planning for the future. Worldview development, however, must also be linked to compar- ative religionist Max Muller’s dictum, “He who knows one, knows none”: knowledge of one’s own worldview cannot be accomplished without some knowledge of those of others (cited in Sharpe, 1975, p. 36).

G. K. Chesterton argued that “the most practical and important thing about a man is his view of the universe” (1986, p. 41). According to Parks (1991), humans have an inherent desire to make sense of their universe: we are meaning-makers. We need and desperately want to make sense of our world: to compose/dwell in some conviction

people are the same, so no two worldviews are the same. No matter how thick the spirit of homonoia or like- mindedness, there will always be at least some variation (Webb, 2009). Further, worldviews are not ascribed ex- clusively to individuals; a community can also be de- fined by a particular worldview (Aerts et al., 2007; Webb, 2009). Thus, one can speak of a collective world- view influencing individual worldviews and that indi- vidual worldviews can also influence a collective worldview.

In all of this, worldviews require interpretation. Here, two challenges present themselves. First, any interpreta- tion of a worldview will be filtered through the world- view of the interpreter (Klüver, 1926). An investigator must recognize and take into account that he or she, too, has a worldview. That worldview serves as a lens or framework through which the worldview of another is interpreted and described. The existence, character, and content of one’s own worldview do not imply anything similar in regard to that of another person. One is ill advised to jump too quickly from the content of one’s own mind to inferences about the content of another.

Second, worldviews can often be fundamentally inco- herent, inconsistent, and unclear (Aerts et al., 2007). They may be tattered, makeshift constructs that make some sense of daily life, but may also be little more than evolutionary truces or temporary versions of an adopted worldview, as Kegan (1982) inferred. Worldviews may be partial—comprised of bits and pieces that lack ap- parent connection. They may be filled with unresolved contradictions and may change over time. A person’s worldview may resemble a patchwork of evolving sub- worldviews and not something coherent and complete, a notion consistent with the pluralistic imagery es- poused by James (1909/1996).

Yet, any concept is an abstraction from lived reality and certain features will be included and others ex- cluded. No worldview is so elaborate as the reality it at- tempts to depict. That is impossible, and misses the point of worldview construction ( Whitehead, 1938, 1951). Worldviews, however articulate or inarticulate, coherent or incoherent, complete or incomplete, are ab- stractions of the world in which we live. But worldview development is the very act of overcoming inarticulate- ness, incoherence, and incompleteness (McKenzie, 1991). What is constructed will invariably become

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academic disciplines attempt to understand, identify, and describe larger patterns of thinking and/or acting, frequently employing the term worldview in the process (Foltz, 2003; Kriger & Seng, 2005; Sire, 2004).

These larger patterns of thinking or worldviews come with totalizing narratives: assertions or explanations of “the way the world is” as seen from a particular perspec- tive. But all perspectives require interpretation, for real- ity and a particular view of it are not synonymous. No one stands at the mountaintop. For this reason, our worldview is necessarily a “leap of faith” about the na- ture of reality, which requires at minimum a small meas- ure of humility and a great deal of interpretation.

Perhaps it has been the reluctance to distinguish real- ity from its interpretations that has led postmodernism to reject the totalizing or meta-narratives often implied or assumed in worldviews, arguing that these narratives, if not the worldviews themselves, need to be decon- structed for what they really are—struggles for power, control, and domination. History is replete with such worldview struggles, and the current era is no different. Yet, it would be an oversimplification to assert that all attempts to understand one’s own worldview or those of others automatically translate into struggles for or pre- sumptions of moral, religious, cultural, and economic superiority. In leadership studies a genuine desire to un- derstand “the other,” in order to better know the self, might be more appropriate as we come increasingly to recognize ourselves as citizens of a global world.

Reflection on our visions of life and our ways of life— on what we believe and value and why, and the partic- ular kinds of directives and actions that result from them—is important in the academic training of lead- ers, especially when postmodern fears of distinguishing differences will lead to pursuits of power, attitudes of superiority, or false notions of what is real and true. That became apparent in issues surfacing at the 1993 World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago. Ingham (1997) mentions that leading scientists stated, in a sur- prising turn of events, that solutions to the world’s biggest challenges lay not in more political action, better technology, or increased economic initiatives. Solutions, they argued, lay rather in guidance from some of the world’s most respected spiritual leaders. Tapping into the wisdom of the past, understanding its relevance for the present, and allowing it to guide us into the

of what is ultimately true (Peterson, 2001). In the process, we create things, ideas, stories, and experiences that speak to some of the deepest realities of our lives. The result is “worldview construction”—creating mean- ing in a world that can appear confusing and meaning- less (McKenzie, 1991; Naugle, 2002). Worldviews are thus meaningful visions of life.

Worldviews are also ways of life. Everyone has a con- scious or subconscious way of acting and behaving in the world based on particular beliefs and values. These may be known, articulated, or discerned by individu- als or groups to greater or lesser degrees. Achieving con- sistency and congruency in our visions and ways of life is challenging: We all readily profess one thing and do another. Beliefs can be loosely adhered to, incompatible, or in tension, leading to inconsistent or contradictory action: “talking our walk” does not always match “walk- ing our talk” (Olsen et al., 1992; Olthuis, 1985). This may readily reflect human weakness but does not erode the need to be anchored in some coherent sense of the reality we experience.

The reality that we experience does, of course, change. As our reality changes, so does our understand- ing of ourselves, others, and the world we inhabit. In some cases, our worldview changes dramatically but more often than not it is aspects of our worldview that are expanded and deepened. Core philosophical, onto- logical, or epistemological aspects are seldom discarded or abandoned. Further, giving articulation to our world- views is not easy. Often, philosophers, theologians, or poets express what others may only feel or believe in- tuitively. As such, they become spokespersons, leaders, or individuals of great influence, of which Socrates, Martin Luther King Jr., or Vaclav Havel are but a few examples.

When we hear and read of perceptions of the world expressed by persons of great influence, or even others, we come to recognize that those perceptions or perspec- tives can be considerably different. The worldview per- spectives of a Richard Dawkins, Donald Trump, or Karl Marx, for example, differ radically from those of a Desmond Tutu, Chief Seattle, or the Dalai Lama: They are simply not the same and we know it. We also see them played out. We come to know that Capitalism, Communism, and Confucianism differ from one another both as visions of life and ways of life. Various

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future may greatly assist us in overcoming our greatest challenges. It has been noted, sadly, however, that the depths of wisdom offered by many of the world’s tra- ditional religious worldviews, each accustomed to ask- ing life’s so-called “ultimate or existential questions,” are accessed by only a very small percentage of leaders today (Valk et al., 2010).

Asking these big questions in regard to business devel- opments, political action, international relations, and concern for the environment might well, however, lead to some startling discussions and revelations. Incorpo- rating worldview study into leadership study might, for example, change our notions and understandings of wealth and wealth creation. The capitalistic drive to gen- erate wealth might lead from a narrow focus on maxi- mizing profit to a broader one that includes living wages for workers, healthy families, and sustainable environ- ments. Engaging multiple perspectives or worldviews can enhance dialogue as debates of intense public in- terest play out in the public square.

It is also in engaging multiple perspectives in the pub- lic square that we need to increase our critical aware- ness of the different perspectives that are part of our plural society. Fixating on “Christianity lite” or “Bud- dhism lite” renders only dumbed-down and distorted versions crafted for media sound bites or scoring points in public debates. In-depth leadership study must avoid cheapened versions, opting rather to plumb the depths of various perspectives to extract wisdom so desperately needed in our society today.

Critical awareness is also required to achieve balance. Careful scrutiny is needed in discerning when, for ex- ample, consumer capitalism’s desire to generate wealth throughout the world digresses to little more than a dominant strategy to increase world market share and seek cheap labor in order to maximize profits (Wexler, 2006), or when religious worldviews focused exclusively on the spiritual neglect the impoverished reality of their devotees. Open dialogue and discernment involving multiple perspectives will assist in distinguishing true human needs and longings from those that are con- trived, truncated, and insatiable. Discussions also should not be confined to national boundaries or single disci- plines: economic issues are at the same time environ- mental, cultural, spiritual, religious, scientific, and political.

As we deal with the challenges of the 21st century, clearer senses of purpose and direction are required—in essence, clearer visions linked to specific actions. Inves- tigating the bigger pictures—worldviews of self and others—will give guidance and direction to leaders in new or unique ways. We live in a global world. Chal- lenges and issues confronted by one organization, re- gion, or nation invariably become global challenges and issues. Just as leadership must extend beyond the narrow confines of one’s own organization, it must also extend beyond the narrow confines of one’s own perspective. As well, it must dissuade giving prominent voice to those with worldviews that dominate and distort, dis- tain and detract, impede and restrict. Rather, opportu- nities ought to be created for those with visions that strive for balance, have concern for the common good, are understanding of others, and discern paths needed to create the world we truly need or want. This becomes most relevant as dynamics unfold at a larger national and international scale. Those dynamics are beginning to shape individual and collective worldviews in ways not previously experienced, and the changes are impact- ing some generations more than others.

Worldviews and Generational Change Winston Churchill once said that “the longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward” (Langworth, 2008, p. 577). Amidst the current global economic cri- sis there is a need to examine and learn from the past mistakes of the global consumer capitalist worldview in order not to perpetuate those mistakes in the future. Ig- noring the past and looking only to the future may be a human tendency, but it is fraught with shortsighted- ness. Can a people, nation, or organization truly move forward without continually examining its presupposi- tions and paradigms?

According to Strauss and Howe (1991, 1997) and Howe and Nadler (2010), we are living in a period of “civic crisis.” The West is confronted with environmen- tal devastation, economic downturns, social upheavals, housing crises, civic unrest, and political polarization in a manner not seen for some time. While most of this turmoil is not new on the human stage, what is new is the extent of its reach in the information age. Crises

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networking occurring across cultural, national, and worldview divides on a scale never witnessed before. Fourth, family is again seen as the ultimate safety net, largely out of economic necessity in light of a weaken- ing or collapsing of public support mechanisms. Rela- tionships of intergenerational trust are emphasized and strengthened, with less focus on materialism and money as primary drivers. Finally, diversification, which nets knowl- edge and fluency in languages, cultures, and technology, is stressed. A generalist with survival skills may have an edge over specialists with focused skills (Strauss & Howe, 1997).

Strauss and Howe (1997) make the case that the worldviews of Millennials are more globally focused, a shift from the individual to the community. Social net- working takes them outside national borders to the global stage, where technology provides open channels for communication and information sharing to all parts of the world. They exhibit a common willingness to col- laborate among all nationalities, working together to help solve societies problems in ways that will benefit all (Bradley, 2010; Hernandez, 2008; Howe & Strauss, 2007).

Franklin Roosevelt once remarked that the objectives of his generation of young people had changed away from “a plethora of riches” to one of a “sufficiency of life”—an advancement “along a broad highway on which thousands of your fellow men and women are advancing with you” (Roosevelt & Hardman, 1944, p. 243). For the Millennials, this highway is the virtual one, the World Wide Web that has facilitated commu- nication in real time across the globe. Its ability to reach the far corners of our world has seen a transformation that bodes well for the Millennials as they spread their community-based leadership and action across our world, in essence, as they spread their worldview.

Conclusion There is an extensive if not diverse use of the concept of worldview in scholarly literature. That use has also slowly begun to emerge in the leadership literature. The need to link this literature and get beneath the casual uses of the concept becomes paramount. The forego- ing begins a process of laying out the parameters neces- sary to link worldviews and leadership in a scholarly manner.

played out on the world stage are today visible in our very living rooms. But according to Strauss and Howe, they impact different generations in different ways. They have formative influence on the worldview devel- opment of younger generations and increasingly so.

Generational scholars have characterized the large postwar Baby Boom generation as predominantly self- focused—inward-looking to fulfill individual needs (Dychtwald, 2005; Howe & Nadler, 2010; Strauss & Howe, 1991, 1997). The Baby Boom generation has been privileged with tremendous social mobility, eco- nomic growth, political liberty, and individual freedom of the last half-century. But they have also witnessed environmental devastation, fiscal implosions, demo- cratic disengagement, and poverty in the midst of af- fluence (Howe & Strauss, 2000). The result is that a younger generation now considers upward mobility, in- creased wealth, and improved lives—a sense of genera- tional progression—illusions of a generation past. Further, new generations—Millennials, “13ers”—may be required to act as “repair generations,” “fixing the messes and cleaning up the debris of others” (Strauss & Howe, 1997, p. 326).

The worldview of the young Millennial generation will be more globally encompassed because we now live in a global world. This will have a great impact on lead- ership as a new generation takes the reins and attempts to remain upbeat about the future of their world. Sev- eral factors, some new and some not so new, influence and shape their worldview formation. First, emphasis on the virtues of honesty and integrity, on reputation and trust building, is again important (Howe & Nadler, 2010). These virtues have been integral to traditional religious or spiritual worldviews but have become ab- sent in growing individualistic, secular, and consumer worldviews (Martinsons & Ma, 2009). Second, con- nectedness to a community comprised of worldview di- versity rather than worldview homogeneity has become the norm (Bartley, Ladd, & Morris, 2007). But that di- verse community also has its eyes on government to meet society’s basic needs. Barack Obama, the United States’ first president of color, was proactive in bring- ing together diverse groups for common cause (Alex- Assensoh, 2008). Third, personal relationship building and teamwork is paramount. While some of this comes with an expected loss of personal freedoms, there is

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Making the concept robust for leadership study re- quires certain depth and complexity in understanding worldviews. Constructing a deeper understanding of worldviews requires certain mindfulness, not least of which is the degree to which our own worldview may filter our perceptions of others. Awareness of one’s own perspective requires scrutiny while engaging that of an- other.

Worldview construction is complex. One’s view of the world is initially shaped by the immediate context out of which one emerges—family, community, social, and cul- tural environments. But there are also other factors at play. As our larger world increasingly impinges upon us, global factors also begin to shape our worldviews. This becomes evident especially with generational differences, where a balance of factors internal and external to our immediate contexts begins to play a larger role.

Nonetheless, the nature of leadership reveals that great leaders take action in the world from a clear place: they are anchored in a particular view of the world. Humans are meaning makers, and when leaders assist others in making sense of the world through a clearly articulated and coherent worldview, solid action can fol- low. Thus, while we need to be cognizant of the diversity of worldviews and the diversity of uses of the concept, we also need to recognize that particular visions of life and ways of life can be powerful and compelling. The chal- lenge to leadership is to find ways to more explicitly map out these worldviews, discerning those that tend to im- pede and restrict from those that seek to enhance and expand the world we truly need or want.

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John Valk is associate professor of worldview studies at Renaissance College, University of New Brunswick, Canada. He received his doctorate from the University of Toronto. John can be reached at [email protected]

Stephan Belding teaches at the Universities of Phoenix and Marylhurst. He has an MBA from the University of Phoenix. He is currently working on his doctorate at Capella Univer- sity. Stephan can be reached at [email protected]

Alicia Crumpton is the director of the Center for Global Stud- ies and teaches Leadership Studies at Johnson University. She received her doctorate from Gonzaga University. Alicia can be reached at [email protected]

Nathan Harter is professor of Leadership and American Stud- ies at Christopher Newport University. He received his juris doctor (JD) at Indiana University School of Law. Nathan can be reached at [email protected].

Jonathan Reams (Ph.D.) is associate professor in the De- partment of Education at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Jonathan can be reached at Jonathan@ Reams.com

Winning the Talent Hunt

This excerpt taken from – "Learning to Lead: The Journey to Leading Yourself, Leading Others, and Leading an Organization" (pp. 197-198) by Ron Williams.

How to Build Your Team One way to define leadership is the art of achieving things through other people. To make that possible, you have to learn how to recruit, train, and motivate the most talented working team possible. Here are some ideas about how to make it happen.

One of the most crucial challenges you’ll face as a leader is the development of an empowered, highly motivated team—a team that is capable of achieving extraordinary things even in the most challenging circumstances. To create such a team, the leader must always remember that the people he works with are even more important than the job or the organization and its problems, and behave accordingly. Several basic skills are involved in building your team of miracle workers. These include learning how to set expectations rather than simply issuing demands, being able to accurately read and describe reality rather than being imprisoned by false assumptions, and putting people first rather than killing their zeal through indifference, as many would-be leaders do. These fundamental leadership techniques add up to what I call people-centered leadership. Applying them can help to transform a seemingly modest collection of talent into a team of world beaters. Of course, a fundamental element in building your team is recruiting and hiring the right people in the first place. Doing that isn’t quite as simple as many leaders appear to assume.

THE VALUE OF INCLUSION: IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT DEMOGRAPHICS A leader should recruit a team that complements the leader’s own strengths— and compensates for any weaknesses—rather than simply mirroring the leader’s personality. Especially in times of stress and turmoil, the smart leader recognizes the power of attracting team members whose unique perspectives may offer fresh problem-solving approaches that the organization desperately needs. For this reason, some of the most common ways of thinking about the recruiting and hiring process are dangerous, even potentially fatal, to the effort to build a powerful team. For example, many hiring managers and human resources

professionals talk about “cultural fit” as an important element in selecting new employees. In one sense, this is correct: You want to have a clear sense of the values that your organization seeks to embody, and you want to attract people who generally share those values and will be proud to help you uphold them.

Thus, at Aetna, we tried to hire people who truly cared about the health-care needs of ordinary individuals and would always aspire to making sure that our customers and clients would be treated with respect and consideration. But all too often, leaders use the word “fit” to describe people who are culturally and personally similar to an organization’s current employees—the kinds of people they are accustomed to working with and whom they might enjoy hanging out with in the company cafeteria or on off-site retreats. This in turn tends to morph into a search for people who come from the same background as the leaders— who grew up in the same kind of neighborhood, went to the same kind of college, studied the same kinds of subjects, and have the same kinds of personal tastes and interests. When they find a job candidate who gives them this kind of warm- and-fuzzy feeling, they say, “He really looks as though he’ll fit in here!” or “I can definitely see her becoming a part of our team!” Conversely, people involved in the hiring process often use vague observations like “I’m not sure he fits in to this department” or “I don’t think she’s ready for the assignment” as a way of vetoing a particular candidate. I don’t believe in blocking an opportunity for an otherwise well-qualified candidate based on such data-free comments. I think a leader should challenge remarks of this sort by asking probing questions: What exactly do you mean? In what specific way is he unready? What particular skills do you think are missing? Can you give me an example of what you are saying? These sorts of questions gently force people to “get real” about the hiring process rather than falling back on empty assertions about “fit” that often amount to nothing more than “I kinda like her! Let’s hire her.”

More important, the search for “fit” can hurt your quest to build the most powerful, effective team. In practice, it often means avoiding people with new perspectives, ideas, approaches, and personal styles—which can be a big mistake. Hiring people who are in the same mold as everyone else in the organization strongly reduces the odds of getting the kind of innovative, out-of-the-box thinking that makes reframing possible. In an age when change and adaptation are among the chief imperatives for every organization, choosing people in a way that reinforces

the path of least resistance is a recipe for long-term decline. Instead, I suggest you make a deliberate effort to choose people who are different from those you already employ. This is about much more than just demographic diversity. Yes, it’s valuable to build a workforce that includes people of differing ethnic, racial, religious, and class backgrounds, as well as people of different genders and of varying sexual orientations.

The best way to understand the needs and values of customers from every background is to have employees from every background who speak their language and understand their experiences. But the deepest value of diversity is derived from cultural and intellectual inclusion, not just demographic variation. When employees with a wide range of different sensibilities offer fresh perspectives on the organization and its mission, it helps you tap new sources of knowledge and creativity that will enable your organization to thrive and grow.

When you approach the recruiting challenge with this in mind, you avoid the trap of hiring too many people in your own image. Instead, you open your doors to the broadest possible candidate pool, and you develop the ability to recognize and appreciate talent no matter where you find it or what it may look like on the surface. In many cases, the most effective leadership teams involve “odd couple” combinations of individuals who seem, at first glance, wildly different, even incompatible—but who have complementary skills that, taken together, provide exactly what the organization needs to succeed. At Aetna, Jack Rowe and I formed such a team. When the headhunter for Aetna originally called Rowe to ask if he would be interested in joining the company, he was incredulous. “Are you kidding? I’m suing Aetna!” he replied. That was more or less true. One symptom of the problems Aetna was having with its physician stakeholders was several lawsuits against the company, one of which had been brought by Mount Sinai, where Rowe was president. Recognizing the seriousness of this issue, Aetna was determined to fix it, which was why they were recruiting their “enemy,” not only to join but to lead the Aetna team. Rowe knew the world of medicine inside and out. But he knew little about insurance and had never studied management, although his role with Mount Sinai called for considerable leadership and organizational skills. When he agreed to take on the chairmanship of Aetna, Rowe knew he needed to complement his own talents with a second-in-command whose aptitudes and knowledge were drastically

different from his own. Rowe recalls: I needed someone who understood everything about the nuts and bolts of health insurance—someone capable of taking the engine apart, spreading out all 250 parts on the floor of the garage, and putting it back together better than before. And then, when the key was inserted and turned, we needed to be sure the engine would start! So we started searching for that kind of guy—a person who understood the atomic structure of insurance right down to individual products and the markets they served. I could help formulate a top-down vision for our industry. But I couldn’t make it real without the help of a bottom-up guy. Rowe and I became a highly effective team. I could take the broad ideas we developed, translate them into practical, concrete steps, and then show people how to implement them. I had the patience and fortitude needed to stick with the task until all the thousands of tiny administrative, organizational, and systemic pieces were fitting together and operating smoothly. Our complementary strengths and our mutual respect enabled us to effectively guide the company’s turnaround.

Working with Rowe reinforced my appreciation for pursuing inclusion in hiring— not by checking off demographic traits on a list, but by recruiting people who differ from you rather than people you are “comfortable with.” When you cast a wider talent net, you’re likely to hire people with a less traditional image—in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, age, and other characteristics—but more important, they will bring varied backgrounds, perspectives, insights, and gifts to the challenges you face. The result: fresher ideas, greater creativity, and a higher rate of successful innovation. With this kind of inclusion in mind, as president and CEO of Aetna, I consciously recruited and promoted team members who were nontraditional. Even before I joined Aetna, the company had many successful female managers, and I maintained and expanded this emphasis. I also looked for smart, talented people with unusual business backgrounds and then tried slotting them into assignments that would give them a chance to grow in new ways. For example, I took Kim Keck out of Aetna’s finance department and gave her the job as my chief of staff. She had to take a crash course in the entire structure of our corporation, which she knew little about before. But working with me, she quickly got up to speed and used her people skills, her communication talents, and her leadership instincts to become an amazingly effective right-hand person for me. As I’ve mentioned, Keck has since gone on to become a CEO in her own right.

DEMOGRAPHIC INCLUSION: IT STILL MATTERS I’ve been emphasizing the importance of intellectual and cultural diversity when building your organization’s team. But demographic inclusion based on concrete traits like race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and disability is also important. Surveys show that many Americans—especially white Americans—assume that racial prejudice is a matter of ancient history, that programs of affirmative action have long since equalized the opportunities available to people of all races, and that therefore deliberate efforts to encourage encourage racial inclusion in US businesses are, at best, unnecessary, and, at worst, divisive and harmful. These assumptions ignore the reality that people of color are still quite rare in American boardrooms and executive suites. They ignore, too, the fact that efforts to integrate US society began only recently in historical terms. I mentioned earlier that landmark laws and court rulings eliminating legal segregation occurred during my own lifetime (and in fact have yet to be fully implemented in practice). I am a member of the first generation of black Americans to enter historically white institutions—colleges, universities, social organizations, and businesses—in significant numbers. Like practically all other black Americans, I’m familiar with the experience of being the only person of color in a conference room or lecture hall filled with white people. I’m profoundly aware of how awkward and disconcerting it can be to feel culturally isolated from those around you; to encounter no natural role models or mentors when entering a new environment; to be the subject of embarrassing questions, comments, looks, and assumptions; and to be accepted, if at all, merely as a token representative of “my people” who is supposed to speak for an entire race rather than simply myself.

At the time I started my business career, few black Americans held leadership positions. Those who’d managed to climb a few rungs up the corporate ladder were often confined to a handful of specialized departments—human resources, community relations, “special markets” (a term often used as a euphemism for “black customers”). These were mostly staff jobs rather than line jobs, which meant they were viewed as cost centers rather than profit centers. Those who held these positions had extremely limited growth opportunities and were highly vulnerable to layoffs in times of financial stress, since they weren’t believed to be generating profits for the corporation. The real power centers in most companies were off-limits to blacks, so virtually no CEOs, chief financial officers, chief marketing officers, divisional vice presidents, or factory managers were black.

The reality is that, had I been born just five or ten years earlier, none of the opportunities that I’ve experienced would have been available. I’ve mentioned the chance I had to go to a better public school outside of Chicago because of my grades. During and after college, I was able to get jobs at the Federal Reserve and in the Illinois governor’s office. These were all opportunities that simply hadn’t existed for black Americans of previous generations. I have a tremendous amount of appreciation for those people who dedicated their lives to creating the social changes that opened those doors. Yet today, fifty years after the heyday of the civil rights movement, the process of creating a society in which all Americans have equal opportunities has barely begun.

Black executives lead only a handful of major US corporations—for example, three in the Fortune 500. (For the record, they are Merck, headed by Kenneth Frazier; TIAA, headed by Roger Ferguson Jr.; and Lowe’s, headed by Marvin Ellison.) Until the retirement in May 2017 of my friend Ursula Burns, Xerox was also on this list. Importantly, Burns was also the first black woman to serve as a Fortune 500 CEO. The United States has done much to break down institutional barriers between races in recent decades. But the work of creating true diversity, and of taking full advantage of the rich variation in perspectives and life experiences that Americans of all backgrounds offer, is far from complete. For these reasons, as Aetna’s CEO, I put my weight behind the traditional kinds of demographically oriented diversity programs, which helped to bring fresh talent and new thinking to the company. I chaired Aetna’s corporate diversity council, an unusual step for a CEO, and made sure it included many of the company’s most important executives—the directors of purchasing and marketing and the chief IT officer, for example. We urged Aetna’s vendors—outside companies that provided us with services such as advertising, media, printing, accounting, investment banking, consulting, and legal advice—to create inclusive client services teams so people from many backgrounds could learn about our business and provide us with their unique insights. Also, within Aetna, we created affinity groups to address the needs of specific sectors of our workforce and to represent their interests in the company’s councils. We had affinity groups for black Americans, working parents, and veterans, among others. Encouraging and supporting these groups, listening carefully to their concerns, and helping to address their problems made it easier for Aetna to draw on the talents of a wide

array of people—all of whom had something important to contribute to our long- term mission as a company.

I also pushed the envelope on racial awareness through an occasional personal gesture. For example, I made a point of inviting several top Aetna executives to the annual Golf & Tennis Challenge, a networking event hosted by Black Enterprise magazine. I suspected these colleagues of mine—who happened to be white—might find it interesting and eye-opening to spend a weekend as members of a racial minority group (since the vast majority majority of attendees at the Golf & Tennis Challenge are black). They did. A number commented about the awkwardness they felt, the difficulty in launching conversations, and the anxiety about saying and doing “the right thing” in an unfamiliar cultural setting. Several years later thanked me, commenting on the greater sense of empathy they now felt for people of color.

When you have the opportunity to help select new people to join your organization, I urge you to consider inclusion of all kinds as part of the recruitment and hiring process. We live in a world where people from every background are important—as customers, suppliers, investors, and fellow citizens. So organizations need input and contributions from people of all kinds— and the most successful businesses are likely to be those that draw on the widest possible pool of talent. If Silicon Valley wants to make significant progress on this front, companies like Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook need to make inclusion a high priority. Rather than delegating the job, their CEOs should devote some portion of their own time and energy to leading the charge. They need to insist on considering diverse slates of candidates for every important position before hiring the best person. When a CEO fails to personally emphasize and invest time in this effort, it sends a signal that the issue isn’t really important. Demographic diversity often pays immediate, short-term benefits. I’ve seen it happen many times.

Here’s an example. When I was at Blue Cross of California, we were once in competition with another health-care company for a major contract with a large corporate client. After both potential suppliers had provided written proposals with contract terms, costs, and other details, the day came for an extensive presentation before a group of executives who would make the final decision. I

arrived at the client’s offices with my team from Blue Cross. It included our network manager, who was a Hispanic man; our chief actuary, an Asian- American woman; our general manager of geography, another woman; and me, a black man. In the waiting area outside the boardroom where the big presentation would take place, we met our counterparts from the rival supplier. Every member of their team was a blond, blue-eyed male between six feet and six feet three inches tall. We shook hands and wished one another well—and of course we couldn’t help noticing the surface differences between the two teams. Our team from Blue Cross made the second presentation that morning. When we walked into the room, we saw that the members of the client’s team were as diverse as we were—there were men and women of various ages, colors, and ethnic backgrounds waiting to hear our presentation. The team was a cross- section of the company’s working population—and, like our team, it was also a cross-section of twenty-first-century America. We immediately felt confident that we could “speak the language” of everyone in that room. Blue Cross won the contract.

CREATING A HIGH-PERFORMANCE CULTURE: THE LEADER SETS THE PACE Building your team isn’t only about choosing the right people. It’s also about creating an organizational culture that enables your team members to give the best of themselves to the organization. And here again, I return to the theme of self-leadership. Unless you learn to manage your own time, energy, and focus so that you are giving one hundred percent to the organization—or even a bit more than that—you will never be able to get one hundred percent from your team members. I’m generally recognized as a hard worker. It’s a habit I developed long ago, going back to when I worked alongside my dad in the car wash. I maintained that self-discipline during my years in high school, college, and graduate school, as well as throughout my working career. The habit was facilitated by the fact that I liked my work. When you are fascinated by the challenges and problems that crop up every day on the job, then you don’t mind devoting countless hours to them, even on evenings and weekends—just as an avid painter, surfer, rock climber, or dancer never gets tired of the long hours they dedicate to mastering the activity they love. I didn’t necessarily expect the people who worked for me to put in the same kinds of hours I did. But I did expect them to devote the time and energy needed to attain the results that the organization

needed and expected. If they couldn’t or wouldn’t, then they needed to find another job that suited them better, and I needed to replace them with someone who could pull their weight as a member of our team.

Over the years, I had to learn the right ways to communicate my work expectations to my team members. I think people sometimes felt intimidated when they saw how many hours I put in. I guess it can be a bit daunting when your boss is at his desk before you arrive in the morning, is still there when you leave in the evening, and sends you work-related emails throughout the weekend —maybe even in the wee hours of Sunday night. But my intention wasn’t to impress people or to extract the same level of dedication from them. If a team member could accomplish everything that was required at a high level of excellence within the hours of nine and five, more power to them! I became concerned only when people let the clock dictate the amount of work they put in rather than obeying the genuine demands of the job. I’ve been told that my style of relating to my team members was also a bit intimidating. I’ve never been one for small talk. The typical watercooler chitchat is mostly uninteresting to me. So I tended not to participate in the usual conversations about movies, family outings, or the performance of the local sports teams. As a result, people would get the idea that I was all work and no play—and that I expected the same from my colleagues. Some even assumed that I was unconcerned about them as people —that I viewed them simply as cogs in the corporate machine, and that all I cared about was their productivity. That’s certainly not the message I was trying to convey.

Reflecting on this issue, I came to realize that my level of focus on the tasks we needed to accomplish was so high that I needed to raise my level of focus on the people I worked with as well. When I didn’t do this, the disproportion felt jarring to those around me. So over the years, I learned to adjust my communication style to express more accurately my concerns about the people I worked with. I developed the habit of checking in with people about their family lives and their personal interests—to ask how an elderly mother was doing or how a teenaged daughter’s latest track meet went. I even learned to show a little interest in how the New York Giants football game turned out on Sunday! (Although if the sports talk dominated the office for more than a few minutes on Monday morning, I was known to remind my team members that there was work to be done.)

Setting appropriate expectations for your team members involves understanding their individual capacities. The metaphor of the Navy SEAL that I explained in an earlier chapter can be helpful here. SEALs and regular Navy sailors are two different kinds of people with different roles. You bring in your SEALs for crucial, time-sensitive tasks that require maximum sustained effort for a specific period of time. Your sailors may be equally talented, but they are steadier and more capable of working on the same task over a long period of time. To get the most satisfactory results for the company as well as for the individuals involved, make sure that both you and your team members recognize the difference and know which group they fit into best.

Sometimes, setting the right tone is a matter of clearing up misunderstandings. When I would ask to review my team members’ vacation schedules, they occasionally thought I was trying to keep tabs on them, or even hinting that a week in the Caribbean might be excessive. That wasn’t my purpose at all. Actually, I just wanted to be sure I could anticipate issues that might arise during their absence so I could avoid interrupting their vacations with emails or phone calls. Once I realized the confusion I was causing, I found that explaining my real intention made a big difference in people’s reactions. Still, there were times when I drove people hard—especially during my early years at Aetna, when the company was in crisis and we were devising and implementing emergency measures. Evening and weekend meetings fueled by pizza and cartons of Chinese take-out were common. For many on my top leadership team, family lives were disrupted, vacations were short and infrequent, and thoughts about work and the problems we faced were constant. I know that the stress this caused on people’s personal lives was real and sometimes quite painful. I hope and believe that I never exerted more pressure on my team members than was absolutely necessary to meet the genuine needs of the organization. And I hope, too, that the rewards we shared over time—both financially and in other, less tangible forms—made the sacrifices worthwhile. The fact that so many of the people I worked with during those tough times at Aetna have remained colleagues and treasured friends of mine suggests that’s the case.

In my latter years as Aetna CEO, people sometimes told me that I seemed to be “mellowing” as a leader—that I wasn’t quite as demanding and single-minded as when I first joined the firm. Maybe there’s a bit of truth to that. But more important

is the fact that all the hard work we put in enabled Aetna to get out of crisis mode. Once the company was on an even keel, there was less need for evening and weekend sessions and emergency meetings to put out the latest fires. What’s more, as the pressure lessened, the leaders around me were able to devote more of their time to developing the people who worked for them. As my team members built teams of their own that could keep the business running smoothly in their absence, it became easier for people to take weekends off and vacations.

A well-run company doesn’t require routine superhuman feats of effort to remain successful. An organization that accomplishes great things without outrageous work schedules is one of the rewards you get for building a smart system and staffing it with talented people in the first place.

THE REALITIES OF WORK-LIFE BALANCE Having said all this, let me be clear: Even when the business is running smoothly, being the leader of a large, complex organization is never less than extremely demanding. If you aspire to leadership, don’t imagine it will ever be easy. It will be engrossing, challenging, fascinating, and at times exhilarating—but easy? Never. Earlier in this book, I described how my friend Ursula Burns learned so much about the life of a top corporate leader when she served as the executive assistant to Wayland Hicks at Xerox. She traveled with him, organized and attended his meetings, and managed his contacts with hundreds of colleagues inside and outside the company. In Burns’s words, Hicks was “all in, all the time”—engaged at the highest possible level every moment of the day. For example, she recalls seeing Hicks fly coach from the United States to Japan— working most of the way—check in to a Tokyo hotel on arrival, take a quick shower, and immediately head out to a round of business meetings. This was a typical performance, not an extraordinary one. Burns remembers telling her boyfriend (now her husband), “If this is what it takes to be a top executive, I never want to do it!” But Burns changed her mind when she went to work as the executive assistant to Paul Allaire, then chairman and CEO of Xerox. Allaire was every bit as engaged, energetic, and dedicated as Hicks. But he had a wider array of outside interests that fascinated and revitalized him, and he’d managed to develop ways to integrate them into his schedule without sacrificing his productivity and focus. Allaire was an avid biker and motorcyclist, and he made the time to take cross-country trips; he was also a ballet aficionado and

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occasionally arranged his schedule so he could leave the office early to attend a special performance. Watching Allaire in action made Burns realize that it might be possible to be a super-effective corporate leader while also enjoying a semblance of normal life. In her later roles—first as Xerox’s vice president for global manufacturing and eventually as the company’s chairperson and CEO— she consciously modeled her work style on Allaire’s. Make no mistake, Burns works extremely hard. “I’m a natural loner, an introvert,” she says: There’s nothing I like better than taking a solitary run in the park or curling up with a great book on my sofa at home. But as a leader, I don’t usually have options like that. I’m responsible for tens of thousands of people! They rely on me to keep them going, to help make them successful, to keep our company afloat. So I have to be thinking about those responsibilities constantly. Instead of enjoying a quiet meal with a friend, I’m more likely to be attending a big dinner with dozens of people from one of our facilities, so I can hear about their plans for a big new project or a factory expansion. It’s interesting and important, but it’s also time- intensive and very demanding. At times, I get cranky! But it comes with the territory.

Like most successful executives, especially women, Burns is constantly asked by aspiring leaders how she balances her work and her personal life. She explains that, for anyone in the highest ranks of leadership, the idea of work-life balance is often misunderstood. “You have to bring your entire self to the leadership role,” Burns says. As a result, having work and life in balanced portions at any given moment in your career is almost impossible. “You can have work-life balance over a lifetime,” she has concluded, “but not necessarily all the time.” Burns learned some valuable lessons about how to enjoy a happy and successful family life from her mother, who worked as a maid and house cleaner. “My mom worked very hard—she had to,” Burns explains. “So I learned from her that being with your kids every minute of the day is not what good parenting is all about. I learned to be a tactical parent—to pick and choose the most important moments when I needed to be there for my kids, and to make the most of those.” Burns was fortunate to have a supportive husband on whom she could lean for help with family responsibilities. She missed a lot of her kids’ basketball games and music recitals, but when she did, her husband was usually there. And Burns figured out where to draw the line between life and work so that she could fulfill her most important family obligations. “Even when my kids were young, I had to

travel constantly,” she says. “But I made a rule that, with almost no exceptions, I would be home with them for the weekend—and believe me, I did some crazy things to live up to that rule, even if it meant taking three flights to arrive at my doorstep at midnight on Friday!” Burns’s experiences resonate with me.

When you’re a leader—whether in business or in any other arena, from the nonprofit world to government to academia—you need to be prepared to sacrifice personal needs and interests for the good of the organization. There are people relying on you, and you can never forget that. Of course, your family and others in your personal life rely on you, too. So while it may be impossible to achieve work-life balance in any neat, convenient way, you owe it to yourself and to those who love you to draw lines to protect some sacred personal space. Burns did it with her home-for-the-weekend rule. I did it by having crucial family events built into my schedule by the same assistant who managed my company travels, my board meetings, my facilities tours, and all my other work activities. It was her job to figure out on a weekly basis how to fit someone’s request for an urgent project review in between my 2:00 p.m. television interview with a stock market reporter and a 4:00 p.m. soccer game at my kid’s school. Having the soccer game on the same calendar with the TV interview and an employee roundtable helped me keep some family time “untouchable” and as important on that day as anything else. Of course, once the soccer game ended, I’d likely be heading back to the office for a couple of hours of additional meetings and preparation for the next day’s gauntlet of events. But that’s the life of a leader. For many of us, the quest for work-life balance is a continuing journey. Kay Mooney, who served as my capable and dedicated chief of staff for three years during my tenure at Aetna, recalls how challenging it was to adjust to the realities of working for a constantly- in-demand CEO: I started working in Ron’s office in April. A month later, I planned to take a day off on the Friday before Memorial Day. Ron and I were at the office until 9:00 p.m. on Thursday. Before I left, I put my “out of office” message on my email, indicating I would be out of the office until Tuesday. When I got home forty- five minutes later, I checked my email and found two new emails from Ron. The first was about a business issue he needed me to address. The second read, “You don’t need to use that ‘out of the office’ message on your email, because as my chief of staff, you’re never really out of the office.” Of course, Ron didn’t mean it literally—he was fine with me taking some time away from the office. But his point was that I could never be out of touch or unavailable, because the CEO can

never simply ignore the problems of the organization, no matter when they arise —and as the CEO’s chief of staff, I couldn’t ignore them either. Mooney’s conclusion: “Work-life balance has to be defined by every individual based on what is right for you at a particular moment in your career.” She goes on to say: As Ron’s chief of staff, the proportion between work and life for me was around ninety-two percent to eight percent. Later, when I was asked to build Aetna’s public exchange business in the wake of the Affordable Care Act, I still worked very long hours, but the pressure and the demands were considerably less on a relative basis. As the work changes and as your role evolves, so does the balance you strike. All you can do is strive for a balance that works for you at a given time—and adjust it as your needs and tolerance demand. Like Kay Mooney, I had to wrestle with issues of work-life balance. I was lucky: I could never have accomplished what I did in my business career without the support of a committed, generous, and understanding spouse. When tough decisions had to be made—for example, moves that would uproot us from one city to another— Cynthia recognized the trade-offs required and discussed them frankly with me so we could make the best decisions for our family. My advice to would-be leaders: Understand the difficult demands that are inherent in the leadership role.

If you’re involved in a serious relationship, talk with your partner about the challenges ahead as honestly as you can. Don’t make promises you may not be able to keep. And when your significant other says, “Please call me when you’re on your way home,” don’t dial the phone until you’re actually out of the office and in your car or on the bus or train. I’ve learned from painful experience that if you call any sooner than that, you’re sure to be hijacked by a colleague on your way out the office door—leaving you with an embarrassing half-hour delay to explain to your loved one.

TREATING YOUR PEOPLE AS IF THEY REALLY MATTER People-centered leadership can unleash amazing levels of energy and creativity —provided everyone retains a shared focus on the needs of the organization. In my pursuit of the goal of people-centered leadership, I tried hard to keep my finger on the pulse of my team members. Simply paying close attention to what was going on around me was an essential element of this process. There’s no substitute for being a good listener. That’s not a passive skill. It includes actively probing for the underlying emotions, fears, dreams, aspirations, and worries that

people may be expressing indirectly when they talk with you about the issues they’re facing in life and work. Remember that, in most organizations, there’s a subtle but real dividing wall between rank-and-file team members and the boss who leads them. It’s true at every level of the organization, whether you’re considering the relationship between a factory foreman and the assembly-line workers who report to him or the relationship between a CEO and the members of his executive team.

Team members are typically reluctant to “bother” the boss unless they have something important to share, and in one-on-one meetings they usually communicate using language they’ve carefully planned in advance. As the leader, you should consider every conversation with a team member as potentially sensitive and important. The people who work for you care a lot about everything you say—or don’t say. They want badly to earn your approval, your support, and your understanding. Learn to listen carefully to the unspoken concerns that resonate through every conversation, and try to respond not only to the literal words you hear but also to the emotional currents that underlie and motivate them. In addition to being a good listener on an everyday basis, you should purposefully make time for one-on-one meetings with those who rely on your leadership.

As CEO, I met regularly with each of the ten people who reported directly to me and also with their key direct reports—about twenty-five people in all. These meetings weren’t usually lengthy—half an hour or so was typical—but they included time for a brief recap of how the team member’s most important projects were unfolding, a conversation about the biggest challenges or obstacles they were wrestling with, and a look at the biggest goals they’d set for the months ahead. Most important, I tried to come away with a sense of how my team member’s personal aspirations were meshing with those of the organization and if there was anything I could do to help ensure that the fit was as strong and mutually nurturing as possible. Making sure these brief but meaningful conversations were sacred on my schedule, and not postponed or canceled for other activities, was an important part of my leadership style. When you blow off a meeting like this, you’re indirectly communicating to your team member that they are not really important to you. That’s a sure way to alienate them and, eventually, lose at least a portion of what they have to offer. As my chief of staff

Kay Mooney used to say, “You’ve always got to show your people the love!” Just being there, to talk with them and to listen deeply, is an essential first step.

TAKEAWAYS FROM CHAPTER 10

• One key to success in today’s business world is creating a diverse team of employees from varying backgrounds. This will maximize your organization’s ability to understand and address the problems and needs of widely differing customers.

• Demographic diversity (in terms of race, gender, religion, and other basic characteristics) is desirable and important. But even more important is diversity of work background, experience, values, attitudes, and knowledge.

• Don’t fall into the trap of seeking employees who fit a predetermined cultural or personal mold. Instead, look for people who will bring fresh ideas and new personality traits to your organization.

• As the team leader, you set the work pace for your team. If you model dedication to the organization in your daily behaviour, the members of your team will usually follow suit.

• Work-life balance is often misunderstood. At any given moment, a worker must determine their own appropriate relationship between personal time and work time—and that relationship is ever-changing and only occasionally comfortably balanced.

• The lives of your team members are vitally important, and as the team leader you must never forget that. Your team members want to align their life goals with those of the organization, and helping them achieve that will elicit their dedication and their best efforts.

Citation Williams, Ron. Learning to Lead: The Journey to Leading Yourself, Leading Others, and

Leading an Organization (pp. 197-198). Greenleaf Book Group Press. Kindle Edition.

1

Beyond the False Choice

Two questions haunt every human life and every human community. The first: What are we meant to be? The second: Why are we so far from what we’re meant to be?

Human beings have an indelible sense that our life has a purpose—and a dogged sense that we have not fulfilled our purpose. Something has gone wrong on the way to becoming what we were meant to be, individually and together.

The first question exposes the gap in our own self- understanding, our half-formed sense that we are meant to be more than we know. How can we have such a deep sense of purpose but find ourselves unable to easily name or grasp that purpose? Yet this is the human condition.

The second question exposes the gap between our aspira- tions and our accomplishments, between our hopes and our reality, between our reach and our grasp. If the first question gives voice to our greatest hopes, the second brings to the

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surface our deepest regrets. Having both great hopes and great regrets is also, alas, the human condition.

In this book I offer a way of answering both of these questions. It’s simple enough to explain in a minute or two of conversation, or in a page or two of a book—it’s coming up in just a few pages, and you’ll grasp its essence almost immediately. You’ll see it in action in your friend- ships, your workplace, your family and your favorite TV show or movie—you’ll find it in the pages of Scripture and in the most mundane moments of day-to-day life. You’ll see it in the most horrifying contexts of injustice and exploitation, and in the most inspiring moments of compassion and reconciliation.

Many simple ideas are simplistic—they filter out too much of reality to be truly useful. This one is not, be- cause it is a particular kind of simple idea, the kind we call a paradox. It holds together two simple truths in a simple relationship, but it generates fruitful tension, complexity and possibility. I’ve come to call it the paradox of flourishing.

“Flourishing” is a way of answering the first great question, What are we meant to be? We are meant to flourish—not just to survive, but to thrive; not just to exist, but to explore and expand. “Gloria Dei vivens homo,” Irenaeus wrote. A loose— but by no means inaccurate—translation of those words has become popular: “The glory of God is a human being fully

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Beyond the False Choice 11

alive.” To flourish is to be fully alive, and when we read or hear those words something in us wakes up, sits up a bit straighter, leans ever so slightly forward. To be fully alive would connect us not just to our own proper human purpose but to the very heights and depths of divine glory. To live fully, in these transitory lives on this fragile earth, in such a way that we somehow participate in the glory of God—that would be flourishing. And that is what we are meant to do.

Every paradox requires that we embrace two things that seem like opposites. The paradox of flourishing is that true flourishing requires two things that at first do not seem to go together at all. But in fact, if you do not have both, you do not have flourishing, and you do not create it for others.

Here’s the paradox: flourishing comes from being both strong and weak.

Flourishing requires us to embrace both authority and vulnerability, both capacity and frailty— even, at least in this broken world, both life and death.

The answer to the second great question—Why are we so far from what we’re meant to be?—is that we have for- gotten this basic paradox of flourishing, which is the secret of being fully alive. Actually, we haven’t just forgotten it, as if we had misplaced it absentmindedly. We’ve suppressed

Flourishing comes from being both strong and weak.

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1 2 St rong a n d We a k

it. We’ve hidden it. We’ve fled from it. Because we fear it. I used to think that what we feared was vulnerability—

the “weak” part of the paradox. But in the course of writing this book and talking with many others about the paradox of flourishing, I’ve realized that we fear authority too. The truth is that we are afraid of both sides of the paradox of flourishing—and we especially fear to combine them in the only way that really leads to real life, for our- selves and others.

This book is about how to embrace the life for which we were made—life that embraces the paradox of flourishing, that pursues greater authority and greater vulnerability at the same time.

But most of all, this book is about a picture, the simplest and best way I know to explore the paradox of flourishing. It’s really just a sketch, the kind of thing you can draw on a napkin, but it will give us plenty to think about for the rest of this book (see figure 1.1).

It’s one of my favorite things: a 2×2 chart.

The Power of the 2×2 There’s nothing I find quite as satisfying as a 2×2 chart at the right time. The 2×2 helps us grasp the nature of paradox. When used properly, the 2×2 can take two ideas we thought were opposed to one another and show how they com- plement one another.

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Beyond the False Choice 13

The world is littered with false choices. The leadership writers Jim Collins and Scott Porras talk about “the tyranny of the OR and the genius of the AND.” Should products be low cost or high quality? Whom do managers serve, their investors or their employees? The most transformative companies manage both. Are we the products of our nature or our nurture? They are not opposites—they have to go together.

The Christian world has its own versions: Is the mission of the church evangelism and proclamation or is it justice and demonstration? Are we supposed to be conservative or radical, contemplative or active, set apart from the world or engaged in the world? Or take the topic that almost generated the first

IV I

III II

WITHDRAWING SUFFERING

EXPLOITING FLOURISHING

AU TH OR IT Y

VULNERABILITY

Figure 1.1

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1 4 St rong a n d We a k

great biblical 2×2 chart. Is the life of the Christian about faith or works? (“Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you a 2×2 chart of my faith and works”—James 2:18, my take on the original Greek!) Then you’ll be ready for the ultimate question: Was Jesus of Nazareth human or divine? Was he Son of Man or Son of God?

In all these cases, what we need is not a linear “or” but a two-dimensional “and” that presses us to see the sur- prising connections between two things we thought we had to choose between—and perhaps even to discover that having the fullness of one requires that we have the fullness of the other.

One of the best examples comes from studies of effective parenting—the kind of parenting that produces children who display self-confidence and self-control. Which is better, to be a strict, demanding parent who sets firm boundaries, or a responsive, engaging parent who interacts with their children with warmth and compassion? If you were a parent, where on this spectrum would you want to be (see figure 1.2)?

Put the question this way and most parents will lean one

FIRMNESSWARMTH

Figure 1.2

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Beyond the False Choice 15

way or the other. Some will quote Proverbs—“spare the rod, spoil the child”—and opt for firmness (see Proverbs 13:24). Others will quote Paul—“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger”—and opt for warmth (see Ephesians 6:4, Colossians 3:21).

Both are right. Firmness and warmth, it turns out, are not actually op-

posites. They can go together—in fact, they must go to- gether for children to flourish. Their relationship is much better shown with a 2×2 (see figure 1.3).

Map firmness and warmth this way, and you quickly dis- cover that either one, without the other, is poor parenting. Firmness without warmth—authoritarian parenting—leads

FI RM

NE SS

WARMTH

Figure 1.3

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16 St rong a n d We a k

eventually to rebellion. Warmth without firmness—in- dulgent parenting—leads eventually to spoiled, entitled brats.

In fact, there aren’t just two ways to be a bad parent— there are three! The worst of all is parenting that is neither warm nor firm—absent parenting (see figure 1.4).

There is a difference, it turns out, between being nice and being kind. “Nice” parenting drifts down to the bottom right, settling for easy, warm feelings without ever setting high expectations. Kind parenting manages to be clear and firm while also tender and affectionate. Psychologists call it authoritative parenting rather than authoritarian. The best parenting, in our 2×2, is up and to the right.

There are a few more insights hidden in this simple diagram.

ABSENT INDULGENT

AUTHORITARIAN KIND

IV I

III II

FI RM

NE SS

WARMTH

Figure 1.4

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Beyond the False Choice 17

I’ve numbered the quadrants using Roman numerals I to IV, starting with the ideal quadrant up and to the right and con- tinuing around clockwise—in the same order and direction we’ll consider them for the next four chapters. Consider the line from the top left to the bottom right, from quadrant IV (Authoritarian) to quadrant II (Indulgent), from firmness without warmth to warmth without firmness.

Remember our one-dimensional line with warmth on the left and firmness on the right? In practice, if that is your mental model of parenting, you’ll end up becoming either authoritarian (firmness without warmth) or indulgent (warmth without firmness). The IV-II line describes the line of false choice—the world we often think we live in (see figure 1.5). It describes our default way of thinking about

IV I

III II

FALSE CHOICE

Figure 1.5Cop yr ig ht ©

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18 St rong a n d We a k

how the world works—at least when we are limited to a linear model.

Because neither authoritarian nor indulgent parenting produces healthy results, they tend to generate and rein- force one another. Grow up in an authoritarian home, and you may well react by being an overly indulgent parent. Grow up with indulgence, and you may well overcorrect toward strictness when your own children come along. Much of the dysfunction of our lives comes from oscil- lating along the line of the false choice, never seeing that there might be another way.

One other observation: There is one quadrant that really is the worst of all. It’s quadrant III (Absent), the quadrant of withdrawal and disengagement. Authoritarian parents may not meet their children’s need for affection, but at least they provide structure. Indulgent parents may not provide structure, but at least they create an environment of ac- ceptance and affirmation. But absent parents leave two voids in their children’s lives, not just one. There’s some- thing about the Absent quadrant that is uniquely dam- aging—the total opposite of the Kind quadrant.

You could sum it up this way: We tend to think that our lives have to be lived along the line of false choice, the IV-II line. But actually the deepest question of our lives is how to move further and further away from quadrant III (Absent) and more and more fully into quadrant I (Kind).

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Beyond the False Choice 19

The III-I axis is the one that matters the most—the one that leads from a life that is not worth living to the life that really is life. And that, in a nutshell, is what this book is about.

The Paradox of Jesus No human being ever embodied flourishing more than Jesus of Nazareth. No human life (let alone death) ever un- leashed more flourishing for others. And precisely for this reason, no other life brings the paradox of flourishing so clearly into focus. In the life of Jesus we see two distinct patterns that can seem impossible to reconcile.

On the one hand, consider the bookends of his life on earth. He was born an infant, utterly dependent like every other human being. He ended his life on a Roman cross, was buried and descended to the dead. One of Christian- ity’s oldest texts puts it this way:

Though he was in the form of God, [he] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—

even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:6-8)

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On the other hand, there were Jesus’ three years of flour- ishing public ministry, the culture-making effects of which resound through history and throughout the world—the most consequential life ever lived. Christians believe that this very Son of Man and Son of God now sits at the right hand of the Father, truly the world’s Lord, and sends his Spirit of power to equip us to live his life in the world. To quote the very next line of that same ancient text: “Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name” (Philippians 2:9). Indeed, Jesus himself told his first followers that they would do even greater things than he himself had done (John 14:12).

But how can these two callings—to humility and to boldness, to death and to life, to submission to the worst

the world can do and to reigning with Christ over the world— possibly coexist? What do they mean for those of us who have some scope of choice and action—those of us who have been granted privilege and power? What do they mean for those who live at the cruelest edges of the world, in settings

of implacable injustice and oppression? Is there really any Christlike way to exercise leadership within our broken

How can these two callings—to humility and to boldness, to death and

to life, to submission to the worst the world can do and to reigning with Christ over the world—

possibly coexist?

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Beyond the False Choice 21

human institutions all the way up to (or down to) the church itself? What would be the specific practices we could adopt to live in ways that bear the true image and bring lasting flourishing?

We need a way to hold these two seemingly opposing facets of Jesus’ life, and our calling, together—a way to navigate this complexity without being overwhelmed. Which means we need a 2×2 chart, of course.

The Dimensions of Power I’m sure you see it coming already—the two dimensions of Jesus’ life, his vulnerability in dependence and death on the one hand, his authority in his earthly ministry and his heavenly exaltation on the other hand, can easily start to seem like linear alternatives. Exaltation or humiliation? Ascension or crucifixion? Miracles of healing, deliverance and even resurrection, or, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The empty tomb or the cross? The only way to hold them together is a 2×2 (see figure 1.6).

Some of us will instinctively identify with, or aspire to, the “vulnerability” dimension. Perhaps that is the reality of our lives—it is, eventually, the reality of every mortal life. It may be the reality of the community or family into which we were born, making us keenly aware of the limits of our power and the precariousness of our circumstances. Or we may aspire to identify with vulnerable people and places.

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From those places and with those people, we look at Jesus and see vulnerability. Jesus identified with the vulnerable in his birth, life and death. Whether we identify with vul- nerability or aspire to it, Jesus is there.

On the other hand, others of us identify with, or aspire to, authority. We have been told we can make a difference in the world; we’ve been given opportunities for creativity and leadership. Other people respond positively when we suggest a course of action. Maybe we’ve invested sub- stantial amounts of our time and money (maybe our parents’ money) in gaining authority in the form of training and certificates and degrees. We look at Jesus and see au- thority—as early as age twelve in the temple, engaging

FLOURISHING

IV I

III II

AU TH OR IT Y

VULNERABILITY

Figure 1.6

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Beyond the False Choice 23

powerfully with the scribes; standing up in his hometown synagogue and boldly proclaiming himself as the ful- fillment of the prophet’s vision; confounding Pilate and the Jewish leaders even when he was in chains; breathing on his disciples after his resurrection and giving them his Spirit, telling them they were now commissioned to go out into the whole world with his authority. Whether we identify with authority or aspire to it, Jesus is there.

When we identify with one dimension or another, it’s easy to become impatient with people who emphasize the other one. I worked in a campus ministry on an Ivy League campus where we emphasized the Christian call to

“downward mobility,” to use one’s privilege and power as an opportunity to serve the materially and spiritually poor. One day an African American student confronted me.

“When I came to college,” he said with some frustration, “my entire community held a prayer service and laid hands on me to commission me to go to Harvard. And now you want me to tell them that I’m just coming back to the hood to work for a nonprofit ministry?” His community had commissioned him for authority—power and position in parts of the culture where they had historically been absent or underrepresented. Who was I to tell him not to stay on that path?

What I was missing, at that point in my life, was a 2×2 conception of authority and vulnerability—the possibility

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that the journey of Christian discipleship, and true power, would involve not just a progression toward one or the other, but toward both at the same time. Such a conception would not simply authorize my student to leave his vulner- ability behind and pursue privilege and power, but it also did not authorize me to ignore his (and his community’s) legitimate pursuit of flourishing and the authority that flourishing requires.

This book is my long overdue answer to that student. First we will examine the four possible combinations of au- thority and vulnerability on that 2×2 diagram. Properly combined, authority and vulnerability lead to flourishing (chapter 2). But when either one is absent—or even worse, when both are missing—we find distortions of human beings, organizations and institutions. We find suffering, withdrawing and exploiting (chapters 3, 4 and 5)—which in their most virulent forms become poverty, apathy and tyranny. They don’t always appear to be that bad—poverty can look like mild disempowerment, apathy can look ap- pealingly like safety, tyranny often seems like mastery. In another layer of complexity, it will turn out that all of us inevitably spend time in each of these three quadrants, and God’s grace is real and available in them all. But none of them is the fullness of what we are made for, the life that is really life.

So how do we move up and to the right on this 2×2 chart?

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Beyond the False Choice 25

Surprisingly, rather than simply moving pleasantly into ever greater authority and ever greater vulnerability, we have to take two fearsome journeys, both of which seem like detours that lead away from the prime quadrant. The first is the journey to hidden vulnerability (chapter 6), the willingness to bear burdens and expose ourselves to risks that no one else can fully see or understand. The second is descending to the dead (chapter 7), the choice to visit the most broken corners of the world and our own heart. Only once we have made these two fateful journeys will we be the kind of people who can be entrusted with true power, the power that moves up and to the right (chapter 8) and brings others who have been trapped in tyranny, apathy and poverty along with us.

In the book Mountains Beyond Mountains, the re- nowned public health physician Paul Farmer tells his bi- ographer, Tracy Kidder, “People call me a saint and I think, I have to work harder. Because a saint would be a great thing to be.”

I think Farmer is entirely right that a saint would be a great thing to be. The saints are, ultimately, the people we recognize as fully alive—the people who flourished and brought flourishing to others, the ones in whom the glory of God was most fully seen. There really is no other goal higher for us than to become people who are so full of au- thority and vulnerability that we perfectly reflect what

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human beings were meant to be and disclose the reality of the Creator in the midst of creation. “Life holds only one tragedy,” the French Catholic Léon Bloy wrote, “not to have been a saint.”

But becoming a saint is about quite a bit more than “working harder”—or perhaps better put, it’s about a great deal less. If you have some inkling, like Farmer, that a saint would be a great thing to be, and if you also have some inkling that you never could work hard enough to actually become one, you’re on the path to true flourishing.

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Flourishing

Flourishing is something both we and our neighbors seek and want. Flourishing captures Jesus’ statement of his own life’s purpose in John 10:10, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” It echoes Paul’s words to Timothy as that young man sought to pastor the wealthy in his

WITHDRAWING SUFFERING

EXPLOITING FLOURISHING

IV I

III II

AU TH OR IT Y

VULNERABILITY

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congregation, urging him to lead them toward “the life that really is life” (1 Timothy 6:19). To be fully, abundantly, gloriously alive—this would be flourishing. What could we desire more?

But there is a danger here, and Paul understood it. To say that there is a “life that really is life” implies that there is a life that is not really life. You can be mistaken. You can miss it. You could possibly live your whole life without ever knowing what real life is. And Paul implies that the people most at risk for missing “the life that really is life” are the rich.

Since nearly every reader of this book possesses wealth that would have been unimaginable to Paul and Timothy, resources out of reach of most of the billions with whom we share the planet, Paul’s warning should ring in our ears. If there is a life that is not really life, there is surely a flour- ishing that is not really flourishing. So perhaps we should remind ourselves what flourishing is not.

Flourishing is not the life we see portrayed in the com- mercial messages that have saturated the imagination of every resident of the mediated world—the unselfcon- sciously multicultural millennial tribes, the blissfully happy families with their responsible-yet-still-cool parents and cheeky-but-still-lovable kids, the youthful retirees on the weathered porch, all glowing in the warmth of the photog- raphers’ golden hour.

Flourishing is not health as we normally understand it.

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Flourishing 29

There are people with profound physical and mental dis- abilities who flourish and make flourishing possible for others, while there are gyms full of people hitting their per- sonal bests who are nonetheless not flourishing.

Flourishing is not the same thing as growth—the ubiq- uitous Southern weed we call kudzu grows, all right, but a roadside overgrown with kudzu is not flourishing.

Flourishing is not affluence. There can be flourishing among the materially poor, and there can be a debilitating spiritual sickness among the affluent.

Flourishing is not gentrification. There are flourishing communities that never appear on lists of the hippest neighborhoods, and a Whole Foods or a sudden influx of people carrying yoga mats is no guarantee of a flourishing neighborhood.

How do we know that flourishing is none of these things? Because the most influential human being in history was a Judean carpenter and rabbi who did not live in a gentrified neighborhood (although, to be fair, he did tell at least one person to pick up his mat). He was never noted for his physical appearance (in fact, he had “nothing in his ap- pearance that we should desire him,” see Isaiah 53:2). His circle of followers first expanded then dwindled as his mission reached its culmination—from curious crowds of thousands to a few steadfast and heartbroken women standing by his cross.

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30 St rong a n d We a k

He lived the most exemplary human life possible, but it was not a life that looks like our affluence-addled picture of flourishing.

Define flourishing carelessly—define it hastily, instinc- tively, from a position of temporary power or privilege— and you will end up missing the real thing, or the real One.

You will miss Jesus—and you will also miss Angela.

Angela Like all my sister Melinda’s children, Angela, her third of four, was born in a plastic inflatable tub in the middle of their living room, attended by a midwife and surrounded by family—a scene that will give you some sense of my con- fident, resilient and countercultural sister. (My wife Cath- erine and I have preferred to experience the miracle of new life in, shall we say, more controlled environments.)

But the moment that Angela arrived in the world, the midwife’s patient and cheerful coaching shifted suddenly to decisive urgency. I will never forget picking up the phone, three hundred miles away, and hearing my father’s an- guished voice as he struggled to say the words, “There’s something wrong with the baby.” By that time Melinda, her husband, Dave, the midwife and Angela were already speeding toward the regional hospital, half an hour’s drive over mountain roads from their home.

There was indeed something wrong—one basic thing

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Flourishing 31

wrong, it turned out, that led to many other things wrong. Angela, doctors determined after days of tests, had three copies of her thirteenth chromosome, a condition called trisomy 13. (The far more common condition called Down Syndrome involves an extra copy of the twenty-first chro- mosome—trisomy 21.) Some babies are born with a milder

“mosaic” version of this condition that only affects some cells. In Angela’s case, every cell had this debilitating extra set of instructions.

Many children with trisomy 13 die before birth; half of those born alive die within the first week. Trisomy 13 af- fects almost everything, for the worse, in a human body— from the unfused plates in Angela’s skull that first alerted the midwife to her need for urgent medical attention, to the curled-in toes on her feet. It is so rare that even at the tertiary-care facility where she was cared for, most doctors had only heard of the condition, never seen it. When they did see it, their words were grim.

My brother-in-law still has the notebook where he tried to keep track of what the endless parade of specialists said in those first few frantic days. Early on he wrote down the phrase, “Incompatible with life.” Yet eleven years later, Angela was still alive.

She could not meaningfully see or hear; she could not walk; she could not feed or bathe herself. She knew nothing of language. We could only guess what she knew or under-

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stood of her mother, her father, her grandparents, brother and sisters. Early on she would respond to voice and touch; in recent years, even as she had grown physically, she had for long seasons receded further into an already distant and un- knowable world.

Which leads to this question: Is Angela flourishing?

The Flourishing of the Vulnerable If your definition of flourishing is the life held out for us by mass-affluent consumer culture, the obvious answer is that Angela is not flourishing—never has and never will. She cannot purchase her satisfactions; she cannot impress her peers; she cannot even “express herself ” in the ways we think are so important for our own fulfillment.

But perhaps the question actually has things backwards. When Jesus was asked, “Who is my neighbor?” he told a parable that turned that question on its head, ending with the question, “[Who] was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” (Luke 10:29, 36).

If we were to similarly turn the question of flourishing around, maybe we would be asking, “Who is helping Angela flourish?” We might be asking, “Who is flourishing because of Angela?” And even, “How can we become the kind of people among whom Angela flourishes and who flourish with Angela in our midst?”

Flourishing is not actually the property of an individual

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Flourishing 33

at all, no matter how able or disabled. It describes a com- munity. The real question of flourishing is for the com- munity that surrounds Angela—her parents and siblings, her extended family, the skilled practitioners of medicine and education and nutrition who care for her, and in a wider sense the society and nation of which she is a citizen. The real test of every human community is how it cares for the most vulnerable, those like Angela who cannot sustain even a simulation of independence and autonomy. The question is not whether Angela alone is flourishing or not— the question is whether her presence in our midst leads us to flourishing together.

Then the question goes one step further. Is Angela helping us flourish? Is she the occasion of our becoming more fully what we were created to be, more engaged with the world in its variety and com- plexity, more deeply em- bedded in relationship and mutual dependence, more truly free?

The surprising answer is that precisely because of Angela’s great vulnerabil- ities, because of the immense challenges that accompanied her into the world, a kind of flourishing is possible that would not otherwise exist. For ten years and counting,

The question is not whether Angela alone is flourishing or not—the question is whether

her presence in our midst leads us to flourishing together.

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untold people have had the opportunity to serve Angela and her family with authority and with vulnerability. The medical teams who have cared for her from the earliest days have had to bring all their authority as physicians and caregivers to bear on her many vulnerabilities. But because her condition is so complex and all-encompassing, mere medical authority is by no means sufficient—everyone in- volved with Angela must also take risks, be willing to learn and discover that they were mistaken, be willing to open themselves to the reality that even the most effective medical care will only provide partial healing.

The only kind of power that can sustain Angela’s life has to be up and to the right in our 2×2 diagram. Authority without vulnerability will not suffice. Neither will vulner- ability without authority. The two together are what is needed. And these two together, I have come to believe, are the very heart of what it is to be human and to live for God and others.

If there is someone in your own life who has contributed in dramatic ways to your own flourishing—a parent, a teacher, a mentor, a friend—they almost certainly acted with authority in your life and exposed themselves to vul- nerability as well.

If you have ever been part of a community that experi- enced some real measure of flourishing (a business, a church, a neighborhood, a sports team, a musical ensemble,

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Flourishing 35

a class)—some group of people who experienced a deep health and growth, among whom the vulnerable were wel- comed and the strong were vulnerable—I suspect you’ll find that among the characteristics of that community were high authority and high vulnerability. It’s the way we were meant to live.

True Authority Think of authority this way: the capacity for meaningful action. When you have authority, what you do, or do not do, makes a meaningful difference in the world around you. Teachers and nurses have authority in the classroom and the hospital; plumbers have authority with pipes and land- scapers have it with plants; pilots have authority with air- planes and librarians have it with books. When you have authority, you can ask, command, or even merely imply that something should be done, and it will be done. Not all authority, though, is about the ability to command or control. Sometimes it means knowing, or being known, in ways that set you free. An electrical engineer can read a circuit diagram that would stump the rest of us, under- stand how it works and see how to make it work better. If you have risen through the ranks of a business, you can walk into meetings and those present will already know your name, your character, your track record. You will be able to act in ways that you cannot act among strangers.

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Authority requires that our action be meaningful, not just willy-nilly activity. I can idly pluck the strings on a guitar, but because I have never learned the guitar, my plucking has no real musical meaning or value. No one may be stopping me from picking up the instrument and plucking the strings, but I still do not really have the au- thority to play the guitar.

What makes action meaningful? Above all, meaningful action participates in a story. It has a past and a future. Meaningful action does not just come from nowhere, and it does not just vanish in an instant—it takes place in the midst of a story that matters.

Authority, at least for human beings, is always limited. The president of the United States has a great deal of ex- ecutive authority within that nation, but none at all when visiting another country; and of course that capacity for meaningful action is conferred only for four years at a time, eight years at the most. Authority is limited not just in space and time, but to particular domains—the CFO of a firm has broad authority over the firm’s accounting con- trols, but not generally over its advertising decisions, and he or she has no authority over the accounting practices of another firm.

Perhaps most importantly of all, true authority is always given. The capacity for meaningful action is not something we possess on our own. It is something others confer on us.

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Flourishing 37

Without being given countless gifts—of language, of nurture, of love—by those who cared for us in our infancy and childhood, none of us would have the capacity to act meaningfully in the world. Without being continually af- firmed and upheld in our capacity to act, none of us would be able to exercise whatever authority we have—as teachers, parents, pastors, presidents or coaches. Sociologists distin- guish between “ascribed” authority and “achieved” au- thority—the kind that comes from a title or an inheritance versus the kind that comes from a history of successful action—but both come from outside ourselves. Authority, like flourishing, is a shared reality, not a private possession.

More Authority Than Any Other Creature Human beings have far more authority than any other creature. Other creatures act, certainly, and even act with lasting effects, sometimes reshaping their environment in significant ways (as a beaver does when building a dam). But they do so in limited ways and always in a particular ecological niche. Human beings, on the other hand, have found ways to flourish and act meaningfully in nearly every ecosystem on the planet, from the steppes of Siberia to tropical rainforests—even, in modern times, to the con- tinent of Antarctica. The first readers of the biblical command to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28) can only have had the faintest

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inkling of how truly human beings have been able to fulfill that call—and, as well, how terribly we have been able to abuse it.

Likewise, no other creature, at least in any way we can tell, acts meaningfully in the ways that human beings do— that is, acts as part of a grand and complex story about the world’s origins and destiny and their place in it. There are other creatures on the continent of Antarctica, but none of them are pondering the history and destiny of our planet and cosmos in the way that the scientists are doing as they conduct experiments there. (Indeed, the fact that human beings will voluntarily travel to a land of constant subzero temperatures and no daylight for three months a year, just to study the world, is an extraordinary testimony to our desire for meaning.)

No other species has such a clear sense of responsibility for other species—what Christian theology calls dominion, the capacity and responsibility to act on behalf of the flour- ishing of the rest of creation. The psalmist of Psalm 8, having considered the vastness of the cosmos and human beings’ smallness in the midst of it, then proclaims,

Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.

You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;

you have put all things under their feet,

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Flourishing 39

all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field,

the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

(Psalm 8:5-8)

This authority, uniquely ours as the image bearers of God, is a gift in every way. It does not come from our own autonomous selves—it is given by Another. And it is good. The sorrow of the whole human story is not that we have authority, it is the way we have misused and neglected au- thority. Our drive for authority—our sense of frustration when we are denied it or our sense of grief when we lose it—comes from its fundamental goodness.

So authority is meant to characterize every image bearer— even the most vulnerable. As infants, long before we could provide for ourselves in any way, we learned that we were capable of meaningful action. We emerged from the womb and instinctively sought to recognize a human face. We learned that others would give meaning to our cries.

Even my niece Angela has authority in this sense. Cer- tainly her authority is limited—but as we have already seen, that is actually true for every human being. Like everyone’s authority, Angela’s capacity for meaningful action comes from the community around her. When she cries out with frustration, hunger or discomfort, others around her in- terpret those sounds and respond. They incorporate her

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actions, as unconscious and limited as they are, into a story, a shared reality with a past and a future. Angela’s capacity for meaningful action is a gift, to be sure—one she cannot earn or sustain on her own. But that does not make it less real—that makes it true authority.

And Angela certainly has the other quality that makes us uniquely human, uniquely capable of bearing the divine image. The other thing that is essential for the exercise of true power is our vulnerability.

Two Kinds of Vulnerability The way I will use the word vulnerability in this book is a bit different from its usage in America today, where it is often limited to personal and emotional transparency. We live in an age of oversharing. Ordinary people and celeb- rities disclose all kinds of seemingly shameful or incrimi- nating details of their lives. Indeed, some people who have become celebrities simply through the sheer volume and extravagance of their self-disclosure are praised for their

“vulnerability.” But this is not really what I mean by the vulnerability

that leads to flourishing. Instead, think of it this way: ex- posure to meaningful risk. Sometimes emotional trans- parency is indeed a meaningful risk—but not always. For one thing, what was truly vulnerable and brave in one gen- eration can become a key to success in another. When you

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Flourishing 41

can acquire fame, wealth and significant cultural power by frequently appearing on screen physically naked, na- kedness can become less about the exposure that human beings fear and more about the “exposure” that every would-be celebrity needs—a currency of power, not of loss.

The vulnerability that leads to flourishing requires risk, which is the possibility of loss—the chance that when we act, we will lose something we value. Risk, like life, is always about probabilities, never about certainties. To risk is to open ourselves up to the chance that some- thing will go wrong, that something will be taken from us— without knowing for sure whether that loss will come to pass or not.

To be vulnerable is to be exposed to the possibility of loss—and not just loss of things or possessions, but loss of our own sense of self. Vulnerable at root means woundable— and any wound deeper than the most superficial scratch injures and limits not just our bodies but our very sense of self. Wounded, we are forced to become careful, tender, tentative in the way we move in the world, if we can still move on our own at all. To be vulnerable is to open oneself up to the possibility—though not the certainty—that the result of our action in the world will be a wound, something

The vulnerability that leads to flourishing requires risk.

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lost, potentially never to be gained again. Here again we need the word meaningful to do its work.

We are not talking about willy-nilly risk, putting ourselves in harm’s way for no good reason. Nor are we talking about risking things we don’t care whether we keep or lose, playing poker with chips that never have to be cashed in. True vulnerability involves risking something of real and even irreplaceable value. And like authority, true vulnera- bility involves a story—a history that shapes why we are choosing to risk and a future that makes the risk worth- while but also holds the potential of loss coming to pass. When we expose ourselves to meaningful risk, we become vulnerable in the sense I will use the word in this book.

So emotional transparency can be meaningful risk—or it can be calculated manipulation. An already powerful person can use what seems like emotional honesty, even tears, to win followers, avoid confrontation or sidestep accountability. If you are in a setting where emotional transparency will almost certainly win you a hearing or undermine others’ criticisms, to be emotionally transparent may indeed be the right thing to do. It may even be part of the proper exercise of your au- thority, a meaningful action that will contribute to your com- munity’s story. But it is not necessarily vulnerable.

Naked Creatures The very first word of Patrick Lencioni’s “business fable”

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Flourishing 43

Getting Naked is vulnerability. His fable tells the story of a small but unusually successful consulting firm that is swallowed up by a larger and more conventional company. The secret of the smaller firm’s success, it turns out, is vulnerability. Lencioni applies the vivid phrase “getting naked” to actions consultants can take in front of their clients that directly challenge three fears: fear of losing the business, fear of being embarrassed and fear of feeling inferior. It’s a compact catalogue of the sources of au- thority in the consulting world: profit, prestige and a reputation for being smarter than anyone else. Even though Lencioni agrees that consultants need to be prof- itable, be well regarded and bring unusual insight to the table, his fictional narrator Jack discovers that achieving those goals actually requires putting them at risk—

“getting naked” by exposing oneself to the possibility of losing them all. Jack learns to make honest but difficult observations about his clients’ businesses—and perhaps more difficult, to be willing to ask “dumb questions” that reveal his own limits or ignorance.

Nakedness is a funny thing. Of all the creatures in the world, only human beings can be naked. By adulthood, every other creature naturally possesses whatever fur, scales or hide are necessary to protect it from its envi- ronment. No other creature—even naked mole rats or Mr. Bigglesworth, the hairless feline sidekick of Mike Myers’s

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movie villain Dr. Evil—shows any sign, in its natural state, of feeling incomplete in the way that human beings consis- tently do. Only human beings live our whole lives able to return to a state that renders us uniquely vulnerable, not just to nature but to one another.

The unsettling truth is that just as human beings have more authority than any other creature, we also have more vulnerability than any other creature. We are not just born naked, we are born dependent, exposed in every conceivable way to the possibility of loss. For far longer than even our closest evolutionary relatives, after we are born we are de- pendent on others to nourish us, clean us and protect us. For many years we remain immature—unable to fully assert our authority competently in the world. (With the extension of adolescence in the modern world, that timespan keeps growing—Joseph and Mary presumably made their trip to Bethlehem when she was a teenager, but it’s not until age twenty-five that you can freely rent a car from most com- panies in the United States and not until age twenty-six that parents must remove children from their health insurance plan. The length of time you can live in your parents’ basement is continually being renegotiated upward as well!)

This is the essential human condition: greater authority and greater vulnerability than any other creature under heaven. Indeed, as the scholar Walter Brueggemann pointed out many years ago, the way the original man in

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Flourishing 45

Genesis 2 recognizes the original woman as his suitable partner, after seeing so many other creatures that would never suffice, is with this outburst of poetry: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23). Bones—hard, rigid, strong. Flesh—soft, pliable, vulnerable. We image bearers are bone and flesh—strength and weakness, authority and vulnerability, together.

The same psalmist who celebrated human dominion over the creatures also was capable of looking up into the heavens and grasping what they meant for the significance, or insignificance, of our small and transitory lives: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, / the moon and the stars that you have established; / what are human beings that you are mindful of them, / mortals that you care for them?” (Psalm 8:3-4). Only a human being can fully grasp the meaning of that canopy of stars, of the in- finitude of the Creator’s life before and after our small lives—so only a human being can be so completely ex- posed to meaningful risk.

I have come to believe that the image of God is not just evident in our authority over creation—it is also evident in our vulnerability in the midst of creation. The psalm speaks of authority and vulnerability in the same breath—because this is what it means to bear the image of God.

When the true image bearer came, the “image of the in- visible God” (Colossians 1:15), he came with unparalleled

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authority—more capacity for meaningful action than any other person who has lived. His actions all took their place within the story of Israel, the greatest of all shared histories, and they decisively changed the path of history and created a new and different shared future. And yet he, too, was born naked, as dependent and therefore vulnerable as any human being; and though the Western artistic tradition has placed loincloths over the uncomfortable truth of crucifixion, he died naked as well. He died exposed to the possibility of loss, not just of human life but of his very identity as the divine Son with whom the Father was well pleased. He was laid in the dust of death, the final and full expression of loss. And in all of this, he was not just Very Man but Very God.

What Love Longs to Be As I was writing this chapter the makers of the GoPro line of cameras had their latest viral video hit. A helicopter drops the skier Cody Townsend at the top of a seemingly impossible, nearly vertical crevasse between two rock walls at the top of a snow-covered mountain. Thanks to the head-mounted camera, we follow him off the edge, plunging down through the narrow canyon and out, safely, just barely, onto the gentler slopes below.

It is terrifying. (One person who shared it online said that as he watched, he “tightened every orifice in sym- pathy.”) It is also mesmerizing and exhilarating.

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Flourishing 47

What makes this ninety-second video so compelling and compulsively shareable? It’s the combination of authority and vulnerability—Townsend’s complete command of the sport of skiing plus his willingness to stretch that compe- tence to its absolute limit, to the point where there was the real possibility of loss. A video that showed authority without vulnerability might be impressive, but it would ul- timately be boring; a video that showed gratuitous risk- taking without commensurate authority might well be good for a few laughs in the genre of “stupid human tricks,” but it would not provoke astonishment, admiration and awe. What we truly admire in human beings is not authority alone or vulnerability alone—we seek both together.

When authority and vulnerability are combined, you find true flourishing. Not just the flourishing of the gifted or affluent, but the needy and limited as well. For my niece Angela to flourish, others will have to act meaningfully and place her own actions in a meaningful story. Indeed, if An- gela’s condition could be solved with a simple, technical medical procedure, perhaps all it would take to restore her health would be someone with medical authority. But her con- dition is too comprehensively challenging for that—it will

What we truly admire in human beings is not

authority alone or vulnerability alone—we

seek both together.

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never be “solved.” So Angela’s flourishing also depends on others being willing to put something meaningful at risk— the doctors charting an uncertain and difficult medical treatment, the caregivers who bear the difficulties and in- dignities of providing for a broken human body, and above all her parents choosing to love sacrificially, day after day, in the face of a most uncertain future.

In the end, this is what love longs to be: capable of mean- ingful action in the life of the beloved, so committed to the beloved that everything meaningful is at risk. If we want flourishing, this is what we will have to learn.

What we will have to unlearn, and be saved from, are our failures of authority, vulnerability or both—and that is the territory we now must explore.

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3

Suffering

When did the topic of justice become important to you?” Gideon Strauss posed that question to two dozen

people crammed into our living room one fall evening in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Some of us were there be- cause we knew Gideon’s remarkable personal story—

WITHDRAWING SUFFERING

EXPLOITING FLOURISHING

IV I

III II

AU TH OR IT Y

VULNERABILITY

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growing up Afrikaner in the last years of apartheid South Africa, becoming deeply involved in that coun- try’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Com- mission. Others were interested in his work with the Center for Public Justice, an innovative think tank in Washington, DC.

From my eleven-year-old daughter—perched on her mother’s lap for lack of chairs—to the gray-haired couple from a nearby suburb, all of us took turns answering Gideon’s question. A few minutes earlier you could have mistaken this gathering for a polite dinner party of rea- sonably diverse, prosperous professionals. But as we went around the circle, as so often happens, the answers went deeper and deeper, longer and longer.

Almost every answer to Gideon’s question involved a story of violence.

In this room of seemingly secure citizens of the United States, there was hardly anyone who had not encountered some kind of forceful violation of dignity that had shaken their world, bruised their innocence and kindled a passion for justice. That word justice, potentially so abstract and distant, was in fact acutely personal. But for me one answer came even closer to home.

Abby, an Asian American physician a few years younger than me, had been invited by mutual friends. When her turn came to answer Gideon’s question, she began, “When

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Suffering 51

I was a girl my family moved to a suburb of Boston, Mas- sachusetts, called Needham.”

Needham! My family, too, had moved to Needham when I was thirteen years old. I came of age there, and it will always be home for me, though my parents moved away years ago. Abby was from my hometown. I barely restrained a delighted outburst as she continued her story.

“There was a convenience store named The Little Peach in Needham.”

Yes, there was—down the street from the high school, right across from the Methodist church where I came to a living faith. My friends and I stopped at The Little Peach countless afternoons in my high school years. I enjoyed a pleasant wave of nostalgia (and a distinct memory of the taste of Orange Crush soda) as Abby went on.

“One day my dad needed to use the copy machine there, and he brought me along. I must have been seven or eight years old.” I quickly estimated the years—that would have been my sophomore or junior year in high school.

“My father was born in China, and his English was poor. He had trouble figuring out how to get the copy machine to work. But he couldn’t explain his problem to the owner of the store. The owner became furious with my father. He started mocking my dad’s Chinese accent. Then he grabbed my father’s papers, ripped them up and tossed them on the floor, and told us to get out of his store.”

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Abby paused. “I had always known my father as strong, kind and smart. I had never seen him humiliated like that in front of me. He was so ashamed—I was so ashamed. I didn’t know what racism was before that day and what it could do to someone—but after that, I knew.”

Vulnerability Without Authority I never knew.

All those years, full of the joyous energy of adolescence, my friends and I—all of us “white” without ever giving it one moment’s thought—had spilled out the doors of that little convenience store, sodas in hand. To us, racism was something that happened long before and far away, not under our noses, not at the copy machine I used a dozen times or more, not at the counter of The Little Peach.

For me, Needham was always about flourishing—the place where I came of age, discovered talents and ability, learned to pray and fell in love, was granted authority and discovered vulnerability. For Abby, it was the place where the violence of the world burst into the open, where her own father saw his authority ripped into pieces and thrown to the floor, his identity mocked and his weakness ex- ploited. The place where an eight-year-old girl started a journey that would lead her, one day, to a circle of people, bruised by violence, seeking justice.

That afternoon in The Little Peach, eight-year-old Abby

That afternoon in The Little Peach, eight-year-old Abby discovered

what it is like to live with vulnerability without authority.

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Suffering 53

discovered what it is like to live with vulnerability without authority. Authority, the capacity for meaningful action, has many sources. It comes from facility in a language—but immi- grants trade their native tongue for one they learn with difficulty, if at all. It comes from citizenship in a nation and all the rights that come with citizenship— but many immigrants arrive with only provisional status, at best, in the new land. It comes from membership in an extended family, the deep knowledge of people and place that is only acquired over generations—immigrants give all that up the moment they step on the ship or plane that takes them away from their home. Immigration is such a drastic step that few would take it except in cases where the vulnerability of staying home, whether economic, po- litical or cultural, is even greater than the vulnerability of trying to make a life and a living in a new home.

Abby’s parents had taken that step. And one of the most admirable things about the United States is how much au- thority they had in fact been able to acquire, in the form of economic and educational opportunities, by the time they arrived in Needham. But on that afternoon, Abby was rudely awakened to all the ways her parents lived with

Abby paused. “I had always known my father as strong, kind and smart. I had never seen him humiliated like that in front of me. He was so ashamed—I was so ashamed. I didn’t know what racism was before that day and what it could do to someone—but after that, I knew.”

Vulnerability Without Authority I never knew.

All those years, full of the joyous energy of adolescence, my friends and I—all of us “white” without ever giving it one moment’s thought—had spilled out the doors of that little convenience store, sodas in hand. To us, racism was something that happened long before and far away, not under our noses, not at the copy machine I used a dozen times or more, not at the counter of The Little Peach.

For me, Needham was always about flourishing—the place where I came of age, discovered talents and ability, learned to pray and fell in love, was granted authority and discovered vulnerability. For Abby, it was the place where the violence of the world burst into the open, where her own father saw his authority ripped into pieces and thrown to the floor, his identity mocked and his weakness ex- ploited. The place where an eight-year-old girl started a journey that would lead her, one day, to a circle of people, bruised by violence, seeking justice.

That afternoon in The Little Peach, eight-year-old Abby

That afternoon in The Little Peach, eight-year-old Abby discovered

what it is like to live with vulnerability without authority.

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vulnerabilities she had not seen—how authority could be snatched out of her father’s hand and ground spitefully underfoot. She had discovered the reality of life in the corner called Suffering.

Discovering Suffering None of us make it very far in life without spending time in this corner. Suffering can be the result of injustice and evil, but it touches even the most sheltered lives.

My friends and I in Needham knew little of the worst of the world, but suffering found us all the same. My friend Paul, head over heels in love with a girl named Janet, was summoned to the back of the library stacks junior year, where Janet told him she had tried to commit suicide the previous weekend. She was breaking up with him, she said, so he wouldn’t have to deal with her depression. I knew nothing of this until six years later, when it spilled out in a conversation one summer day back from college, and Paul wept as uncontrollably as if it had happened yesterday. That same summer, one of my best friend’s parents divorced, and I suddenly replayed my memories of their home in high school and realized that all those years his family had lived with toxic bitterness, as corrosive as any acid to the hope and confidence of their children.

I will never forget the first funeral I attended for someone my age, in the church across the street from The Little

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Peach. Matt had been practicing with the freshman football team when he noticed unusual bruises from the gentlest of collisions. Four months later, he died from leukemia, and my friends and I sat in the overflow crowd in the vestibule of the church as we watched his parents walk in to the service. In his grief, his father looked to me like the strongest man in the world carrying the heaviest weight in the world on his shoulders. Out of nowhere, suffering had found him, and us.

All this happened to me, and around me, in one of the most protected corners of the world, in one of the most affluent places on the planet. (Even decades later, the wounds are deep enough that I have changed names and identifying details in this chapter out of respect for friends’ privacy.) Wherever you come of age, suffering will come into your life earlier than you expected, in the form of risks you cannot manage and pain you cannot avoid, a room with no exit.

Ultimately, suffering—vulnerability without authority— is the last word of every human life, no matter how privi- leged or powerful. We will end our days, one way or an- other, radically vulnerable to others, only able to hope that they will honor our diminishment and departure with care and dignity. The authority we carefully store up for our- selves will evaporate slowly or quickly, over the span of decades—or over brunch.

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Eric and Kate Before I really talk with Eric and Kate for the first time, I can already make a rough guess of their status and occupa- tions. Eric is athletic, handsome, in a suit with an open collar; Kate is dressed with the effortless panache that takes a great deal of effort. It’s not hard to picture her on the paths along Boston’s Charles River with the other early-morning runners (a more apt name for her Lycra- clad tribe than “joggers”). He works in finance; she works in marketing—they both live on Beacon Hill, Boston’s neighborhood for young professionals with good jobs, good friends and good prospects.

They began dating, I find out, shortly before Eric started going to church. Eric is effusive in his newly discovered faith—Kate is more reserved. And yet you sense her opening up to the possibility that a loving God knows her and is seeking her, along with a growing wonder at the openness and generosity she has discovered among the fol- lowers of Jesus.

On Easter Sunday, a few months after we meet, Eric and Kate attend church and go out for brunch with friends. In the middle of the meal, Kate’s head droops, and then her whole body goes limp. An ambulance rushes Kate, unresponsive, to the emergency room of Massachusetts General Hospital. By the time I get Eric’s anguished email to a few Christian friends later that night, she is in the neurological intensive care unit.

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On Monday morning, and every morning for the next week, I visit to support Eric and to pray with him as Kate’s chest rises and falls with the mechanical rhythm of the life-support equipment. Her face is expressionless, pale, soft as with sleep. The hospital’s chief of neurology takes over Kate’s case and spends hours with the family and with attending physicians, interns and nurses at Kate’s side. They have arrived at a diagnosis: a rare and undetected genetic condition has made Kate vulnerable, all her life, to a massive stroke. It could have happened years ago; it could have waited years longer. On Easter Monday, there is still some hope Kate might recover, at least partially. Over the coming days that hope dwindles. She will never open her eyes again. Late one afternoon, with her family around her, the doctors remove the equipment from her body and she is gone.

I attend the funeral in one of Boston’s most affluent suburbs—not very different from my own home of Needham. The impeccably dressed mourners arrive in late-model SUVs, and I am reminded of how highly New England’s elite value their control—control over slippery roads, over ap- pearances, over emotions, over relationships. Kate’s room- mates give bewildered eulogies, grasping for profundity out of friendships born largely of carefree partying and the small trials of college life. The faith that she had just begun to ex- plore hovers over a service that is hollow with grief.

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At the graveside I am surprised to see the hospital’s chief of neurology. He is perhaps sixty years old—he has cared for countless patients, has risen to the very top of his pro- fession at one of the most prestigious medical centers in the world, and yet here he is at this young woman’s grave, his face streaked with tears. He is shorter than I remem- bered from the hospital. He reaches up to embrace Eric and says, “I’m so sorry we couldn’t save her.”

The Paths to Suffering Of the four quadrants, Suffering is the one we least want to visit. And yet it is the only one I can be absolutely sure

every reader of this book has experienced. You may or may not feel you have ever tasted the flourishing that comes from simultaneously experiencing great authority and great vulnerability; you may or may not have ever

lingered in the withdrawal of having neither authority nor vulnerability; perhaps you have never had the opportunity to taste the tantalizing promise of authority without vul- nerability. But without a doubt you have experienced vul- nerability without authority, risk without options.

We suffer in the hospital waiting room, knowing that the

Of the four quadrants, Suffering is the one we least want to visit. And yet it is the only one I can be absolutely

sure every reader of this book has experienced.

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child or parent or friend who just was taken into surgery has taken everything we cherish in life with them—but also knowing that we can do nothing, beyond faithful waiting and prayer, to affect the outcome.

We suffer in romance, being on the receiving end of one of the worst and most cowardly inventions of the modern age, the breakup by text message. (Now that is vulnerability without authority!)

We even suffer in ambition, having sent off an appli- cation for a job or a place at university, all the documen- tation we could muster of our authority—but then having to wait weeks or months for a decision.

Indeed, sometimes suffering is simply the painful payoff of risking love in a broken world. This is the burden of Eric at Kate’s grave, but it is also the burden of the chief of neu- rology at Mass General Hospital, with all his professional success and skill; it’s the burden of the widower closing his wife’s casket after fifty years of marriage; on a smaller but still very real scale, it is the burden of my friend grieving his breakup with Janet six years later.

But there is another path to suffering, one that has nothing to do with the risks that come with true flour- ishing. The other path is injustice—the spiritual and physical violence done by those who seek authority without vulnerability. Abby’s father had done nothing to earn the violent contempt of the proprietor of The Little Peach, but

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that man’s distorted use of his petty power did damage all the same—far more damage, surely, than any satisfaction he gained from his display of superiority. One bleak day I sat with my friend Jeremy the day after his divorce was fi- nalized. His ex-wife had opted out of marriage with its de- mands for growth and transparency. It is surpassingly un- likely that she will end up happier in the long run, but the damage has been done in their lives and the life of the young daughter she left behind.

The most painful path to the quadrant called Suffering is the human choice, at the very origins of the species, to pursue Exploiting—to seek authority without vulnerability, godlike power without God-like character. We are vul- nerable without authority because our first parents sought authority without vulnerability—and because their fallen children seek it still.

Generations of Suffering Any experience of vulnerability without authority is painful, but the deepest and most intractable examples of suffering are communal and multigenerational. They involve whole peoples who find themselves stuck in suffering, whole communities with a shared painful history and a dismal expected future.

This is not just a matter of financial deprivation. Even if you are personally materially poor, if your community—

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your family of origin, your ethnic group, your nation—has some measure of authority and can resist the worst of human vulnerabilities, you are at a much lower risk of true poverty. You are connected with others who can restore some measure of flourishing in your life.

Conversely, even if you are personally materially well-off, if your community is mired in suffering—if your parents, people and nation have known little for generations but enforced helplessness due to tragedy and injustice— then you are not free from the oppressive reality of suf- fering. And this kind of suf- fering is far deeper, and far less tractable, than the suffering all of us experience as individuals—because simply escaping it as an individual does nothing to change the fundamental systems of vulnerability without authority.

Sandra grew up in Ventura County in southern Cali- fornia, and she carries herself with the confidence that seems to be the birthright of children of those safe, sunny, endless suburbs, the confidence that carried her to uni- versity and into a professional career. Meeting her for the first time, I make a host of assumptions—almost all of which turn out to be wrong.

I assume that like so many young Americans, she can

The deepest and most intractable examples of suffering are communal and multigenerational.

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largely chart her own course in life, choosing her college major and career—when in fact, every one of these deci- sions has been discussed and debated and decided by her whole extended family.

I assume she grew up knowing she would go to college. In fact, no one in Sandra’s family had ever gone to college. For most of her childhood it was a distant and hazy dream.

I assume her parents worked hard to pay for her edu- cation—but in fact, Sandra’s parents worked hard her whole life at several jobs each, not to save money but to pay for basic daily expenses.

I assume she grew up in a loving, stable home, which is half true. Her family was generous and warm, but stability was far beyond their grasp—because although Sandra was born in the United States, her parents were not. They have spent her whole life in the United States without legal status. Early in her teens, translating from the Spanish that is their only fully comfortable language to the English that she speaks like the American native she is, she fully grasped the reality: any hour, any day—at a routine traffic stop or when a white Immigration & Customs Enforcement ve- hicle would pull up at the places where they held down their informal, under-the-table jobs—they could in an in- stant be taken away from her, back to the land they left before she was born.

Her family is part of the vast and complicated story of

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undocumented immigration to the United States—a story of brave and hard-working people leaving homes of little opportunity and perilous violence to take back- and spirit- breaking work in American factories and fields. During Sandra’s years in junior high school, a movement began to force the issue of these long-term, tax-paying residents and workers. Sandra and her friends skipped school to march in the peaceful procession through downtown Los Angeles. For them, American-born citizens, the worst that could happen would be a night in jail. For many of the im- migrant workers in the march—their uncles, aunts, parents and neighbors—speaking up for basic recognition and fair treatment could have been the last act of their lives in America.

As Sandra tells this story, you can still glimpse the scared and perplexed thirteen-year-old she once was. She de- scribes her yearning for her eighteenth birthday, the day she could apply for family-based green cards for her own parents. She cannot speak without emotion about the day those green cards arrived two years later. Sandra no longer lives with that radical vulnerability, knowing her parents could disappear to a country she has never visited. Or maybe, since all of us live with the vulnerabilities of our teenage years long after those years are gone, she lives with that vulnerability every day.

Every one of us is a neighbor to communities in suf-

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fering. This can literally be true—the pleasant town where I live borders a postindustrial city with one of the highest murder rates in my state. Nearly every reader of this book will live within an hour’s drive of a place similarly en- trenched in vulnerability without authority—and we all live a short plane flight away from even more extreme ex- amples. Within our businesses and our workplaces, our hospitals and our colleges, in even the healthiest places, there are pockets of persistent and seemingly intractable poverty, material and spiritual.

You might object. Not all workplaces, you might say. What about those darlings of the media, the social media startups of the last decade where every employee is a mil- lionaire, the companies with stratospheric valuations, onsite masseurs and free vegan cuisine in the cafeteria, the firms full of authority and healthy risk-taking?

But in fact these firms also are neighbors to and inter- twined with an economic ecosystem that leaves whole communities in suffering. In October 2014 Wired mag- azine reported on the dirty work every social media company must somehow handle: moderating the deluge of exploitative, degrading content posted in unimaginable quantities around the world and around the clock by boors (and increasingly by bots). This is not simply material that might offend those of gentle or puritanical sensibilities, but truly unthinkable representations of real and fictional vio-

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lence, abuse of women and men, children and animals, and countless other horrors conjured up by the human mind.

Someone has to prevent the average user from encoun- tering these horrors or else all of our news feeds would be regularly infiltrated by retch-inducing images and text. But this means that a human being has to review every degrading image. And that someone is usually a resident of a distant country, employed by an outsourcing firm—at the time of Wired’s article, largely in the Philippines, thanks to its cheap labor supply and reasonably close ties to Western culture. Philippine young adults do this work because there is no better work to do, and they do it until they are utterly undone by it.

This is the reality of the globalized Internet world, in which the depredations of a few, the pornographers and exploiters who seek power without vulnerability (Ex- ploiting), are foisted on those with no alternative (Suf- fering) in order to allow the privileged to live in ignorant comfort (Withdrawing). It’s a world in which poverty of spirit is bought at near-poverty wages. The flourishing of a few powerful companies—and we who use their services— is a mirage made possible only if you avert your eyes from the vulnerability they outsource to others.

Building Authority The existence and persistence of the quadrant called Suf- fering is the real test of power—a test that all of us with

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power have failed. The consequences of our failure to fully bear the divine image fall most heavily on those who live in this quadrant with no prospect of escape—the in- dividuals and communities who exist in a state of con- tinual vulnerability.

Making things worse, some well-meaning attempts to intervene in situations of suffering can actually increase vulnerability and undermine authority. As Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros point out in their compelling book The Locust Effect, half a century’s worth of financial in- vestment in the materially poor world has had surpris- ingly little effect. Introducing material resources alone into a system of exploitation—treating the symptoms of Suffering without addressing the disease of Exploiting and Withdrawing—actually can increase the vulnera- bility of the poor. Even at the smallest scale, a family given a few farm animals by a well-intentioned devel- opment program can begin to attract the hungry gaze of people willing to do them violence. At the largest scale, global development funds in the hundreds of millions of dollars become powerful incentives to corruption at the highest levels of government.

Too often, our efforts to intervene in suffering end up only reinforcing poverty. It is almost never enough to reduce vulnerability—even though that is what most of us seek to do in our own lives. We must also restore proper

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authority to individual persons and to whole communities. There is nothing wrong with reducing meaningless risk in people’s lives—their vulnerability to hunger or disease. But the best interventions in situations of persistent poverty increase authority as well.

How do we move people stuck in the quadrant called Suffering toward the authority for which they were made? The only truly sustainable response is to help build lasting authority. In 2007 I had the opportunity to visit a district in India where bonded labor—modern-day child slavery— had been endemic. But with the help of the Christian hu- manitarian organization World Vision, these small, mate- rially poor communities had begun to see extraordinary change. A few of World Vision’s interventions in that situ- ation were focused on pressing, immediate relief of vulner- ability (programs to provide basic food, clean water and shelter), but most were aimed at increasing meaningful authority: savings programs for women (financial savings, especially in communities of great poverty, are an im- portant source of capacity for meaningful action), training and support for local law enforcement (encouraging the kind of legitimate authority that could restrain exploitative moneylenders), and, most memorably for me, the “chil- dren’s panchayat,” a village council just for children, where they could practice the responsibility for the community that would be theirs when they came of age.

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What I found in that community is what can be found in so many communities marked by suffering: when the gospel begins to transform individuals and communities, it does not simply relieve the most immediate needs. Indeed, many of those needs may remain unmet in any material sense. And yet the gospel restores hope and dignity, mean- ingful action and meaningful risk. At a distance, you might suppose that systemic injustice and multigenerational vul- nerability would leave nothing but misery in their wake. But draw closer to even the greatest suffering and you find people of extraordinary resilience and spiritual power. One of them, for me, is named Isabel.

A Path Appears Every session of the weekend conference on faith and work, held at an energetic and growing church in Santa Barbara, California, was to begin with an interview between Kyle, the pastor hosting the event, and a member of the congre- gation talking about their work. The very first story we heard is what I will always remember about that weekend.

Isabel, poised and impeccably dressed, joined Kyle on the stage. She gave a brief summary of her story in profi- cient, Spanish-inflected English—born in the city of Viña del Mar in Chile, trained and credentialed there as a family counselor. A few years before she had immigrated to the United States with her American husband, awaiting the

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birth of their son. They settled in Santa Barbara to be near family members. But Isabel discovered that her profes- sional credentials from Chile were not recognized in the United States, and her husband struggled to find steady work. Still, Isabel said gratefully, she had eventually been able to find full-time work.

“And what is that work?” prompted Kyle. “I clean houses,” Isabel said. The Santa Barbara hills are

full of spacious homes, and nearly every one employs a Hispanic woman as a cleaner. That was the work that Isabel had found—and could speak about in theological terms.

“How do you see your work reflecting God’s work?” Kyle asked.

“If you look in the book of Genesis, in the beginning, the world is in darkness,” Isabel said. “There is no order. God is a God of order—he orders every single life, changes every life from darkness to light in Jesus. And that is my moti- vation as I work. Everything I do is from God, not from man. Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, and we are to do the same: be a servant with love. If I am cleaning a toilet—well, that is something that needs to be done to order the world and to wash the feet of others. There is no sadness about that; it’s a joy. The greatest example of ser- vanthood in my life is the Holy Spirit, because he guides me. I listen to his voice, and I say, ‘Yes, sir.’”

Just to make sure you understand the significance of this

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near-verbatim transcript from her interview: in a few sen- tences, Isabel had just given us a trinitarian vision of the work of house cleaning.

“Do you encounter bro- kenness in the work you do?” Kyle asked.

“Of course,” Isabel re- plied. “It’s sad to see people who have everything beau-

tiful, everything perfect. They contract with you so their world can continue perfect and clean. But you realize their life is empty. So I have to be light for them. Every single home I go to, I pray for that family, that they can find him. If he will use me, amen. If not, amen—he will send somebody else.”

When Isabel is not working or caring for her own family, she is volunteering with a center called Immigrant Hope that serves other women from Latin America, most of whom also clean houses. Isabel teaches courses that help them prepare for drivers license exams and the tests re- quired for citizenship in the United States. “The Lord Jesus is teaching me that we are all immigrants,” she told me,

“and our real home is with him. So we should be showing others his love and mercy, and how much he loves those whose lives are broken. By addressing very practical needs, we show them the one who makes everything new.”

In a few sentences, Isabel had just given us a trinitarian vision of the work of house cleaning.

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Suffering 71

I called Isabel to ask her permission to quote from that interview in this book. She asked for time to pray about it, then asked if we could speak by phone a few days later. It turned out that Isabel had not primarily been praying about whether she should give permission for her story to be in this book—God had apparently settled that question quickly, and it was fine. Instead, she had been praying for me, by name, and God had given her specific words to speak to me, specific instructions for my own prayer life and a set of verses from the New Testament letter 1 Peter to guide me. Printed on a piece of paper, they sit on my desk as I write.

Isabel has authority, something you discover the moment you meet her. She speaks and acts meaningfully in every- thing she does. Her authority does not come primarily from her circumstances—those reflect the vulnerability of the countless immigrants who, their deeper gifts so often unrecognized and unused, serve in jobs that few Amer- icans will take at all, let alone take gladly. There is much in Isabel’s life and story, both spoken and left unsaid between the lines of her testimony, that speaks of the vulnerability without authority that comes to so many in a broken world.

But her story has been transformed by another story— her life’s action has been made meaningful by being caught up in the story of the gospel. She has moved from quadrant II to quadrant I, from Suffering to Flourishing—and she is bringing others with her.

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7 2 St rong a n d We a k

This can be true for us as well. No one escapes this quadrant of human experience. As we will see in the final chapters of this book, we actually will be called to seek out suffering, to go to its depths, if we truly want to bring flour- ishing to the world. But when we journey to the heart of suffering, whether by circumstance or by choice, we are only going where Another has gone before us. When we find our place in that story and in that journey, our vulner- ability, too, becomes the path to flourishing.

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4

Withdrawing

As a father, I discovered what exactly the Gospel of Luke had meant by “swaddling clothes.” My newborn son loved nothing so much as to be tightly wrapped in a blanket, arms and legs neatly tucked into a package, and held. Un- swaddled, he would fuss and squirm; properly swaddled,

WITHDRAWING SUFFERING

EXPLOITING FLOURISHING

IV I

III II

AU TH OR IT Y

VULNERABILITY

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he became both calm and alert, able to take in the world around him without anxiety. The swaddling clothes bound him but also comforted him. It is worth pondering that the Savior of the world, too, was swaddled in his own infancy— protected from both action and risk.

Within a few weeks, of course, my son outgrew his swad- dling blankets and his desire for them. (And not all babies take to swaddling, as his sister made fiercely clear when she came along a few years later.) But for the first years of his life, it was my deepest desire as a parent to protect him from too much of either authority or vulnerability. We moved tantalizing but fragile objects out of his reach; we swooped in to pick him up when he wandered too far on the sidewalk or the playground; we scanned every room for sources of risk. A healthy childhood is one where both ca- pacity for action and exposure to meaningful risk are meted out in measured doses, gradually increasing as the child matures.

So if Suffering is the quadrant none of us have been able to avoid, the quadrant of Withdrawing is where we all began—and at the beginning it was called Safety.

No authority and no vulnerability—or at least no awareness of either one. Unborn, we had no capacity for meaningful action, and we were blissfully unconscious of meaningful risk. We had not yet discovered the world with its history, future, possibilities and dangers. Just as well,

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Withdrawing 75

because we were unformed and unready for them. If we had been too exposed to either authority or vulnerability at that most tender stage of human life, we would not be alive today.

Such safety is a fleeting thing. Far too many childhoods are compromised by the early introduction of too much vulnerability and too much authority. This very day there are children picking through smoldering heaps of garbage in the ports of Africa and Asia where our discarded elec- tronics go for recycling, making tiny sums of money to support their families while exposing their lungs to toxic fumes and their hands and feet to jagged metal and glass. Others are being handed lethal weapons and trained in killing before they have developed the moral compunc- tions of adulthood; still others are exposed to the degraded passions of desperate men. Few parents would wish this kind of crash course in the cruelty of the world on their children, but many parents themselves live deep in the quadrant called Suffering. There is no vulnerability deeper, no lack of authority more crushing, than the inability to protect your own child from harm. Millions of parents on this planet know that reality all too well.

One night as I tucked my daughter into her bed, safe beneath her down comforter and properly lavished with kisses and hugs, and prayed for her safety, I unexpectedly sensed the unmistakable voice of Another addressing me

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in return. “I hear your prayers,” this voice seemed to say kindly but sternly. “But I also hear the prayers every night of parents who can offer their children no protection.” It was not a rebuke; it was an invitation to understand exactly how much anguish is brought before “the Father from whom all fatherhood takes its name.” And perhaps it was a reminder that there is another way to fail your children: too much swaddling.

The Only Thing Money Can Buy For almost all of human history, parents’ nightly prayers for their children’s protection were offered in the face of urgent and unavoidable vulnerability. Only in these last decades, in privileged corners of the world, has any child been tucked into bed with such utter security as my own children have known. Perhaps parents have always been tempted to swaddle their children for too long, protecting them from as much of the world as they can—but only recently have we been able to actually succeed.

We have a saying in our family: The only thing money can buy is bubble wrap. Affluence cannot ultimately remove the vulnerability that is our human condition and

our true human calling, but it can swaddle you in so many layers of insu- lation that you will never

The only thing money can buy is bubble wrap.

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Withdrawing 77

be able to fully feel it—or to freely move. It can keep you swaddled far beyond your tender years, well into an adulthood of risk-averse entitlement.

If you settle down in this corner, even your ambitions will become carefully circumscribed, following well- marked paths to good compensation and social respecta- bility. The slippery pole of ascent to an Ivy League edu- cation may be fiercely contested—a friend who works in college admissions jokes that “helicopter parents” have now been replaced by “bulldozer parents,” who clear every obstacle from their children’s paths, and “drone parents,” who hover invisibly overhead and then swoop in with over- whelming force when their progeny is endangered. But the competition is so fierce precisely because the prize is so predictable: a golden ticket to career paths that are care- fully staked out in advance to maximize reward and min- imize risk. If you look at life this way, there is nowhere so safe as Harvard Yard. If you aim for real flourishing, there is nowhere more dangerous.

The greatest challenge of success is the freedom it gives you to opt out of real risk and real authority. Entrepreneurs who take on substantial authority in the face of real risk, and have the fortune to be rewarded for that venture into the quadrant called Flourishing, can cash out of the game, turning the fruits of their success into so much stored wealth that they can retreat from risk—and authority—

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altogether. The more that you know, or sense, that your success was as much a product of luck and timing as of skill and character, the less likely you will be to ever dare to risk that much again.

The Eternal Cruise We have to begin in Safety in order to flourish, but to cling to it in adulthood is folly. When I think about this quadrant, and the strange allure it holds for us later in life, I think about one of the leisure fantasies of the modern world: taking a cruise. Not a crossing, mind you, the epic journey

from the Old World to the New across the Atlantic that some of my ancestors undertook, a one-way trip with a destination and something different and

difficult waiting at the other end. And not even the kind of cruises, like those up into the glacier bays of Alaska or the f jords of Norway, that allow you to come close to natural wonders impossible to apprehend any other way—the kind that leave you feeling awed, humbled, properly small and full of praise. I’m thinking of the cruises without destina- tions that circle around the tourist-friendly ports of tropical islands, cruises where the real desire and delight is to be on the ship itself.

We have to begin in Safety in order to flourish, but to cling

to it in adulthood is folly.

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Withdrawing 79

As you can guess, I am firmly in the non-cruising part of humanity—the part that chortles at David Foster Wal- lace’s epic essay about such a cruise, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” and hopes never to do it in the first place. But I can appreciate why my cruising ac- quaintances think that a cruise, with its languid days and nights, its bountiful buffets, its complete disengagement from terrestrial life, is a marvelous vacation. After all, a cruise is about as pure a return to the quadrant III of childhood as you could ask for. Food is abundant, de- mands on your time are minimal, the sun is bright. You have absolutely no authority—even if the captain invites you to visit the bridge, you will be forcibly restrained if you attempt to take command of the ship—and, for all practical purposes, no vulnerability either. (We will set aside the handful of cruises from hell where the engines give out, the ship starts turning in slow wide gyres in the Gulf of Mexico and the passengers spell out “HELP” with their bodies on the Lido deck—as well as the surprisingly frequent cruises where some virus colonizes the kitchen and half the crew and passengers become ill, or those where the steady rolling of the ship leaves you bedridden for days. As you can see, I’m just not that much of a fan of cruises.)

This is all fine—as vacation. It is delicious for a few days or perhaps even a week.

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But what if your whole life were a cruise? Year after year of others deciding where you will go, what’s for dinner, an- ticipating your needs and protecting you from any real harm? That would be less than human. Indeed, it would be something quite like hell. The magnificent Pixar film WALL-E depicts exactly such a cruise gone wrong, set in a not-so-distant future in which all of humanity has fled the mess their own greed created. The first passengers are told it will be a brief excursion, but instead it goes on for cen- turies with no hope of return, and each generation be- comes less capable and more dependent on the robots who take over their image-bearing calling.

Like all Pixar films, WALL-E is about what it is to be fully human. With his insatiable curiosity, his delight in both order and abundance, and his willingness to fall in love with a lovely and lethal robot far more advanced than himself, the little trash-collecting robot is the truly flour- ishing character in the midst of Earth’s garbage and the spaceliner Axiom’s decadence.

But for all of WALL-E’s charm, he turns out to be a supporting character. Once we meet the ship’s captain, who has been reduced to pudgy inactivity deep in the corner of Safety and Withdrawing, the real conflict un- folds. The captain represents all of us human beings in all of our infantilized incapacity. His awakening to the delights of an almost-forgotten Earth and the call of

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Withdrawing 81

stewardship—and his decision to wrest command of the ship from autopilot—is the laugh-and-shout-out-loud climax of the movie (hilariously accompanied by the strains of Also sprach Zarathustra). We cheer for the captain because he is claiming his authority and em- bracing meaningful risk—exiting Withdrawing in hopes of a return to Flourishing.

We are not meant to be eternal cruise-ship passengers. We are meant for more than leisure. This is true for our own sakes, but it is also true because, like the diminished human beings aboard the Axiom, we are still responsible for a world gone wrong. The deepest reason for the call out of With- drawing is not our own health, though this quadrant is none too healthy or satis- fying a place to live. It is far more about the neighbors and the created order we have neglected, who have no option to board a cruise away from vulnerability, who live, in some cases quite literally, among the trash our af- fluence has discarded. To disengage from the profound needs of those caught in suffering is to reject the call to bear the image of God. We all began in the protection of par- adise, but attempting to make that safety our final state will in fact consign us to hell.

We are not meant to be eternal cruise-ship passengers.

We are meant for more than leisure.

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Simulated Authority There is, however, a subtler version of withdrawing than the pure vacancy of a cruise. Most of us would in fact find ourselves bored to tears after a few weeks of perpetual va- cation—our thirst for flourishing is too strong to com- pletely abandon the call to authority and vulnerability. But the technological culture has another, stronger trick up its sleeve—not total disengagement, but powerful and re- warding simulations of engagement. The real temptation for most of us is not complete apathy but activities that simulate meaningful action and meaningful risk without actually asking much of us or transforming much in us.

So if you really want to see what withdrawing looks like in affluent, technological America, you don’t have to visit a port of call. You just have to turn on the PlayStation in

your living room. Just like cruises and

other forms of vacation, games have an impor tant place in a healthy life. For children, games are a primary way of prac-

ticing the authority and vulnerability that will be their calling in adult life. For adults, games’ simplicity and rule- based rewards are a welcome break from the open-ended, complicated demands of maturity.

If you really want to see what withdrawing looks like in affluent,

technological America, you just have to turn on the PlayStation

in your living room.

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Withdrawing 83

But just as a cruise starts to degrade from heaven to hell if it becomes your daily life, games, especially technologi- cally enhanced ones, are a dangerous place to live. Very few of us can afford a perpetual cruise. But we can afford video games—they are priced at the sweet spot of consumer dis- cretionary demand. We would have to rearrange our whole lives to spend our remaining years on cruises. Video games, however, gladly take up residence at the center of our homes. Most of us would start to get fidgety after a few days onboard a ship. Video games are a far more satisfying version of withdrawing—because while you are engrossed in them, you feel totally convinced that you are flourishing.

Games confer authority. But video games (and most screen-based forms of recreation) confer authority more quickly and more completely than any real-world game does. To become the quarterback for the pickup game in my neighbor’s backyard would require me to demonstrate some level of mastery of the game of football to other human beings. Even being a backyard quarterback is probably beyond the reach of my puny arms, but to become a quarterback in the NFL requires nearly superhuman abilities and discipline.

To become an “NFL quarterback” in the video game Madden Football, however, requires little more than choosing an avatar and pressing a button. Suddenly you are vested with all of the authority, and much of the ability, of

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your chosen celebrity player. Of course there is a learning curve in Madden Football—if there were not, it would quickly become repetitive and boring. Your onscreen self will drop passes, get sacked and make poor decisions. But with a little dedication, almost anyone can become a ca- pable Madden Football quarterback. The learning curve is far shallower in the video game than in the real game—if it were not, almost no one would find it rewarding to play.

The game also gives you an experience of vulnerability— exposure to meaningful risk—but even more than the ersatz authority you gain with technology’s help, this vul- nerability is well and truly a mirage. Play enough Madden Football and you really will acquire certain kinds of skills, thin though they may be—that is, you will gain some real authority in understanding and playing the game of football. But no matter how much you play, you will never get a concussion, you will never be cut from the team, and you will lose nothing of value in the “real world” outside the game (except, of course, whatever real capacities you could have developed in the time you spent becoming an expert at Madden Football). The authority may be largely simu- lated, but the vulnerability is entirely an illusion.

This is the power of video games—the reason they are far more absorbing than TV, with its one-way, passive con- sumption, and a bigger industry than movies after just a few decades in existence ($93 billion worldwide in 2013

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Withdrawing 85

compared to the movie industry’s $88 billion). They give us accessible simulations of flourishing life, the life which we all crave—the life of action and risk, the life of adventure and conquest, even (in some games) the life of romance and the satisfactions of community.

But they are only simulations. There is a marked asym- metry between the skill you acquire in the world of space, time and flesh-and-blood bodies, and the skill you acquire in the virtual world of screens and controllers. Skill from the real world translates well, generally, into the virtual world. If you are skilled at the actual embodied game of (American) football, you will likely be good at the video game Madden Football. If you are an accomplished race- car driver, you can probably quickly master Forza Motor- sport 5. But the skills do not transfer, or transfer only min- imally, in the other direction. Being good at Madden Football will have very little effect in your neighbor’s backyard, let alone on the turf at Soldier Field.

Ironically, the reason video games develop so little real skill is that they are too rewarding. Real authority is a te- dious business. Developing the depth of competence re- quired to play an in- strument, pilot an aircraft or transplant a human organ requires thousands of hours of

Ironically, the reason video games develop so little real skill

is that they are too rewarding.

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unstimulating, unstinting practice that gives us little im- mediate sense of authority.

And yet this kind of patient development, which is itself a form of vulnerability, is the only path to real au- thority. In video games, every warrior has qualified for the Special Forces; every basketball player has a 30-inch vertical leap. Not to mention that wielding lethal violence leaves no emotional scars, just a pleasant sense of victory— and the bodies on the screen stay perpetually young and vital. The more you give yourself over to simulations, the more true authority and true vulnerability recede from your life. Video games give us a shortcut to the godlike figures we wish ourselves to be but are too inconstant to actually become.

Friction-Free Activism If this simulated flourishing were restricted to the world of leisure—cruises and games—at least we would know that it was not the real world. But the reward structure of video games—the simulated authority and vulnerability of virtual reality—is increasingly colonizing our interactions with the most serious matters of the real world as well. Like technologically mediated entertainment, the technology of social media is becoming more “gamified” by the year as developers learn how to tap into the deep human hunger for simulations of authority and vulnerability. In social

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Withdrawing 87

media, you can engage in nearly friction-free experiences of activism, expressing enthusiasm, solidarity or outrage (all powerful sensations of authority) for your chosen cause with the click of a few buttons.

Like all media (including books like this one!), social media are largely what we make of them—escapist or trans- forming depending on what we expect from them and how we use them. In far-flung places in the world, an emerging generation has used media like Twitter to coordinate im- pressive examples of meaningful action combined with extraordinary risk—the 2014 protests in Hong Kong and the outcry in the United States about police practices and race being recent examples as I write this book.

But these two uses of social media have two key features in common. First, they were largely used by people living deep in Suffering—exposed to meaningful risk without being granted meaningful capacity for action by their so- cieties. Second, they led to embodied, in-the-flesh experi- ences of action in community. When media are tools that help those who have lacked the capacity for action take action, and bring them together to bear risk together rather than be paralyzed in Suffering, they can lead to real change.

But when the residents of the comfortable affluence of Withdrawing use media to simulate engagement, to give ourselves a sense of making a personal investment when in fact our activity risks nothing and forms nothing new in

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8 8 St rong a n d We a k

our characters, then “virtual activism” is in fact a way of doubling down on withdrawing, holding on to one’s invul- nerability and incapacity while creating a sensation of in- volvement. Only when technology serves a genuine, em- bodied, risky move toward flourishing is it something other than an opiate for the mass elite—the drug that leaves us mired in our apathy and our neighbors in their need.

The Safety Generation Before the current era, almost no one could stay in With- drawing beyond the early years of childhood. The world was too harsh and human cultures too demanding of real maturity. Society could not afford to tolerate those who shirked the authority and vulnerability that were necessary to eke out flourishing from the world. Consider the eight- year-old child sent to the barn to milk a cow. She has al- ready been granted real flourishing—the authority of do- minion over a creature, responsible for its flourishing and benefiting from its abundance, along with the vulnerability of being a small human being next to a massive bovine. It is a kind of flourishing that a child milking a cow in Mine- craft (accomplished, I’m told, by right clicking while

“holding” a bucket) will never know. But today we have to constantly choose to move up and

to the right. If there is one temptation that seems to me endemic to the emerging generation of young adults, it is

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to choose Withdrawing—to retreat from authority and vul- nerability alike. At a worship service one evening in the spring of 2014, I presented these four quadrants—espe- cially the three where all of us spend far too much of our lives—to several hundred college students. We invited stu- dents to come forward for prayer, to be liberated for the abundant and flourishing life we were made for. We were astonished and moved as more than one hundred students came forward for personal prayer. It was one of the mani- festations of the power and presence of God that you cannot orchestrate but can only receive, and we stayed long into the night praying alongside these friends.

The next day, the college chaplain and the team of coun- selors who had offered prayer gathered to debrief the pre- vious night’s event. I was curious about which quadrant most of the prayer requests had come from. Were students wrestling with experiences of persistent vulnerability without authority? Or the temptation to grasp authority without vulnerability? Or the retreat from both? Over- whelmingly, every prayer leader reported, it was With- drawing. The domain of inaction, of fear of exposure, of safety. One young man approached me for prayer and con- fided that in each of his four closest friendships, he was experiencing overwhelming temptation to minimize risk, avoid real engagement and abandon them.

Amidst safety the world has never before known, the

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9 0 St rong a n d We a k

greatest spiritual struggle many of us face is to be willing to take off our bubble wrap.

The Path from Withdrawing The good news about escaping the Withdrawing quadrant is that pretty much any move, toward either authority or vulnerability, is a step in the right direction. Perhaps the two best beginning moves, for those of us swaddled in af- fluence and intoxicated by our technology, are into the natural world—the world of stars, snow and rain, trees and deserts—and into the relational world—the world of real bodies with heartbeats, hands and faces.

Turn off your devices and go for a walk or a run, not just on days when the weather is pleasant but on days when the wind is fierce, the rain is falling or the humidity is high. Shiver or sweat, feel fatigue in your limbs, hear the sounds of the city or the countryside unfiltered by headphones. Choose to go to places—the ocean, the mountains, or a broad, wide field—where you will feel small rather than grand.

Dare to walk across campus or across town without looking at a screen.

Decide to introduce yourself to one new person each day—just to learn their name and give them yours, with no further agenda.

Choose to go to places— the ocean, the mountains,

or a broad, wide field— where you will feel small

rather than grand.

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Withdrawing 91

Brew coffee or tea, sit with a friend and ask them ques- tions—questions just one step riskier than the last time you talked. As you listen, observe the flickers of sadness or hope that cross their face. Try to imagine what it must be like to live their story, suffer their losses, dream their dreams. Pray with them and dare to put into words their heart’s desires, and dare to ask God to grant them.

The next time you travel, decide not to be a tourist, who uses material wealth to purchase experiences of vicarious significance—being in places that make us feel grand and worth noticing. Instead, travel like a pilgrim, who travels to encounter people who have been sanctified by suffering. Seek out people who live on the cruel edges of the world. Accompany them in person, at least for short seasons, in their authority and vulnerability. Share what you have with them in sufficient measure that your generosity feels vul- nerable, emptying your bank account to the point that you instinctively start to pray for daily bread.

Our affluence has left us unready for the tragedy and danger of the world. But what we cannot see when we are caught in Withdrawing is that there is something far better ahead, pleasures which we must be made strong enough to bear. We will only discover them if someone unwraps us and calls us forth. And the great glad news of the gospel is that someone has.

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5

Exploiting

As I write these words, the world’s most apparently suc- cessful tyrant is a man named Kim Jong Un.

Along with a small band of elite leaders, Kim rules the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—better known to the rest of the world as North Korea—with absolute

WITHDRAWING SUFFERING

EXPLOITING FLOURISHING

IV I

III II

AU TH OR IT Y

VULNERABILITY

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Exploiting 93

authority. Like his father and grandfather, he has ruthlessly eliminated anyone who might pose a threat to his power, including ordering the execution of elder members of his own family. Causing even the most minor disturbance to the leader’s authority or his sense of national pride—say, turning in an insufficiently pleasing design for a new airport—is a death warrant for officials high or low.

If we believe the reports of former chefs and, improbably enough, movie directors employed by the Kim family, Kim Jong Un has enjoyed a life of extraordinary privilege and comfort. But in spite of the relentlessly upbeat reports that emerge from the state-controlled news agency, this abun- dance never spreads beyond a tiny circle. Most of Kim’s subjects live in profound poverty, and every one of his country’s citizens lives with well-justified fear.

Kim Jong Un lives up and to the left, in quadrant IV, Exploiting. But the people he leads live deep in quadrant II. Tyranny and suffering, exploiting and poverty, always are found together. Indeed, you know you are encountering a situation of injustice when a few people in a system enjoy authority without vulnerability at the price of most people in that system suffering vulnerability without authority.

Tyrants and dictators live at the most extreme edge of exploitation, with their people living at the most extreme edge of suffering. But Exploiting is found anywhere people seek to maximize power while eliminating risk.

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94 St rong a n d We a k

And it turns out to be the most seductive and dangerous quadrant of all.

Risk and Reward We human beings, as one ingeniously devised experiment after another has demonstrated, are considerably more motivated by the fear of loss than the possibility of gain. If I give you fifty dollars, then give you the choice of simply walking away with that fifty dollars or wagering it in a bet where you have a chance of making five hundred dollars, you are far more likely to choose the safe fifty than take the bet. Just a few moments ago, you had nothing—but once we have something, we want to keep it.

This tendency toward “loss aversion” is not universal— some of us will take on much more risk than others—but overall it is consistent and powerful enough to affect whole industries, economies and nations. The completely rational actor of economics, that fictional creature sometimes called homo economicus, would balance risk against reward in strictly mathematical fashion—but we homo sapiens weigh risk and reward using very different scales.

And this explains something interesting about our 2×2 grid. Flourishing, I’ve been arguing, requires both authority and vulnerability in equal measure. The true life for which we were made will require us both to act and to risk. But we do not pursue these two good things with the same

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Exploiting 95

wholeheartedness—or even the same halfheartedness. Most of us are far more willing to move up than we are to move to the right—indeed, we are more likely to spend significant amounts of energy moving away from the right than toward the right at all.

It’s loss aversion in action. Authority corresponds to the ability to add something to the world—the possibility of gain. Vulnerability corresponds to the possibility—though only the possibility—of loss. In our daily choices, both con- scious and unconscious, the possibility of loss counts far more than the possibility of gain. That is why so many of us end up moving to the left, away from vulnerability.

That is why, to many of us, authority without risk sounds like a much better deal. Perhaps the only real difference between us and Kim Jong Un is that for him, by an accident of birth, that dream of living up and to the left came ter- ribly true.

Your Brain on Drugs Take a social situation every human being has to deal with at some point: walking into a room full of people we do not know. For most of us, that is a meaningful risk. (For a few ultra-extroverts, it’s sheer delight—a hundred friends you haven’t met yet! You know who you are. The rest of us know who you are, too, and we both envy you and think you are truly bizarre.) After the first blissful days of our earliest

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9 6 St rong a n d We a k

childhood, we learned, usually the hard way, that there is vulnerability in crowds.

Think about the vulnerability of the first days and months of your adult life, your first season away from home, perhaps on a university campus, and the simulta- neous excitement and trepidation of your first big on- campus party—full of seemingly happy, confident, at- tractive peers.

What if I could hand something to the eighteen-year-old version of you walking into that party—something you could hold in your hand, something that would increase your authority and decrease your vulnerability? Something that as you held it—and sipped it—gradually eased your discomfort and enhanced your excitement? It wouldn’t be strictly legal, in the United States at least—but it would be very appealing indeed.

At the moment that you begin to use alcohol to manage your vulnerability in a social situation, you are heading up and to the left. At first, and up to a point, it will work wonders. A few drinks will take the edge off the sense of risk and exposure you felt when you walked in. They will give you a heightened sense of power and possibility. You will be living the intoxicating life of a minor god.

But over time, as with all addictions (and all idols), the effect begins to wear off. A higher and higher dose is needed for the same effect. And gradually, the thing that

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Exploiting 97

once delivered authority without vulnerability begins to expose you to risk and rob you of authority. In the long run, unless you are delivered by a miracle of grace, you will find that the very thing that promised authority without vulner- ability has betrayed you, handing you over to the depths of suffering—vulnerability without authority.

Our daily lives are filled with these small choices—small at first, but over time, becoming a deep dependence on strategies that preserve our sense of action while mini- mizing our sense of risk. The church once enumerated seven deadly sins—lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. Most of them are ways of pursuing authority without vulnerability. Sex without commitment (lust), food without moderation (gluttony), goods without limit (greed), anger without compassion (wrath), and above all the pursuit of autonomous, godlike power (pride)—all these are forms of what Scripture calls, most comprehen- sively, idolatry, the use of created things to pursue godlike power without risk or limit. (Sloth, of course, is the deadly sin that corresponds to Withdrawing, the safety of risking nothing in the world; and envy may be the besetting sin of Suffering, the jealousy and bitterness of those who can see only their own vulnerability and others’ authority.) All these are just variations on the promises that accompanied the very first idol, the fruit proffered by the serpent in the Garden: “You will be like God”—unlimited authority—

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9 8 St rong a n d We a k

and, “You will not die”—none of that vulnerable creaturely dependence.

Perhaps the most characteristic idol of our time is online pornography because it fuses two of the most powerful idols of our time: sex and technology. Available at a click are vicarious experiences of sexual knowledge and conquest— authority that begins with the ability to see others in naked and vulnerable states, and escalates, in “harder” forms of porn, to more extravagant and ultimately demonic forms of domination. But these experiences of godlike knowledge and control are almost always consumed from a position of complete invulnerability, in isolation and secrecy.

The irony is stunning: the twentieth-century sexual rev- olution’s promise of “freedom” has given way to a twenty- first-century epidemic of attenuated, mediated sexual es- capism. Even most secular observers now admit that pornography undermines the capacity of men and women to maintain healthy levels of sexual desire for their actual partners, let alone experience the true authority and vul- nerability of embodied encounter. Who could have pre- dicted such an outcome? Anyone could have predicted it—anyone who understood the power of idols to promise freedom and deliver slavery, to offer authority and deliver vulnerability, to whisper fantasies of power but end up with us completely in their grip.

While some of us, by the sheer grace of God, manage to

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Exploiting 99

escape the lure of the most powerful idols, not one of us does not have some habit, some recurring pattern of thought, substance or device that we turn to when we are feeling vulnerable—something that assuages our vulnera- bility and elevates our sense of capacity to act. They offer us, in a word, control—for the very essence of control is authority without vulnerability, the ability to act without the possibility of loss. Control is the dream of the risk- and loss-averse, the promise of every idol and the quest of every person who has tasted vulnerability and vowed never to be exposed in that way again.

But control is an illusion. In fact, all of the quadrant called Exploiting is an illusion. There is, in the long run, no such thing as true authority without true vulnerability. Our idols inevitably fail us, generally sooner rather than later. And as they begin to fail, we begin to grasp ever more violently for the control we thought they promised and we deserved. This is why the end result of life in this quadrant is exploitation—ripping from the world, and especially from those too weak to resist, the good things our idols promised but are failing to deliver.

As a few people pursue and even for a season grasp the idol of control and exploitation, the community around them falls into the poverty that exploitation always brings.

Control is the dream of the risk- and loss-averse, the promise of every idol.

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10 0 St rong a n d We a k

Phil and Leslie My friends Phil and Leslie are driving home one night after a full day of work as campus ministers at the University of California, Berkeley. They stop for a few groceries, turn the corner onto the avenue where they live, and see the flashing blue and red lights of a police car behind them. Do we have a taillight out? Phil wonders.

Within minutes, six police cars have appeared, lights flashing and sirens wailing. Later Phil would write about what happened:

A voice from a loudspeaker told me to roll down my window. The voice told me to open my car door, keeping my hands visible at all times. Take four steps away from the car, keeping your hands clearly visible, I was told. The instructions went on: Face the car. Bend down on both knees. Put your hands on the ground. Lie face down. Turn your face to the right.

Lying on the ground, Phil is handcuffed and placed in one police car. Leslie is subjected to the same procedure. Now they are in separate police cars, watching as police search their vehicle (turning up groceries and Bible study materials, and nothing more). Someone has been robbed at gunpoint a couple of blocks away, an officer tells Phil, and he and Leslie “match the description” of the robbers. The officer ignores Phil’s offer to produce the time-stamped receipt from the grocery store that could clear them of Co

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BL AN

CH AR

D

BO OK

S I N

BR IEF

LEADING AT A HIGHER LEVEL

Blanchard on Leadership and Creating High

Performing Organizations

Third Edition

© Copyright 2019 The Ken Blanchard Companies. All rights reserved. Do not duplicate.

V021119

BLANCHARD BOOKS IN BRIEF

Blanchard Books in Brief 5

CONTENTS Synopsis ………………………………………………………………………………… 6 What Is Leadership? …………………………………………………………….. 9

SECTION I Set Your Sights on the Right Target and Vision ……………………………………………………………. 11

Is Your Organization High Performing? …………………………….. 13 The Power of Vision …………………………………………………………….. 17

SECTION II Treat Your People Right …………………………….19 Empowerment Is the Key ……………………………………………………. 21 SLII®: The Integrating Concept ………………………………………….. 23 Self Leadership: The Power Behind Empowerment …………. 25 One-on-One Leadership ……………………………………………………. 29 Building Trust ………………………………………………………………………. 31 Team Leadership ………………………………………………………………… 35 Organizational Leadership …………………………………………………..37 Leading Change …………………………………………………………………… 41 Coaching: A Key Competency for Leadership Development …………………………………………………… 43 Mentoring: The Key to Life Planning …………………………………. 45 Collaboration: Fuel for High Performance ………………………….47

SECTION III Treat Your Customers Right …………………… 49

Serving Customers at a Higher Level …………………………………. 51

SECTION IV Have the Right Kind of Leadership ………… 55 Servant Leadership ………………………………………………………………57 Determining Your Leadership Point of View …………………….. 59

6 Leading at a Higher Level

SYNOPSIS Leadership guru Ken Blanchard, coauthor of The One Minute Manager® and cofounder of The Ken Blanchard Companies®, has spent more than 40 years helping good leaders and organizations become great and stay great. Now, in this fully updated third edition of Leading at a Higher Level, Blanchard and his colleagues have brought together everything they’ve learned about outstanding leadership. This brief summarizes the four aspects of higher level leadership, showing readers how to:

• Go beyond the short term and zero in on the right target and vision

• Empower people and unleash their incredible potential

• Deliver legendary customer service and earn raving fans

• Ground your leadership in humility and focus on the greater good

In addition, this brief summarizes material from the new chapters in the updated edition:

• Building Trust: Creating a High Trust Environment

• Collaboration: Fuel for High Performance

• Mentoring: The Key to Life Planning

• Organizational Leadership: Leading Organizations at a Higher Level

Blanchard Books in Brief 7

This brief is based on material created by the founding associates of The Ken Blanchard Companies: Ken Blanchard, Marjorie Blanchard, Don Carew, Eunice Parisi-Carew, Fred Finch, Laurence Hawkins, Drea Zigarmi, and Pat Zigarmi. It also includes the thinking of Scott Blanchard, Madeleine Blanchard, Randy Conley, Kathy Cuff, Garry Demarest, Claire Diaz- Ortiz, Chris Edmonds, Susan Fowler, Bob Glaser, Lael Good, Vicki Halsey, Judd Hoekstra, Fay Kandarian, Linda Miller, Alan Randolph, Jane Ripley, and Jesse Stoner. Together they present more than 40 years of breakthrough leadership insights.

8 Leading at a Higher Level

LEADING AT A HIGHER LEVEL

by Ken Blanchard and the Founding Associates and Consulting Partners of

The Ken Blanchard Companies

Blanchard Books in Brief 9

What Is Leadership?

For years we defined leadership as an influence process. We believed that anytime you tried to influence the thoughts and actions of others toward goal accomplishment, you were engaging in leadership. In recent years, we have taken the emphasis away from goal accomplishment and have redefined leadership as the capacity to influence others by unleashing their power and potential to impact the greater good.

When the definition of leadership focuses on goal accomplishment, one can think that leadership is only about results. Yet goal accomplishment is not enough. The key phrase in the second definition is “the greater good”—what is best for all involved. Leadership should not be done purely for personal gain or goal accomplishment; it should have a much higher purpose than that.

When you are leading at a higher level, you have a both/and philosophy. The development of people is of equal importance to performance. As a result, the focus in leading at a higher level is on long-term results and human satisfaction.

Leading at a higher level can be defined as the process of achieving worthwhile results while acting with respect, care, and fairness for the well-being of all involved. When that occurs, self-serving leadership is not possible. It’s only when you realize that it’s not about you that you begin to lead at a higher level.

Blanchard Books in Brief 11

SECTION I Set Your Sights

on the Right Target and Vision

Blanchard Books in Brief 13

Is Your Organization High Performing?

Those who want to lead at a higher level need to understand what a high performing organization looks like and what is necessary to create one. They need to aim for the right target.

The Right Target: The Quadruple Bottom Line In high performing organizations, everyone’s energy is focused on not just one bottom line, but four bottom lines — being the provider of choice, the employer of choice, the investment of choice, and the corporate citizen of choice. The quadruple bottom line is the right target and can make the difference between mediocrity and greatness. The leaders in high performing organizations know that their bottom line depends on their people, their customers, their stakeholders, and the citizens and communities affected by their actions.

1. Provider of Choice: To keep your customers today, you can’t be content just to satisfy them; you must create raving fans. Raving fans are customers who are so excited about the way you treat them that they want to tell everyone about you.

2. Employer of Choice: Today’s workers seek opportunities where they feel like their contributions are valued and rewarded.

14 Leading at a Higher Level

3. Investment of Choice: All companies require funding sources, through stock purchases, loans, grants or contracts. To be willing to invest, people must believe in the company’s viability and performance over time.

4. Corporate Citizen of Choice: In an increasingly connected world of rising populations and shrinking resources, organizations must balance the needs of their stakeholders with the environment and treat those affected by their actions ethically and respectfully.

The HPO SCORES Model High performing organizations (HPOs) are enterprises that, over time, continue to produce outstanding results, achieving the highest level of human satisfaction and commitment to success.

SCORES is an acronym that represents the six elements evident in every HPO. An HPO scores—hits the target consistently— because it demonstrates strength in each of these six elements:

S = Shared Information and Communication

Information needed to make informed decisions must be readily available to people and openly communicated.

C = Compelling Vision

When everyone supports a compelling organizational vision— one that includes a purpose, a picture of the future, and values— it creates a deliberate, highly focused culture that drives the desired business results.

O = Ongoing Learning

HPOs are constantly focusing on improving capabilities through learning systems, building knowledge capital, and transferring learning throughout the organization.

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R = Relentless Focus on Customer Results

HPOs understand who their customers are and measure their results accordingly. People throughout the organization passionately hold and maintain the highest standards for quality and service from their customers’ perspectives.

E = Energizing Systems and Structures

The systems, structures, and processes in HPOs are aligned to support the organization’s vision, strategic direction, and goals.

S = Shared Power and High Involvement In HPOs, power and decision making are shared and distributed throughout the organization, not guarded at the top of the hierarchy.

Leadership Is the Engine If becoming a high performing organization is a destination, leadership is the engine. While the HPO SCORES model describes the characteristics of a high performing organization, leadership is what moves the organization in that direction.

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The Power of Vision

When leaders who are leading at a higher level understand the role of the quadruple bottom line as the right target—to be the provider of choice, employer of choice, investment of choice, and corporate citizen of choice—they are ready to focus everyone’s energy on a compelling vision.

A compelling vision creates a strong culture in which the energy of everyone in the organization is aligned. This results in trust, customer satisfaction, an energized and committed workforce, and profitability.

Vision and Leadership Vision always comes back to leadership. People look to their formal leaders for vision and direction. While leaders should involve people in shaping direction, the ultimate responsibility for the visionary/direction aspect of leadership remains with the leaders and cannot be delegated to others. This is where the traditional hierarchical pyramid is effective.

CUSTOMERS

Supervisory Management

Customer Contact People

Middle Management

Top Management

RESPONSIBLE

RESPONSIVE

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CUSTOMERS

Customer Contact People

Supervisory Management

Middle Management

Top Management

RESPONSIBLE

RESPONSIVE

Once a vision is agreed upon, the leader’s role moves to implementation to ensure that people respond to the vision. Now the traditional hierarchical pyramid turns upside-down as the leader supports people in accomplishing the vision.

The leader supports by removing barriers; by ensuring that policies, practices, and systems make it easier for everyone to act on the vision; and by holding themselves, their peers, and their people accountable for acting consistently with the vision. This way the leader assures that everyone is serving the vision, not the leader.

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SECTION II Treat Your

People Right

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Empowerment Is the Key

How do the best-run companies in the world beat out the competition day in and day out? They treat their customers right. They do that by having a workforce that is excited about their vision and motivated to serve customers at a higher level. So how do you create this motivated workforce? The key is empowerment.

Empowerment means letting people bring their brains to work and allowing them to use their knowledge, experience and motivation to create a healthy quadruple bottom line. Leaders of the best-run companies know that empowering people creates positive results that are just not possible when all the authority moves up the hierarchy and managers shoulder all the responsibility for success.

Researcher Edward Lawler found that when people are given more control and responsibility, their companies achieve a greater return on sales than companies that do not involve their people. Scholar Thomas Malone believes that empowerment is essential for companies that hope to succeed in the new knowledge-based economy.

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The Three Keys to Empowerment To guide the transition to a culture of empowerment, leaders must use three keys:

1. Sharing Information. One of the best ways to build a sense of trust and responsibility in people is by sharing information. Giving team members the information they need enables them to make good business decisions. High performing organizations continually look for ways to incorporate knowledge into new ways of doing business. Michael Brown, former chief financial officer of Microsoft, says, “The only way to compete today is make your intellectual capital obsolete before anyone else does.”

2. Declaring the Boundaries. In a hierarchical culture, boundaries are really like barbed-wire fences. They are designed to control people by keeping them in certain places and out of other places. In an empowered culture, boundaries are more like rubber bands that can expand to allow people to take on more responsibility as they grow and develop.

3. Replacing the Old Hierarchy with Self-Directed Individuals and Teams. As people learn to create autonomy by using newly shared information and boundaries, they must move away from dependence on the hierarchy. Self-directed individuals and Next Level teams—highly skilled, interactive groups with strong self-managing skills—replace the clarity and support of the hierarchy.

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SLII®: The Integrating

Concept

If empowerment is the key to treating people the right way and motivating them to treat your customers right, having a strategy to shift the emphasis from leader as boss and evaluator to leader as partner and cheerleader is imperative. But what, exactly, is the right leadership style?

Is the direct report new and inexperienced about the task at hand? Then more guidance and direction are called for. Is the direct report experienced and skilled? That person requires less hands-on supervision. All of us are at different levels of development depending on the task we are working on at a particular time. To bring out the best in others, leadership must match the development level of the person being led. Giving people too much or too little direction has a negative impact on their development.

SLII® is based on the belief that people can and want to develop, and there is no best leadership style to encourage that development. You should tailor leadership style to the situation.

Leadership Styles There are four basic leadership styles in SLII® leadership: directing, coaching, supporting, and delegating. These correspond with the four basic development levels: Enthusiastic

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Beginner, Disillusioned Learner, Capable but Cautious Performer and Self-Reliant Achiever.

Enthusiastic Beginners need a directing style, Disillusioned Learners need a coaching style, Capable but Cautious Performers need a supporting style and Self-Reliant Achievers need a delegating style.

Development level varies from goal to goal or task to task. An individual can be at one level of development on one goal or task and be at a different level of development on another goal or task.

The Three Skills of an SLII® Leader To become effective as a SLII® leader, you must master these three skills:

1. Goal Setting. All good performance starts with clear goals. Clarifying goals involves making sure that people understand two things: first, what they are being asked to do—their areas of accountability—and second, what good performance looks like—the performance standards by which they will be evaluated.

2. Diagnosis. You must diagnose the development level of your direct reports on each of their goals and tasks by looking at two factors—competence and commitment. Competence is the sum of knowledge and skills an individual brings to a goal or task. Commitment has to do with a person’s motivation and confidence about a goal or task.

3. Matching. You must match your leadership style to the development level of the person you are leading. Over supervising or under supervising—that is, giving people too much or too little direction—has a negative impact on people’s development.

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Self Leadership: The Power

Behind Empowerment

Managers must learn to let go of command-and-control leadership styles, because soon they will have no choice. In the 1980s, a manager typically supervised five people— in other words, the span of control was one manager to five direct reports. Today, companies have more mean-and- lean organizational structures, where spans of control have increased considerably. Now it is common to find one manager for 25 to 75 direct reports. Add to that the emergence of virtual organizations—where managers are being asked to supervise people they seldom, if ever, meet face to face—and we have an entirely different work landscape emerging.

The truth is that most bosses today can no longer play the traditional role of telling people what, when, and how to do everything. More than ever before, the success of organizational initiatives depends on the proactive behavior of empowered individuals.

Creating an Engaged Workforce Just as leaders must move from a command-and-control relationship to a partnering relationship with their people, so too must those who are being led move from “waiting to be told” to taking the initiative to lead themselves.

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People need to be trained in self leadership. Organizations on the leading edge have learned that developing self leaders is a powerful way to positively impact the quadruple bottom line.

For example, Bandag Manufacturing experienced the value of self leadership after a major equipment breakdown. Rather than laying off the affected work force, the company opted to train them in self leadership. A funny thing happened. Direct reports began holding their managers accountable and asking them to demonstrate their leadership capabilities. They were asking managers for direction and support and urging them to clarify goals and expectations. Suddenly, managers were studying up on rusty skills and working harder.

When the plant’s ramp-up time was compared to the company’s other eight plants that had experienced similar breakdowns in the past, the California plant reached pre- breakdown production levels faster than any in history. The manufacturer studied other measures as well and concluded that the determining factor in the plant’s successful rebound was primarily the proactive behavior of the workers, who were fully engaged and armed with the skill of self leadership.

The Three Skills of a Self Leader Self leaders must be actively developed by teaching people skills and mental attitudes that foster empowerment. Here are the three skills of self leadership:

1. Challenge Assumed Constraints. An assumed constraint is a belief, based on past experience, that limits current and future experiences. Self leadership teaches that the constraints are not the problem; the problem is that we think these things are the only sources of power available to us.

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2. Activate Points of Power. The five points of power are position power, personal power, task power, knowledge power, and relationship power. The sole advantage of power is the ability to do more good. To increase that ability, develop your weak points of power or gather people around you who have points of power you don’t have.

3. Be Proactive. Self leaders take the initiative to get the direction and support they require to achieve their goals. Direct reports can use self leadership to diagnose their own development level on a particular goal or task and take the initiative to get from their managers the leadership style they need to succeed.

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One-on-One Leadership

At its best, leadership is a partnership that involves mutual trust between two people who work together to achieve common goals. Both leader and follower influence each other. Leadership shifts between them, depending on the task and who has the competence and commitment to deal with it. Both parties play a role in determining how things get done.

One-on-one leadership is about creating such side-by-side leadership relationships. It is a process for increasing the quality and quantity of conversations between managers and direct reports. These alignment conversations not only help people perform better, but they also help everyone involved feel better about themselves and each other.

One-on-One Leadership and the Performance Management System When one-on-one leadership is done well, it becomes an integral part of an effective performance management system. This system consists of three parts:

1. Performance Planning. After everyone is clear on the organizational vision and direction, it’s during performance planning that leaders agree with their direct reports about the goals and objectives they should be focusing on. At this stage the traditional hierarchal pyramid is effective, as the leader provides vision and direction.

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2. Performance Coaching. Next, the hierarchal pyramid is turned upside-down as leaders support people in accomplishing the goals, doing everything they can to help direct reports be successful. At this stage, managers work for their people, praising progress and redirecting less than optimal performance.

3. Performance Review. This is where a manager and direct report sit down and assess the direct report’s performance over time. When one-on-one weekly meetings are scheduled, open and honest discussions about the direct report’s performance and concerns take place on an ongoing basis, creating mutual understanding and agreement.

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Building Trust

Trust is the foundation of all healthy relationships, so it comes as no surprise that a leader’s ability to build trust is the key to effective one-on-one partnerships, teams, and organizations.

Studies show that productivity, income, profits, and retention are positively or negatively impacted depending on the level of trust in the work environment. Blanchard’s research confirms that employees will leave an organization where trust is lacking. In a study of more than 1,000 leaders, 59 percent of respondents indicated they had left an organization due to trust issues, citing lack of communication and dishonesty as key contributing factors.

The Benefits of Trust When people believe they are working for trustworthy leaders, they are willing to invest in making a difference in an organization. They feel more connected and invest more of themselves in their work. High trust levels lead to a greater sense of self-responsibility, deeper interpersonal insight, and more collective action toward achieving common goals.

The Four Elements of Trust Because trust means different things to different people, decision makers must first find a common language of trust— qualities they agree are consistent with trustworthiness. The ABCD Trust Model™ * identifies four qualities leaders can use to define and discuss trust with the people they lead. *Now called Blanchard’s Building Trust Model.

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Able is about demonstrating competence. Do the leaders know how to get the job done? Are they able to produce results?

Believable means acting with integrity. In practical terms, this means creating and following fair processes. Believability is also about acting in a consistent, values-driven manner that reassures people they can rely on their leaders.

Connected is about demonstrating care and concern for other people. Connectedness is supported by good communication skills. Leaders need to openly share information about the organization and about themselves.

Dependable is about honoring commitments by following through on what the leaders say they are going to do.

Creating a High Trust Environment Using the ABCD Trust Model™ as a guideline, leaders can create high-trust environments that foster involvement and energy by taking four steps:

1. Know the behaviors that support the ABCDs of trust.

2. Assess the current trust level.

3. Diagnose areas that need work.

4. Have a conversation to restore trust.

Repairing Damaged Trust When a breach of trust is so severe that the relationship is strained to the breaking point—or breaks completely—we call this damaged trust. If a situation is so explosive—or the stakes are so perilous—that a conversation could cause further damage, you probably need to engage the services of a qualified mediator or therapist. If you think the risks are manageable, you can use the following five-step process to begin rebuilding the relationship and restoring trust.

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Step One: Acknowledge and Assure

As you acknowledge the problem, assure the other party that your intention is to restore trust between the two of you and that you are willing to take the time and effort to get the relationship back on track.

Step Two: Admit

Own up to your actions and take responsibility for whatever harm was caused. Admitting your part in the situation is a crucial step that should not be overlooked. Refusing to admit your mistakes undermines your believability.

Step Three: Apologize

Even if you don’t feel you were entirely at fault, apologize for your part in the situation. Avoid making excuses, shifting blame, or using qualifying statements, as these will undermine your apology.

Step Four: Assess

Invite feedback from the other party about how they see the situation. Together, assess which elements of the ABCD Trust Model™ were violated. The purpose of this step is not to point fingers, but rather to identify problem behaviors so they can be avoided in the future.

Step Five: Agree

The final step in rebuilding damaged trust is to work together to create an action plan. Mutually identify the positive behaviors you’ll use going forward. Clarify your shared goals for the relationship and make requests about what you’d like to see both more and less of in the future.

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Team Leadership

As the business world becomes increasingly competitive, the issues it faces are increasingly complex. Organizations can no longer depend on hierarchical structures and a few peak performers to maintain a competitive advantage.

Leading with teams is the best approach in today’s business environment. Working effectively, a team can make better decisions, solve more complex problems, and do more to enhance creativity and build skills than individuals working alone.

Building highly effective teams, like building great organizations, begins with a picture of what you are aiming for—a target. The journey to a high performance team begins with understanding its characteristics. By benchmarking your team in each of the following four areas, you can identify where you need to focus for team development:

1. Align for Results: Clarify team purpose, define goals, define roles, and agree on behavioral norms.

2. Perform Under Pressure: Embrace and address conflict, invite self expression, encourage candor, and listen with curiosity.

3. Develop Team Cohesion: Work collaboratively, promote accountability, build trusting relationships, and appreciate each other’s contributions.

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4. Sustain High Performance: Demonstrate unity, share leadership, adapt to change, and accept greater challenges.

The Power of Teams When faced with pressure or complexity, leaders must acknowledge that it is often the actions and skills of many, as opposed to those of one person, that make a complicated procedure successful. Today’s complex work can no longer be left to a lone hero’s expertise; we need high performance teams working together to achieve results.

When teams function well, miracles can happen. A thrilling and inspiring example of a high performance team is the 1980 United States Olympic hockey team. Twenty young men—many of whom had never played together before—came from colleges all over the country. Six months later they won the Olympic gold medal, defeating the best teams in the world—including the Soviet Union, a team that had been playing together for years.

Or think about the Hudson River plane crash in 2009, when Captain Sullenberger, First Officer Jeffrey Skiles, and the rest of the flight crew worked together to land the plane safely under dire circumstances, saving all the lives aboard.

Whether it’s a medical team of surgeons, anesthetists, and nurses all working together and using their individual specialties as a team to save lives—or a team of tech wizards collaborating on a new software that changes the world we live in—humans can achieve great things when they work effectively as teams.

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Organizational Leadership

Just as team leadership is more complicated than one-on-one leadership, leading an entire organization is more complicated than leading a single team. As is true with building a high performing team, building a high performing organization is a journey. The quality of a leader’s influence at the organizational level is built upon the perspective, trust, and community the leader attains while mastering self, one-on-one, and team leadership. An effective leader’s influence on an organization can create a culture that brings together people and systems in a harmonious whole.

SLII® applies whether you are leading yourself, another individual, a team, or an organization. In the self and one- on-one contexts, the leader diagnoses the competence and commitment of a direct report on a specific task. In the team context, a leader diagnoses the team’s productivity and morale. In the organizational context, the focus is on diagnosing results and relationships.

Results can be defined as the amount and quality of the work accomplished in relation to the organization’s purpose and goals.

Relationships can be defined as the quality of interactions people have with the organization, their leaders, their coworkers, their customers, and the environment.

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If an organization is to become high performing, results and relationships both must be high. Great relationships with no performance might be fun, but they will not create a long- lasting organization. On the other hand, an organization with great results and poor relationships will also be short-lived. Without good relationships, the organization will begin to lose its best people, and the results will decline. The bottom line is that both results and relationships are required for high performing organizations.

Organizational Development Stages There are four stages of organizational development:

1. Start-Up – Low results/high relationships

2. Improving – Improving results/declining relationships

3. Developing – Increasing results/variable relationships

4. High Performing – High results/high relationships

When we combine the four SLII® leadership styles—directing, coaching, supporting, and delegating—with the four stages of organizational development—start-up, improving, developing, and high performing—we have a framework for matching each stage with an appropriate leadership style.

At the start-up stage, a directing style is appropriate. At the improving stage, a coaching style is appropriate. At the developing stage, a supporting style is appropriate. At the high performing stage, a delegating style is appropriate.

We’ve seen too many situations where new CEOs—wanting to make a quick impact—enter organizations and immediately go to their favorite leadership style rather than to the one that is needed. This can cause the organization to move backward rather than forward in the quality of results and relationships. This can happen in any organization, whether it’s a business, government, or nonprofit. Applying the appropriate leadership style at each stage will ensure that the organization progresses to or maintains high performance.

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Leading Change

Constant change is a way of life in organizations today. How do managers and leaders cope with the barrage of changes that confront them daily as they attempt to keep their organizations adaptive and viable?

Leaders often feel trapped in a lose-lose situation when they try to launch a change effort. On one hand, they risk unleashing all kinds of pent-up negative feels in people. On the other hand, if they don’t drive change, their organizations will be displaced by those that are committed to innovation.

To lead a successful change, leaders must listen in on the conversations in the organization and surface and resolve people’s concerns about the change. They must strategize to lead change in a way that leverages everyone’s creativity and commitment.

Five Change Leadership Strategies The following five change leadership strategies and their outcomes describe an effective process for leading change.

Strategy 1: Expand Involvement and Influence (Outcome: Buy-In)

By involving people in decision making about the change, leaders significantly increase the probability that the change will be successfully implemented. People are less likely to resist the change when they have been involved in creating the change.

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Strategy 2: Explain Why the Change Is Needed (Outcome: Compelling Case for Change)

This strategy addresses information concerns. When leaders present and explain a rational reason for the change, the outcome is a compelling case that helps people understand the change being proposed, the rationale for the change, and the reason the status quo is no longer a viable option.

Strategy 3: Collaborate on Implementation (Outcome: The Right Resources and Infrastructure)

When leaders engage others in planning and piloting the change, they encourage collaboration in identifying the right resources and building the infrastructure needed to support the change.

Strategy 4: Make the Change Sustainable (Outcome: Sustainable Results)

Rather than simply announcing the change, leaders must make the change sustainable by providing people with the new skills, tools, and resources required to support the change. By modeling the behavior they expect of others, measuring performance, and praising progress, leaders create conditions for accountability and good results.

Strategy 5: Explore Possibilities (Outcome: Options)

Possibilities and options should be explored before a specific change is decided upon. By involving others in exploring possibilities, you immediately lower information concerns when a new change is announced, because people are “in the loop” about deciding what needs to change.

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Coaching: A Key Competency for Leadership Development

The development of new leaders is becoming an important focus for executives and senior managers. More and more, coaching is being recognized as one of the key competencies that effectively develops future leaders.

After working with thousands of people in organizations, we have found that many managers and leaders spend most of their time dealing with performance challenges. With the leadership shortage ahead, it is important to shift from managing performance to focusing on development.

Five Applications of Coaching

When we talk about coaching in this context, we are expanding our definition beyond the coaching leadership style described in SLII®. Coaching in the broader sense has five common applications:

1. Performance coaching is used when individuals need help returning their performance to acceptable standards.

2. Development coaching is used when high performing individuals are ready to become more fully rounded in their current role.

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3. Career coaching is employed when individuals are ready to plan their next career moves.

4. Coaching to support learning occurs when managers or direct reports need support, encouragement, and accountability to sustain recent training and turn insights into action.

5. Creating an internal coaching culture is what happens when leaders recognize the value of coaching and use it to develop others.

Companies that use these coaching applications will have a significant competitive advantage in developing and retaining scarce talent.

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Mentoring: The Key to Life Planning

Like coaching, mentoring is a one-to-one process. But the relationship between an individual and a coach has specific objectives and goals focused on developing potential, improving relationships, and enhancing performance. Mentoring, on the other hand, is a mutually beneficial relationship that has big- picture objectives and goals. As the subtitle of this chapter suggests, mentoring is about more than goal accomplishment; it’s about life planning.

The MENTOR Model: Elements of a Successful Mentoring Partnership The MENTOR Model provides six guidelines for an effective mentoring relationship. Following these steps will keep your mentoring partnership on track.

Mission: Take time to craft a mutually agreed-upon mission statement for the mentorship. What do each of you intend to get out of your partnership? A mentoring mission is a picture of how things will be if everything goes as planned.

Engagement: Agree on ways to engage that work for your personalities and schedules. Particularly at the beginning of your mentorship, make a commitment to regular meetings, even if they are virtual. By deciding how often you will communicate with each other and by what means, you will be building the structure that will make your mentoring partnership a reality.

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Networking: Both mentor and mentee will bring a network of connections to each other. These connections will become a pipeline to new knowledge, skills, and opportunities. However, care must be taken so that you are not being reckless with each other’s connections.

Trust: It takes time to establish the deep communication and give-and-take that happens in a mature mentoring relationship. Trust can be destroyed in an instant, so address any mistakes and communication breakdowns right away. By telling the truth, staying connected, and being dependable, you can build the kind of trusting relationship that leads to significant personal and professional growth.

Opportunity: For both mentor and mentee, the relationship will open up opportunities—events, learning experiences, connections, and career options. Digital media makes potential networks bigger than ever, allowing for more opportunities for partners.

Review and Renew: Mentoring relationships don’t necessarily last indefinitely. Once your mission is established, a regular review—perhaps annually or biannually—will help you keep the relationship on track and let you know when the mission for your mentorship has been accomplished. You can renew the relationship and create a new mission, or you can bring the mentorship to a close.

Many companies have discovered that formal mentoring programs are one of the best ways to groom new hires to become successful while preserving the critical corporate knowledge of long-time employees.

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Collaboration: Fuel for High Performance

Collaboration creates high performing teams and organizations. And with today’s diverse, globalized workforce, it’s crucial. Organizations that embrace a collaborative culture benefit internally from increased sales, improved innovation, and better business processes. The external benefits can include new products and services and a smoother running business that delivers higher client satisfaction and increased revenues and profitability. Additional, less tangible benefits include knowledge sharing and competence building of employees and contractors.

Many people think of collaboration as being the same as coordination, cooperation, or teamwork. However, these words are not interchangeable.

Collaboration involves bringing resources from various areas together to create something better or to solve a complex problem. These resources may come from different departments, teams, or locations and may even include people from other organizations.

This kind of collaboration can save lives. For example, during the wildfires of 2003 in San Diego, the efforts of police, firefighters, and first responders were fragmented due to unaligned communication systems. In 2003, as firefighters flocked to the county from all over the west, some had only 800-megahertz radios rather than the traditional VHF radios—meaning they

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couldn’t talk to each other. By 2007, when the Cedar Fire hit, the agencies had learned to collaborate: all the police, fire, and emergency responder agencies were equipped with VHF radios.

Collaboration can happen even between organizations that traditionally might be thought of as competitors. For example, in 2011 the Nature Conservancy and Dow Chemical Company partnered to construct a wetland for water recycling that was beneficial for both nature and Dow’s bottom line.

Attitude can color our willingness and ability to be collaborative. For this reason it’s important to examine your intentions, beliefs, and actions to develop collaborative competence.

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SECTION III Treat Your

Customers Right

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Serving Customers at a Higher Level

The third step in leading at a higher level is to treat your customers right. While everybody seems to know that, organizations with exceptional service are rare. When an organization delivers with such excellence and consistency that its service reputation becomes a competitive edge, that’s Legendary Service.

Creating Legendary Service Legendary Service begins with leaders who believe that outstanding service is a top priority. We call them service champions—inspirational leaders who create passion and momentum in others to better serve their customers. These leaders follow up their inspiring words with actions, creating systems and processes that support their belief that service is vitally important.

Exceptional service starts with leaders serving their people at the highest level so that people on the front line can in turn serve their customers at the highest level. Creating Legendary Service is everyone’s job—not just the people standing at the cash register or dealing directly with customers.

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Legendary Service consists of four basic elements:

C Committed to customers: Creating an environment that focuses on serving customers—both internal and external—at the highest level.

A Attentiveness: Listening in a way that allows you to know your customers and their preferences. R Responsiveness: Demonstrating a genuine willingness to serve others by paying attention to and acting on

their needs.

E Empowerment: Sharing information and tools to help people meet customer needs or exceed customer expectations.

Together, these elements spell CARE, which is fitting, because great customer service hits people at an emotional level and creates a connection.

Decide, Discover, and Deliver There are three secrets to treating your customers right and turning them into raving fans:

Decide What You Want Your Customer Experience to Be. If you want Legendary Service, you don’t just announce it. You must plan for it. You must decide what you want to do. What kind of experience do you want your customers to have as they interact with every aspect of your organization? Understanding what your customers really want when they come to you helps you determine what you should offer them.

A good example of how this works is Domo Gas, a full-service gasoline chain in Western Canada, cofounded by Sheldon Bowles. Back in the 1970s, when everybody was going to self- service gasoline stations, Bowles knew that if people had a choice, they would never go to a gas station.

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But people have to get gas, and they want to get in and out as quickly as possible. The customer service vision that Bowles and his cofounders imagined was an Indianapolis 500 pit stop. They dressed all their attendants in red jumpsuits. When a customer drove into one of Bowles’ stations, two or three people ran out of the hut and raced toward the car. As quickly as possible, they looked under the hood, cleaned the windshield and pumped the gas.

Discover What Your Customers Want. After you decide what you want to have happen, it’s important to discover any suggestions your customers may have that will improve their experience with your organization. What would make their experience with you better? Ask them!

Deliver Your Ideal Customer Service Experience. Now you must help people deliver the ideal customer service experience, plus a little bit more. Once your desired customer experience is set and people are committed to it, the traditional pyramid hierarchy must be turned upside-down, so that the leaders are at the bottom and the frontline people—who are closest to the customers—are at the top. Now frontline people are responsible—able to respond to their customers. Leaders must now be responsive to frontline people, empowering them to deliver Legendary Service.

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SECTION IV Have the Right

Kind of Leadership

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Servant Leadership

When people lead at a higher level, they make the world a better place because their goals are focused on the greater good. Making the world a better place requires a special kind of leader: a servant leader.

Robert Greenleaf first coined the term “servant leadership” in 1970 and published widely on the concept for the next 20 years. Yet it is an old concept. Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela are examples of leaders who have practiced this philosophy.

What Is Servant Leadership? Leadership has two parts: vision and implementation. In the visionary role, leaders help define the direction. It’s their responsibility to communicate what the organization stands for and wants to accomplish. The visionary role is the leadership aspect of servant leadership.

Once people are clear on where they are going, the leader’s role shifts to a service mindset for the task of implementation. How do you make the vision happen? By turning the pyramid upside- down and helping people achieve their goals. Implementation is where the servant aspect of servant leadership comes into play.

In a yearlong study to discover what kind of leadership has the greatest impact on performance, Scott Blanchard and Drea Zigarmi found that while the leadership part of servant

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leadership (strategic leadership) is important, the servant part of servant leadership (operational leadership) has a greater impact on organizational vitality.

When managers focus only on organizational indicators of vitality—such as profit—they have their eyes on the scoreboard, not the ball. Profit, a key aspect of organizational vitality, is a by-product of serving the customer, which can be achieved only by serving the employee.

Servant leadership is not just another management technique. It is a way of life for those with servant hearts. In organizations run by servant leaders, servant leadership becomes a mandate, not a choice, and the by-products are better leadership, better service, a higher performing organization, and more success and significance.

Blanchard Books in Brief 59

Determining Your Leadership Point of View

Research shows that effective leaders have a clear, teachable leadership point of view and are willing to teach it to others, particularly the people they work with.

Writing your leadership point of view invites you to think deeply about your leadership legacy and how you want to be seen and remembered as a leader. The reflection itself may not change your day-to-day interactions with those you lead, but it will shift your intentions. It will help you find what Bill George calls your True North, and it can serve as a compass that leaders can use to align their actions with their values. In determining your leadership point of view, you are asked to do three things:

Identify key people and events that have shaped and influenced your leadership point of view. Who mentored you? Taught you? Inspired you? What did you admire or not admire about each of these people? What did you learn from them? What have been the turning points in your life? What did you learn from these experiences?

Describe your leadership values. What core beliefs do you feel strongly about? Make a list of values—truth, learning, creativity, success, loyalty, etc.—and identify your three to five most important values.

60 Leading at a Higher Level

Share your expectations for yourself and others. These expectations should flow naturally from the people and key events that have influenced you and your values. Your expectations really are the essence of your leadership point of view. Letting people know what they can expect from you underscores the idea that good leadership is a partnership. And letting others know what you expect from them gives people a picture of how they can be successful under your leadership.

The world needs more leaders who are leading at a higher level. Our dream is that someday everyone will work with leaders who are leading at a higher level—a day when self-serving leaders are history, and leaders who serve others are the rule, not the exception.

YOUR ULTIMATE GUIDE TO BECOMING A GREAT LEADER

Learn how to set the right target and vision and make sure people know the values that will guide your leadership journey to success.

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CONTINUE YOUR LEADERSHIP JOURNEY

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