Originally posted on January 31, 2006
"If you could live forever, would you spend the rest of eternity doing everything? Hang gliding? Mountain climbing without a rope? Or cloistered in a room with books, afraid to take any risks?"
— Longevity researcher Richard Houghten in Death. And How to Avoid It, Los Angeles Times
The next morning I woke up early to spend an extra bit of time in prayer and meditation.
I figured it was a good way to reinforce my conscious decision to surrender the situation to God, and to trust Him completely for the outcome. I had done my best, after all. God knew it, I was sure, and I rested in that.
Maybe I had wrapped too much ego into pushing my brilliant solution onto the organization. The other execs didn’t go for my idea – so what? Maybe there’s another pathway that I can help us all discover. Things will work out, one way or the other. I decided to be open, like a spiritual-leadership-vessel, for whatever God had in mind for this particular project. Yes, a vessel. I like that watercraft image. I’m picturing a nice little 20-foot cabin cruiser?
A follow-up meeting had already been scheduled first thing that morning with the same group of executives, to continue the discussion and determine the direction we would take for the subject at hand.
As I drove in to work, an unlikely calm and confidence lingered in my spirit. My thoughts began to drift thinking about that upcoming meeting. Now that my idea had been tossed, what should I say? How should I behave towards the team? Humbled, but over it? A little ticked off, to keep them on watch? Should I break into a series of nervous facial ticks, indicating the seriousness of their decision to reject my plan? Then it hit me. What to say, that is.
“Here’s what you do,” God said to me from the passenger seat with a glint in His eye. “Listen carefully, Bradley: I want you to go in there, and…” He leaned over and laid out to me his brilliant scheme.
Buy this book from Amazon.com
I drove home from work frustrated, tired and spent. My Big Idea had been argued over, stomped on, and dismissed in the course of 30 minutes during a late afternoon conference. Instead of coming out the hero, I lost complete control of the meeting.
Usually when I get iced out by a colleague or shot down in a meeting, I will either mope around for a few days, or else I will busy myself planning a suitable revenge.
But this time was different.
Because, ironically enough, this fateful meeting-gone-terribly-wrong happened to occur less than 24 hours after the Princeton Leadership & Spirituality Event – the same seminar where I spent two days getting all lathered up around the infinitely positive potential of God’s mighty spirit at work through my leadership position.
Well. Could this unpleasant turn of events be an opportunity to develop my new spiritual leadership skills? Was this a test, of sorts?
As I was driving home, I remembered how Dr. Stephen Payne, a seasoned leadership coach and the head of the Princeton event, recounted stories of leaders slipping into the dreaded spiral of despair and gloom because of performance pressure, corporate politics, projects gone bad, for all sorts of reasons. All of us participants nodded in a sad sort of recognition. We’ve all been there, we said, and we want to rise above it next time. Please, kind sir, how can we access the Spirit to allow God to help us move beyond our lousy circumstances, to do the right thing?
For the past several weeks, I have been leading a team in a transformational project pivotal to our company’s future. The President himself had entrusted me to navigate the treacherous paths of this new venture: “Everyone else has failed, so why don’t you go and try to figure out this mess,” he said to me one day.
My little team spent hours and hours sweating inside a makeshift war room. We schemed up new flowcharts, process designs and org charts. We researched industry trends and best practices. We gathered feedback from dozens of managers. It was an intense and invigorating process. It was just like being part of Jim Collins’ Chimpworks team.
Eventually we had developed enough substance to present a serious recommendation to the other executives, and get their approval to move forward with our brilliant plan – one that would completely transform our organization, forever and ever.
By the way, it’s not like the other execs were unaware of our work. No, I made a point to be super extra sure in checking in with the key players from time to time, to bounce off their opinions and ideas, to show our progress, and basically to make sure they were brought in all along the way. Because, dear reader, I am no schmuck, and this is how a politically astute leader gets it done.
A meeting was finally scheduled to present the Big Reveal.
At the appointed time, I marched in to the Board room with my team, all smiles and greetings, carrying nothing more than a few handouts to frame the discussion. “How exciting!” I thought to myself as I watched my fellow executives taking their seats. “A turning point for the organization, all thanks to my leadership! They will owe me big-time for this.”
We all run into prickly thickets from time to time as we are charging hard down the path of our careers.
Perhaps you are getting dressed down by an irate customer. Or it suddenly dawns on you that you’ve made a huge and costly mistake. Or maybe everyone on the team is now ganging up on your previously brilliant idea.
Whatever it is, you know it means trouble.
When things are not going so well at work, sometimes God provides a way out: an opportunity for spiritual intervention.
But it doesn’t always happen in a blinding flash of light, the way you would hope or expect. More often, the Almighty’s rescue beacon is nothing more than a dim and hazy hint, like the glimmer of a poorly-lit exit sign through a rain-pelted windshield along a very dark and lonely highway. It’s there all right, but if you’re not paying real close attention, you might miss it.
It is in these vulnerable moments when our leadership is tested, when we feel the dark pull of descent into panic and despair, it is here that we have an opportunity to access the infinite power of the Holy Spirit.
When you think of the word "treachery," you often think of an evil person. But I'm quite convinced that people are more often hurt by another kind of treachery in their leaders. Think of these leaders as "thin ice" leaders. On the surface, the scene can look quite beautiful and inviting, but to step out on that ice is to put your life in danger.
I don't believe that these leaders are driven by evil intent. They may attract us with their charisma and vision. They may draw us with their genuine kindness, charm, and compassion. However, once we commit to them we discover that they may not be competent or that they have an inability to follow-through or that they truly don't have the discernment to distinguish between "fact and fiction." Again, these leaders are well-meaning and good. That's why we're drawn to them, but in the end they fall short and leave us on thin ice.
The conventional wisdom of business compensation is that bigger monetary rewards will motivate people to perform better. News headlines are filled with reports of car company and bank executives receiving huge bonuses. This system of compensation and the assumptions underlying it have been around for so long that no one seems to question whether this is how people really work. Are people so easily manipulated by a pile of money?
This video by Daniel Pink, author of Drive, explains the real role of money in motivation and points us to the three real motivators of outstanding performance. Watch the video and think about your own company.
A hat tip and thanks to Jim Hancock for pointing us to this video!
Dan Wooldridge continues with Part 2, sharing thoughts on what leaders can do to transform dysfunctional cultures in organizations.
All of us have had the experience of going to work for the first time in an organization. And it doesn't take long for us as relative outsiders to see things going on that don't make sense. But to the people who've been there a long time, it's not visible or is now just accepted. This leads me to a fourth thing that I did. I don't know exactly where I got the idea, but I began an annual "Dumb Things We Do Around Here" week. I asked everyone in the company to submit in writing during that week anything they saw that we were doing that might be considered a "dumb thing to do" and to accompany that with a recommendation. My job and the job of the management team was to review all these submissions and then make an immediate decision to either quit doing that thing, act on the recommendation, explain why it had to be done, or study the matter further. In most cases, it was pretty clear that we just needed to stop.
Some years ago I was hired to turn around a failing hospitality organization. Upon my arrival, leaders from the company that owned this entity as well as board members told me that the staff was the problem and counseled me to clean house and start fresh with a new team. And it didn't take long to find a dispirited group of people with low motivation and initiative. Many had been there for years and had grown expert in protecting their jobs. Others were going through the paces trying hard not to lose their jobs. I could see nonsensical practices and behaviors everywhere. No decisions were being owned and made. All decisions, no matter how trivial were coming up the chain of command and landing on my desk. It was no wonder that the job was a heart attack waiting to happen for the leader. But I suspected that the problem was not the people per se, but the culture that had been allowed to develop over the years. I felt that the people fundamentally cared about the place, its mission, and it customers and that they were inhibited by dysfunctional cultural and organizational habits from doing their jobs properly.
I also realized that I couldn't go "command and control" on them. That was what they had already experienced over and over, and they were beaten down. I realized that I couldn't just preach a big vision to them. They'd heard all that before as well. And I could see that the level of mistrust that they had for me, sight unseen, was huge. They were afraid that I would be harsh and even fire them. We've all seen puppies that have been abused and how they behave. Well, this was an abused puppy culture.
I originally wrote this in early September of 2008 just as the economic crisis nosed down toward a crash landing. I recently reread this post and added some current thoughts even though the reality described remains unchanged.
Walking through the Colorado Springs Airport the other day, on my way to notch another step in my march toward annual 1K status on United Airlines, I was stopped by this advertisement by Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver: The Top Ten Jobs of 2015 Don’t Exist Today. Though I don’t know what that statement is based on, at an intuitive level, I think it's true.
InsideWork 52
Weekly Bible verse + business quote
Twitter
Facebook
FriendFeed
Delicious
YouTube