Leadership is naming the hard stuff - and illuminating a path forward

The Spooky and the Scary

If you are feeling on edge right now and you are having some challenge with focus and concentration, rest assured: you are normal.

Earlier this week, I joked that an appropriate question – for Halloween and for this moment, is “What scary things have happened since we last met, that might impact planning?”

What scary things are happening to you, your organization, or your clients?

Right now, there is so much happening around the world – the lagging effects of the pandemic, its residual economic influences, mass tragedy in South Korea, a huge election with great implications in Brazil, and our own elections that could shift the direction of our communities and country.

We feel all of this weigh on us over time. So, I ask again – what scary things are happening to you, your organization, or your clients, that are impacting your work right now?

I invite you to pause and breathe into that question for a minute or two. It is okay to feel the hard stuff. Only when we recognize and name the challenges that we are facing can we figure out what to do about them.

One relevant question for many of us is – what is leadership at this moment?

Name the scary. Illuminate the path.

Leadership right now is naming and acknowledging the hard and scary stuff – and illuminating a path forward.

Leadership is seeing big and seeing small.

Recently I listened to Anand Giridharadas’ interview with Brene Brown about his new book, The Persuaders, and I am reading the book.

Here are two insights from The Persuaders that can help each of us find our leadership in this moment:

1. Look for common ground.

In The Persuaders, Giridharadas suggests that democracy is based on organizing people across shared ideals and values. He suggests that when we sit in our echo chambers and stop believing that we can persuade other people, democracy dies.

Do not misunderstand. This is NOT about watering down a focus on equity. It is about listening to understand that there is more alignment than one might think, build awareness towards justice and use language to remind each of us that millions of us are seeking a society in which all will thrive.

This video is an inspiring example.

2. Attend to feelings.

We need to attend to feelings about change as much as policies for change

One of the points that Giridharadas makes is that we are in a time of tremendous change, stirring up a lot of feelings about those changes.

He suggests that liberals and progressives have been much better at proposing policies than giving people the support to manage change and move towards a shared future in which all can thrive.

Openings for shifting perspectives

In the podcast and the book, the argument is that we need to meet people where they are. When we meet people where they are, there are openings for shifting perspectives.

Note that this focuses on people who have some openness to shifting their perspective. For example, Giridharadas interviews Black Lives Matter organizer Alicia Garza about her conversations with white women around the Women’s March in 2017. Garza argues that the way to organize these women was not to berate them about what they have done wrong, but rather to invite them into a home for conversation and learning, so that they could “see themselves in common cause with others who have experienced terrible sh-t and who continue to experience terrible sh-t.” (79).

This aligns with his earlier suggestion about getting out of the echo chamber – go around other people to see how they live and try to understand their perspective. In these highly intense, politically charged moments, it’s all too easy to broadly categorize one’s stance (or religion or party or whatever) into a For or Against pile. This binary approach lacks empathy and understanding for why.

We do each of these things in our work.

We help teams find common ground towards their values by surfacing different perspectives. And we slow the process down when needed in order to attend to the feelings around change.

We, as a culture here in the States, are embracing Halloween and we see the spooky black cats, spiders, and bats around our neighborhood for the month of October. Still, it is for a season. We don’t have to be scared all the time, even if it is fun in small doses. Taking that to the real world, we can work through some of the hard and scary things happening around us and better understand how they influence our work.

How are you attending to the feelings around change -- and looking for common ground right now?