Collaboration is all the rage in enterprise technologies. Whether it’s the latest “enterprise social network” or the newest feature of an established intranet provider or learning management system, technologies are promising to solve your organization’s collaboration ills by claiming to make collaboration easier, more efficient, and more fun. Here’s the only problem: if your organization doesn’t cultivate and support collaboration without technology, then technology isn’t going to cultivate it for you. Collaboration software typically works great for the people who were already collaborative (and liked technology) without it, but isn’t likely to make collaborators out of the previously un-collaborative. Collaboration succeeds where it is understood, promoted, and developed as a value and an expectation. It’s not an activity. It’s not a new technology. Collaboration is a lot less something you do, and a lot more how you are with others and how that shapes the way you work with them (or not) toward common goals. Organizationally, culture frames process; process necessitates tools; tools support process and reinforce culture (but cannot create either of them alone). For it to be sustainable and meaningful in a work setting, collaboration needs to be: STRATEGIC (Culture and Process) – It should be clear at all levels of your organization (at least where collaboration is key to performance) that collaboration is a critical strategy to achieve outcomes. It can’t be “nice-when-we-have-time.” If it’s strategic, it’s fundamental. LEVERAGED (Process and Tools) – Assuming it is, in fact, strategic, collaboration must be part of the design of your organizational processes. It must be operationalized effectively such that it is part of everyday workflow, job expectations, and even evaluation measures. MODELED (Culture) – Like anything, if the people “at the top” don’t “practice what they preach” then it’s hard to get strong buy-in from everyone else. Leadership must be intentional and overt in exposing when and how it leads through collaboration. CELEBRATED (Culture and Process) – We celebrate each other in our work in both subtle and overt ways: the passing comment, the simple nod of a head, or a formal award. Each represents a celebration that promotes and reinforces organizational values. Collaboration needs to be celebrated in many ways and at all levels. INVESTED IN (Process and Tools) – What we invest in shows what we value. What we implement well shows our commitment to our values. We can’t decide collaboration is important and never put the tools behind it. But, we also can’t just throw technology at it and proclaim “now we collaborate!”
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I have worked on committees, in communities and in schools, with truly brilliant, intensely motivated, and incredibly creative individuals. And, I’ve watched and felt as all of us over time ended up as less than the sum of our parts, looking around at each other like we are sedated, wondering why we still come to these meetings, like we don’t have something else to do with our time.
And, I simply don’t understand why/how otherwise strong leaders accept becoming members of committees that end up:
Now, I have also sat on some great committees, and it is these positive experiences that really highlighted for me how to make a committee work, so that bringing leaders together can be powerful rather than neutralizing. So to start, here are a few red flags (sadly from lived experience) that might inspire some critical reflection on your committee work: Red Flag: When I ask you what you do as an organization, collaborative, or initiative, and you lead with how many committees you have… Red Flag: When I ask you what your committee does and you tell me when and where it meets… Red Flag: When I ask you how long you have been on a committee and you can’t really remember… Red Flag: When I ask you who else is on the committee and you include the people who used to, or only occasionally still, show up to the meetings… Red Flag: When I ask you what a typical meeting is like and the long, meandering answer you kindly attempt to offer can be summed up by “we talk about stuff”… Whether you enjoy working through committees, volunteering to serve on them, or you reluctantly have them imposed on you, it’s important to be mindful that they are merely means; they are not ends. A committee is not an outcome. It’s not a product. A committee is an operational tactic, not a strategy. So, here are a few thoughts on how to start and end a committee so that it serves its function and doesn’t linger:
The two most successful committees I have been a part of followed these four key recommendations. The ones that have not (and they are many) have ended up lost, without focus, evolved into “standing” committees and, perhaps most humorously, rebranded themselves as “working groups” without making any real process adjustments. With all there is to accomplish in our schools and communities, we simply cannot afford to let our leadership die in committee. As we prepare to celebrate and reflect on the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, I have been reading articles and seeing special reports on TV about the “I Have a Dream” speech. And, while I have heard most of it before in some form or another, things have struck me a bit differently this year. So the story goes: as Dr. King started to wrap up his remarks, he had delivered a solid speech (for him), which would undoubtedly make it the finest any of the rest of us might ever hope to deliver. But, there was a sense with him, and perhaps with others around him, that as he concluded his planned 4-minute speech, he hadn’t yet “nailed” it. And then Mahalia Jackson chimed in from his side: “Tell them about the dream, Martin.” Apparently, not once but twice, Mahalia urged: “Tell them about the dream, Martin.” Dreams are funny things. They can take us to distant places and liberate our minds and hearts. And yet, the dream untenable can trap us and leave us more hopeless and feeling more stuck in our current reality than ever. As Langston Hughes ruminated on a dream deferred: “Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?” Dreams in reality can be as demoralizing as they are liberating. So, I have been reflecting on Dr. King’s dream to better understand the nature of dreams that become liberating:
It wasn’t that Dr. King had a dream; it’s that we did and he spoke it into being. He tapped into our collective experiences and timely sense of possibility and a pathway to change. He pulled the dream out of our hearts and minds and put it into our hands. Maybe for the sake of our families, schools, workplaces, and communities, we should all be better about sharing our dreams. Perhaps even more importantly, maybe we should all be like Mahalia Jackson urging others along: “Tell them about the dream.” I had the pleasure of sitting and talking a few weeks ago with Bill Milliken. And, among the countless gems that began to flow when he started getting into the rhythm of the conversation, he dropped this: “If I am on an operating table, I don’t want collaborators. I want an integrated system!” With his sharp wit and wily twinkle in his eyes, Milliken is relentless in pushing us to “get it right” in our collective work for and with young people. This is what he has done and advocated for decades (it’s what makes him Bill Milliken!). His charm aside, I thought this quote was worth exploring a little further. So, I started thinking about the difference between collaboration and an integrated system. And, while there are certainly many specific differences to consider, I believe that, at its core, the difference is that of shared strategy (not to be confused merely with a shared strategic plan, strategic vision, strategic alignment, or any other narrow bastardizations of the concept of strategy). As collaborators, we typically bring 1 and 1 together and celebrate how we “strategically” made 2. To use another analogy, in collaboration, I have my puzzle piece and you have yours and we navigate around the edges a bit to see if we can “strategically” fit them together. But, collaboration is too often just that – around the edges – and generally happens downstream of our truly strategic organizational and institutional decisions. In other words, the critical decisions (who we serve, how, when, where, etc.) are already made by the time the collaboration tries to fit them together. Collaboration becomes a reactionary tactic attempting to overcome the lack of an actual integrated system! In an integrated system, we co-create in an ongoing manner our collective strategy, which guides and determines organizational and institutional decisions, key roles, responsibilities, and tactics. I work in this area or on this issue because it complements (not simply adds to) what you do and how you do it toward our common objective (also an element of strategy). An integrated system, therefore, requires constant communication, reflection, and learning so that together our 1 + 1 achieves the proverbial 3. Cynically, then, an integrated system comes at a cost: our work must actually be about our work, not just our organization or institution. Our work must be about the young person, for example, not whether or not I work in a school setting or an after-school setting. Let’s be honest, in most of our communities, the “systems of support” (or lack thereof) we have created for young people have been created because they work well for us as adults and the organizations we lead. Even in some of the best cases, our efforts represent an attempt to add things up for young people, but never really ask us to change what we are doing to make the system more complete. We generate plans of systems but claim expertise or blame funding for why someone else needs to change or do more, and not us. We rarely, if ever, achieve an integrated system at the level of shared strategy. We rarely, if ever, achieve the sort of integrated system that would actually work for our young people. Unfortunately, no amount of collaboration can overcome this reality. And, even more unfortunately, collaboration can obscure the weaknesses within the system by averaging them out. This, in turn, makes future efforts at a more integrated and strategic approach that much more complicated because we appear to be better than we actually are. It also makes it more difficult to identify and address where we are falling short. If I am on the operating table, I do hope my surgeon is part of an integrated system with the nurses and the doctor who diagnosed me. And, once there, I certainly hope the stellar work of my surgeon doesn’t obscure or average out the marginal work of my anesthesiologist! So, Bill, thanks for the analogy, the push to work smarter, and for ensuring the next time I have surgery that I will be completely scared-to-death! In a variety of workshops, whether around school climate, youth/student engagement, or even broader community work, I reference the following change model out of Harvard, which I actually discovered through the Forum for Youth Investment:
Change = Dissatisfaction x Vision x Plan Why is this simple model so powerful? At the simplest level, what happens when you have a zero for any of these elements? No change. It’s basic multiplication, but profound in that so many of our traditional change efforts are built on addition strategies. If we do this and then we get that then it will add up to change. If we add this resource…If we add this position…If we add this new frame for our work… Addition alone doesn’t generate real change. Change is multiplicative. The elements necessary for change are interdependent and exponential magnifiers of each other. So, why can’t we pull this simple multiplication together on a critical, and fairly universally concerning, issue like education reform? It shouldn’t be that hard, and, candidly, a lot of folks have been working really hard on it! We have built countless strategic and organizational plans focused on education from district-level reforms down to teacher evaluation and curriculum. We have crafted mission and vision statements for our community organizations and community collaborations to align around our schools’ vision and plans. We’ve brought in trainers, consultants, data wonks, and various other experts from out of town. We have invested billions of dollars in re-visioning high schools. We have paid millions to develop, implement, and evaluate new data-driven models. The list goes on and on. So, why do we rarely generate real change? Using the Harvard Change Model, we are left to reflect on our dissatisfaction. Now, it may seem ludicrous with the current outcries and the previously mentioned investments in education and education reform to wonder if we are really dissatisfied. With every media outlet in the country full of ideas, opinions, and impassioned rants about education, our dissatisfaction is obvious. Given the increased role of state and federal governments (not to mention the business sector) and the position of education reform in our local and national agendas, surely our collective dissatisfaction with the status quo is clear. At the individual level, I suspect all of us would describe ourselves as frustrated, sad, angry, and myriad other descriptors of dissatisfaction with the state of education in our communities and in this country. Surely, dissatisfaction isn’t the problem. But is it? In expressing our dissatisfaction, we too often focus on the work of others: teachers, principals, counselors, students, unions, community organizations, business, and policymakers (we all are focusing our dissatisfaction on each other). We point outward from our position and proclaim our righteous indignation at someone else’s inability to change, at their role in maintaining the status quo. We all join the chorus saying “something’s gotta change” with an implicit “but it’s not me”. I believe we are all part of the education system (as community system) in some form or fashion. So, if a critical mass is not truly dissatisfied with our own work (and not just the work of others) then there is not the real dissatisfaction required to generate change. There is only blame and subsequent defensiveness (and a lot of failed visions and plans). If all of us who claim dissatisfaction, inside the education system and out, actually changed our own practices, I wonder if it might add up to something? I learned in my first sculpture class in college that a three dimensional piece of sculpture communicates and interacts with its viewer in all three dimensions. (This seems somewhat obvious, I guess, but it’s not that simple.) In other words, a sculpture’s depth, width, and height (along with other elements like color, texture, and movement, that live on that depth, width, and height) each communicate based on the relative size, viewing position, and experience of the viewer as he engages the sculpture. So, if you are trying to communicate and create a relationship with a viewer through the experience of a sculpture, you had better consider it fully in three dimensions.
Herein lies a beautiful nugget of wisdom about life. We obviously live in (at least) three dimensions; so, our experiences and interactions all exist in (at least) three dimensions. (Time can be considered a fourth.) But, as we interact, process, and learn from our world, I wonder if we truly consider it in all three dimensions. Do we truly explore our world from all angles, or just continually process it from one vantage point, that of our own personal experience and comfort-level? Do we communicate in 3D? Do we observe in 3D? To push my personal development (I typically write these blogs to increase my own mindfulness), I propose a three dimensional frame for processing my communication, relationships, and experiences: Dimension 1: Direct experience - my experience of a relationship, image, event, circumstance, etc. This is the “I” dimension. Dimension 2: Divergent perspectives - others’ experiences of a relationship, image, event, circumstance, etc. The “you” dimension. Dimension 3: Determining the implications: The interactions between and implications of dimensions 1 and 2. The “we” dimension. To truly understand my direct experience, I must be willing and able to reflect on and analyze my own perceptions and responses to various stimuli. I need to be able to identify the emotions that are, or are not, involved in my experience. I need to understand what the experience means to me and how or why it either resonates or does not. I need to clarify the messages I receive as I understand them and see how they mesh with the messages I perceive to have been intended. Finally, I must try to identify what piece of myself I project on my perception of others’ intentions. Whether it is a personal relationship, a piece of art, a life event, or even a story or commercial on television, my experience is biased by who I am, how I understand the world, and even where I am at the given moment of the experience. It is neither objective nor absolute. This is why being open to the second dimension (divergent perspectives) is so critical: it’s the same complex web for the “other” experiencing the very same relationship, piece of art, life event, or television commercial. They bring all of their junk to it too! It is their “I” experience. If we are to communicate and relate genuinely, we must understand, or at least empathize with (we still don’t have to like), each other’s “I” experience and some of the individual bases for our respective understanding of that experience. In a world so desperately seeking political, economic, and moral truths, we have to realize that at its essence there is not ever a truly common experience; there is no fundamental truth at the level of human interaction. All perspectives and experiences are at some level divergent. The “I” experience and the “you” experience are never exactly the same. So, if we are to expand our lives to living in a second dimension, we must focus not merely on understanding the event, but understanding the experience of the event by others. So, let’s pretend for a moment that each of us is truly invested in understanding the other, committed to living in the second dimension. Now, we have to understand how our unique and divergent experiences impact the nature of our relationship, and in return, our subsequent experiences of dimensions 1 and 2. We have to determine the interactions between and implications of “I” and “you” on “we”. This third dimension is the space between you and I that, while dependent on each of us, also generates its own dynamics and has its own independent characteristics. Candidly, unless you live in complete isolation, the world of “we” is the “real” world, and most of the challenges of this “we” dimension lie in our failures to deeply engage the “I” and “you” dimensions. We often fail to acknowledge that this relational dimension is a new and distinct entity – a sculpture perhaps. While our lives are a process of constant ebb and flow and our identity and relational dimensions are always in flux, we can deepen who we are and how we are with the world by engaging a three dimensional process of communication and understanding. We can improve our communication, strengthen our understanding of the world around us, and even create new life through new relationships by being mindful that we do, in fact, live in 3D. In a previous post, I wrote about the relationship between responsibility and accountability and how each contributes to my understanding of our democracy, our economy, and our education practices. With this blog, I want to revisit the topic, but in much more personal and individual terms: So, picture a 12 year old allowed for the first time to spend the night at a friend’s house. As Mom pulls to the curb to drop me off and I open the car door, I hear: “Remember, you’re responsible for yourself. Make good choices.” Now, picture a 16 year old taking the car out on a Friday night for the first time and driving around friends who were still only 15. My key hits the house door and as it cracks to the outside air, electric with anticipated freedom: “Remember, you’re responsible for yourself. Make good choices.” Finally, picture an 18 year old taking his girlfriend to Senior Prom and with a curfew extension (past 12pm) for this special occasion. Tuxedo on, my Dad’s car key in hand, I make it as far as the sidewalk and hear: “Remember, you’re responsible for yourself. Make good choices.” How many times did I hear this refrain!? Obviously, at 35 it is still in my mind and is the cornerstone of my own sense of personal responsibility. Although as a teen I may have rolled my eyes hearing these words over and over again, I knew what Mom meant, and I knew that she was reminding me of a social contract we had. I got freedom and opportunity as long as I showed that I was responsible enough to handle it. And, I knew I would be held accountable if and when my responsibility lapsed. I also knew why. There was no question and no fight. I knew what was expected of me and I knew when I had failed those expectations. Candidly, with a teenage son, my Mom knew I would screw up. The question was how badly and how would I respond. But, what is critical in all of this is that my Mom’s message framed responsibility as an omnipresent driver of decision-making, and she made clear that almost everything boils down to a decision. Even if I chose to be irresponsible, I knew I was responsible for that choice. I couldn’t blame peer pressure. I couldn’t claim ignorance. Alternatively, it is also important to share what I did not hear from my Mom: “Remember, don’t smoke cigarettes! If I catch you then I will…” “Remember, don’t speed or drive recklessly! If I catch you then I will…” “Remember, don’t drink and don’t have sex! If I catch you then I will…” Mom knew that responsibility taught only in the shadow of accountability (or threat of punishment) lives in a narrow silo of a single cause and a single effect. As an element of decision-making, on the other hand, it can be a lifelong and life-wide skill. We talked about all of these issues (smoking, drinking, etc.) openly and then it was up to me to make the right decision. Most of the time, I did. Sometimes, I didn’t. So, at age 35, I am trying to understand and diagnose my Mom’s ability to instill a sense of responsibility in my siblings and me as teenagers. And, as best I can tell, responsibility only exists relationally with accountability and positive relationships. Try reflecting on your own experiences growing up, or even in your life today: A relationship without responsibility? Responsibility without any sense of accountability? Accountability without a relationship? (My experience says these don’t work.) But what is it that links these elements? What are the connectors? Relationships - Responsibility: These two are connected by effective communication and trust. It is pretty obvious for most of us that a relationship without trust is usually a pretty poor relationship. But, have we thought about how the quality of communication of our expectations, for example, impacts others’ sense of responsibility to us and to themselves? Have we communicated to our young people how valuable and important they are, how much we love them, how much we believe in them, what we expect of them, so that they feel responsible for honoring their own lives and as well as respecting those around them? Do our own actions model the responsibility we seek from them, so that they can trust us? Have we given them the chance to express what they expect from us? Responsibility – Accountability: These two are connected by logic and clarity. If I don’t understand the logic of what I am being held accountable for, I am not likely to feel responsible to it. If I understand it but I really don’t buy the logic behind it (and also am not buying the relationship), I am not likely to feel responsible to it. We must ensure that young people understand the logic behind our accountability and be clear (and repetitive) as to what the accountability is and why. And in doing so, we can help them own a sense of responsibility and accountability to themselves and not just to us. Accountability – Relationships: These two are connected by consistency and unconditional love. Accountability must be consistently and equitably (refer to trust) applied. If I screw up, I should be able to count on those who love me to hold me accountable. I also must know that I can be forgiven and that the love of those around me is unconditional. If I believe love is conditional, then I can be irresponsible all I want, and figure “well, I would have lost it at some point anyway.” If I know love will always be there, I have to make choices knowing I cannot break away from it or set it aside. If love is unconditional then I am unconditionally responsible to/for it. So, this is just a start. I am still seeking to understand and fulfill my responsibilities to myself and those around me. And, like all of us, I’m still trying to make good choices. A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of spending a couple of days with staff and youth of the Youth Activation Committee of Special Olympics Arizona. I was proud to have the opportunity to support their work by having the chance to facilitate a part of one of their meetings. For my work, our main goal was to get back to an understanding with the youth and adult coordinator of how working with Special Olympics and particularly Project UNIFY is not just something we do, but something grounded in who we are and core to our values system. It is something we live every day and go to sleep with every night. So I started the meeting by simply asking everyone what values being a part of Project UNIFY helped them live out. Why was the work so important to them? We went around the room and, of course, I was inspired by the sense of love and friendship and equity and justice articulated by these teens as well as the commitment of the adult staff. Incredible, really. However, one athlete, part of her school’s unified flag football team, who had been quite vocal up to this point had not yet responded. So, I stopped and asked if she had anything she would like to offer. Without a verbal response, she dropped her head and began writing, slowly and deliberately. The room was silent. She kept writing, slowly, deliberately. (How long do I give her? I have never worked with this young woman. This could go on for hours for all I know!) She kept writing, slowly, deliberately. (Are any of the other youth giving me an idea that it’s time to move ahead? Should I move on and come back to her? We really don’t have that much time!) No cues. The other youth were quiet and patiently waiting. So, I sat down and did the same. I tried not to watch for fear of her feeling any sort of pressure to hurry, but she was in a zone and really working with her thoughts. It wouldn’t have mattered. As she approached the end of the first page of notes, I again began to wonder just how long this could or should last. But, I waited. Finally, at the end of page one, she lifted her head. She started to speak and then got timid and lost her thoughts. Her previous confidence was suddenly gone. She was nervous, a bit confused. Her partner, also from her high school, softly reminded her to look at the notes she had just written. “Oh yeah.” She picked up her pad and began to read. She spoke of the value of friendship and sports and about how it helped organize her days (which was a very clear way she processed and understood the world, by her weekly calendar). She talked a bit about unified football; it was her first season. And then, after a small pause, she said something profound: “Project UNIFY is an action thing to do and includes students and teachers and other people.” Project UNIFY is “an action thing to do.” Project UNIFY involves everyone in her school. She nailed it. It was beautiful. It was real. It was also a statement that may never have happened in the pace and noise of our usual way of doing business. How many times have you been in a meeting when there were two or three good minutes of silent thinking? When no one giggled nervously? Looked around? At their watch? Checked their phone? When people sat there in the presence and fullness of silence? When was the last time you were in a class or a meeting or anywhere for that matter when your opinion was so valued that your peers were willing to sit silently until you could formulate your thoughts? However long it took!? And yet, it was this silence that gave this young woman power and voice. It was this silence that gave the rest of us humility. It gave her a chance to process and express her world with the skills that she has, not based on the rules and skills of everyone else, and not defined or minimized by the skills we all say she doesn’t have. And, it was this silence that allowed this gift to be shared with us. A gift from a young woman whose perspectives are too often dismissed because of intellectual disability, her profundity and spirit lost in the noise of activity when she was all about action. She was about action that included others in her work and in her sports and in her life – this was her core value. I am not sure how to write about silence, and I am not sure how and if I can convey the power of the moment and my appreciation of the young people who showed me the way. I will have the image forever in my mind of watching this young woman write her thoughts, and no amount of time spent waiting could have been more valuable than waiting. If only we could find the silence in our daily lives and relationships to be open to the genius around us and to create the space for all forms of love and life and genius to come in. We may even find that this silence is the path to becoming our best selves. We might just learn that silence is itself “an action thing to do.” I had the honor of speaking at a youth conference hosted and led by young people involved with “I’m Determined” in the state of Virginia (www.Imdetermined.org). I knew the focus of the work and leadership development was on young people with disabilities and that “I’m Determined” is committed to ensuring that these young people develop their voices, understand their power, and achieve self-determination. The experience was incredible; the youth were amazing; the adult staff appropriately supportive without claiming too much power; I left inspired and reflective. Yes, I met some phenomenal young people - powerful leaders - who also had disabilities. From blindness to dyslexia, from Williams Syndrome to Cerebral Palsy, from ADHD to Aspbergers, these young people redefined traditional notions of individual leadership. But, my inspiration didn’t come from any individual, but from who and how they all were together. So, what happens when you bring 130 young people with disabilities together, many of whom had never been to such a conference, some of whom had never even separated from their parents for hours at a time? What happens when you cram these 130 young people, many in motorized chairs, a few with vision impairments and others with an array of physical walking supports and bulky contraptions into a small hotel ballroom full of tables and chairs and bags and personal items on the floor? What happens when some non-verbal, some partially verbal, and some fully verbal youth “discuss” what leadership means and how they can become better leaders? What happens when it is meal time and there is a buffet line and some do not have the physical capacity to get their food by themselves, much less carry their food back to the ballroom and then eat it? What about the young man walking in circles in the corner? What about the young woman who cannot tolerate the sound of the lights in the room (which the rest of us could not even hear)? What happens when you turn all organizing and facilitation of all of this over to a subset of these same youth? Beauty. What sounds like a logistical impossibility was a beautiful manifestation of community, and I don’t mean “disability community”; I mean community in its ideal. When everyone has a disability, no one has a disability. When the assumption is that everyone could use a little support, everyone offers a little support. When we understand that everyone communicates and learns differently, we listen and teach differently. Every young person at this meeting stood ready to help someone else. So, when something was in the way of a motorized chair, someone else leaned down to get it. When someone got in line for food and couldn’t serve themselves, someone else helped them first before getting her own. When someone needed help writing, speaking, hearing, or just calming themselves in this foreign environment, another young person made it all happen. The day went off without a hitch. If only I could be so in tune with others and they with me. I’m determined to be so. I was recently looking back at a piece that a friend of mine named Thomas Knauer wrote in graduate school about the three components of the self: I, me, and myself. Thomas had an uncanny ability of toeing the line between the philosophically brilliant and the painfully inane, and I always admired that about him. So, please read the excerpt from Thomas’ piece below, with this line in mind:
“The self is composed of three things: I, me, and myself…always compresent, never identical…I can speak to myself – in fact can also speak to me – but neither can respond; only I have the ability to talk back…I can be me, myself; but it is left to I alone to be by myself…It is myself that extends throughout I and me; the blind, deaf and immobile element which is myself alone which may know what I am and what I see in me, but will never give up that secret to me.” If this makes your head turn or your eyes roll a bit, just enjoy that sensation! Art school is a funny place. It dawned on me in revisiting his writing that Thomas accidentally hit on a leadership lesson that is both counter-intuitive and ideally suited for our moment in history. While I am tired of the phrase “these economic times,” we are in fact in a challenging and highly intense moment of history for our country. Economically, educationally, socially, racially, and religiously we are as a country at a crossroads, and as a people at an almost infinite number of individual crossroads in this regard. Given these challenges, now, more than at any time in my life, we are also looking for everyone else to take the blame for these problems. In other words, if it weren’t for the “other” we wouldn’t have to face these crossroads. Life would be just fine. As a result, as leaders, too many of us are also seeking to avoid that blame more than seeking to make effective change or even to make an effective decision. We are thus making strategic inaction, rather than effective action, the surest path of leadership. I don’t really feel like I need to explain how this is working with our elected officials. It’s almost too obvious. You can just read any account of our upcoming elections or, perhaps, on a lighter note, consider the element of political reality supporting Stephen Colbert’s satirical blaming of President Obama for the rampant infestation of bedbugs in many of our major cities. In another arena, however, the blame is more difficult to laugh at. Our education leaders (teachers, principals, unions, policymakers, etc.) can and do pretty effectively blame each other for the current state of education. But, we rarely, if ever, hear any of them take even a portion of the blame on themselves. The emotional, personal, and wide-ranging negative impact on children and youth make blame easier to push and more difficult to claim. Additionally, in many of our communities, the frustrations of the economy, the state of young people, and many other such issues have also raised the finger-pointing levels to an all-time high. We are pointing at and blaming juvenile justice who is pointing at and blaming schools who are pointing at and blaming nonprofits who are pointing at and blaming families who are pointing at and blaming government who is pointing at and blaming…Well, I think you get my point. Again, in such an environment, each is naturally left with more immediate incentive to avoid being blamed than to create meaningful change. So, here is my call to stop the finger pointing. Here is my request for all of us to “reboot” our notion of leadership. I am offering a model of leadership that starts with the ONE and ONLY thing we can truly control in all of this: our self (made up of I, me, and myself). The Three Components of Self-Centered Leadership I: “I” is the doer and the speaker and the communicator. I is the teacher. I is the first-person component of leadership. I is the “rational actor” of the economy and the power-consuming and potentially power sharing “front-man” (or woman) of organizations and communities. I is the one that builds leadership skills and seeks advancement. I is acknowledged as the reason one gets a promotion, a raise, or wins an award. Me: “Me” is the receiver of information and the listener to the I. Me is the learner. Me is the object component of leadership. Me is the glue of social capital, of trust, and of respect. Me asks questions. Me gives power to the I of leadership. Me seeks to build connections through empathy because it knows what it’s like to be an object. Me is the “behind-the-scenes” person, the intangible force that makes leadership possible. Me is difficult to quantify but easy to feel. Myself: “Myself” is the reflective (reflexive) component of leadership that requires an antecedent – or prior action or presence. Myself reflects on the actions of I and me but does not act independently. Myself works alone and asks questions and seeks deeper understanding of I and me. Myself is the driver of growth and continuous improvement that I will likely get credit for. No one else can ever know myself. So, my request is for us all to put our blame fingers down and spend some time being self-centered; to spend more time focused on I, me, and myself. How much time and effort in a day do we spend in the “I” space, acting, speaking, doing? How much time and effort in a day do we spend in the “me” space, observing, listening, learning? How much time and effort in a day do we spend in the “myself” space, reflecting, processing, being self critical? If we all could commit to a better balance of these three components of the self, of self-centered leadership, we wouldn’t have the time or inclination to seek an external target for blame or to obsess about avoiding being blamed. We would instead be focused on how we (as a collective of I, me, and myself) become solutions, how we become our best and most productive selves. Imagine if we spent one third of our day or our week dedicated to each I, me, and myself! As a result, imagine if I didn’t spend so much time focused on fixing and blaming you! Just imagine the possibility of self-centered leadership! NOTE: The following are a few terms that “self-centered” leadership should NOT be confused with: selfish, egocentric, self-absorbed, all-about-me, self-aggrandizing, self-righteous…you get the point. |
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