Brought to you by Jeff Thoren, DVM  

As a leader facing difficult challenges, how do you sustain yourself?  How do you keep from sabotaging yourself by mismanaging your own hungers, by failing to discipline your own needs for control and for certainty, for importance, for recognition, or for intimacy?  How do you anchor yourself?  How do you remember who you are and what you want to protect and conserve at the same time that you are engaged in a process that’s buffeting you and tossing you around? 

It’s critically important for leaders to learn to sustain themselves so they can come through the process unbroken and unbowed, with their spirit intact.  Part of doing this is to work intentionally at maintaining an open heart.

Here’s this month’s feature ...

Leading with an Open Heart by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky

From --  Leader to Leader, No. 26, Fall 2002

Highlights from the article:

• After years of learning lessons in the “school of hard knocks” and accumulating scars, most of us develop a set of defenses to protect ourselves.  We buy into the common myth that you cannot survive without developing a thick skin.  But that diminishes us; it squeezes the juice out of our soul.  We lose our capacity for innocence, curiosity, and compassion.  In a sense, our hearts close.
    

• With a closed heart, our innocence turns to cynicism.  We dress this up, of course, because we don’t want to see ourselves -- and certainly don’t want others to see us -- as cynical.  So we dress cynicism up as realism.  We’re not cynical, we’re just realistic!

• The innocence and naivete of an open heart enable us to see things, to be alert to new, emerging realities that other people won’t see because they think they already know the answers.  We live in an age of expertise, where people pride themselves on knowing rather than on being naïve.  This can be a real trap for leaders in today’s organizations.  The toughest challenges that groups, organizations, and communities face are hard precisely because they don’t lend themselves to pat answers and quick fixes.  The word naïve has the same root as the words genius, ingenuity, and Renaissance.  And so we think of naivete as a juvenile quality, but it is also a critical quality for a genius.  It is a critical quality for being open to new possibilities and staying hopeful about new possibilities.
    

• With a closed heart, our curiosity turns to arrogance.  We deceive ourselves into thinking that we’re not actually arrogant ... we just have authoritative knowledge that others don’t happen to possess.  If we are too proud of our authoritative knowledge, we simply reproduce the world in the image we know from our past.

• The curiosity of an open heart is critical because without maintaining doubt, we can’t stay open to changing realities; we can’t be open to hearing what the more naïve people around us are saying.  Those people who pride themselves on their curiosity are frequently marginalized in an organization or on a team, because even a genius gets it right only 30% of the time at best.  So these curious and creative individuals, the people who ask naïve but radical questions, run the risk of getting pushed aside because they can be the source of inefficiency.
    

• With a closed heart, our compassion turns into callousness.  We dress up and cloak our callousness by calling it the thick skin of wisdom.

• The compassion of an open heart allows us to understand the stakes that we are asking others to give up.  The work of adaptive change is emotional work and requires what Daniel Goleman has described as emotional intelligence.  It requires an open heart to respect and appreciate the pains of change that we are asking people to endure.  And we must develop the capacity to receive people’s anger and frustration with an open heart.  This capacity is a great gift to people in an organization in which painful adjustments need to be made.
    

• Maintaining an open heart allows us to be an inspiration for others as we reflect the delights of life, the blessings of life, and the gift of being alive.

For the full text article, go to ...
http://www.leadertoleader.org/knowledgecenter/L2L/fall2002/heifetz.html

Reflections on the Rituals of Wise Leaders

According to author Robin Sharma, leadership is not about the prestige of your title but the quality of your character.  And great leaders spend their days helping those around them manifest their highest potential while they work towards a vision that adds value to the world at large.

Here are four of Sharma’s tips on liberating more of your leadership potential:

1. Understand that, at the end of the day, leadership is all about relationships.  People will not follow you if they don’t trust you.  Showing leadership in your work means that building high-trust, high-touch relationships is Job #1.

2. Remember that leaders are learners who strive for mastery over mediocrity.  Leaders are hungry to learn.  So spend time daily refining your talents and reading from great books.  Take time weekly to reflect on the way you are conducting yourself and make the needed course corrections so the next week builds on the previous one.  Understand that the quality of your life ultimately comes down to the quality of the choices you make every minute of every hour of every day.  As humans, your highest personal endowment is the ability to choose your response to any given event.

3. Stop doing what is easy and focus on doing what is right.  When you exercise the courage and strength of character to do what your heart tells you is the right thing to do in every instance, rather than doing what is easy, you will raise the quality of your professional and personal life to a whole new level. 

4. Know that the time is now.  If you don’t act on life, life has a habit of acting on you.  Great leaders don’t wake up one day in the twilight of their lives, and wonder what could have been.  Stop putting off living or just going through the motions.  As Elisabeth Kubler-Ross said: “It is only when we know and understand that we have a limited time on earth -- and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up -- that we begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.”

Source: The CEO Refresher (www.refresher.com)

Next Month

One reason that visionary leadership is in short supply today is the value our society places on one particular kind of capital -- material capital.  For leadership to inspire long-term, sustainable enterprises, it needs to pursue two other forms of capital as well: social and spiritual.  These three types of capital resemble the layers in a wedding cake.  Material capital is the top layer, social capital lies in the middle, and spiritual capital rests on the bottom, supporting all three.  Next month, we’ll explore spiritually intelligent leadership.

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