The Modern Leader

I’ve run this simulation dozens of times. Imagine a room full of some of the most social justice, human-centered, empathically trained individuals you’ve ever met. We break in to small groups and they are told that “Congratulations! Based on your past record of commitment to justice and equity, you have been hand selected to help the UN design a pilot of the ideal society as a model for the future of nation building.”

Each group gets a set of shared instructions, with team goals and a budget. Each individual also gets their own personal instructions based on their character, as well as a line-item budget specific to their character’s expertise that tells them information that their counterparts don’t know, for example “if you build X roads, 30% of the people will have easy access to hospitals; if you build Y roads, 100% will”. Each character is a generally upstanding person who has done laudable things, but, as in real life, they also each have their own personal agenda.

The groups get a number of hours to design this society, but almost immediately, the conversation becomes a negotiation about budget-allocation and positioning to achieve their personal agenda items. Only once in all the times that I’ve run this, has a group stopped at the beginning and said, “we should come up with a name and vision for our country, agree on our shared values, and develop this new society with an eye always towards those principles first.”

During the debrief, the realization of how far the participants were from espousing their values in an environment that was meant to be values-driven is always a formative and eye-opening experience. I would know, I based the above simulation off of a similar, but not so touchy-feely, Harvard Business School simulation called Mt. Everest, which I won handily at the expense of my teammates, only to feel a lot of shame about it afterwards.

It’s easy to speak aspirationally about the things we say we believe in – inclusivity, empathy, (insert whatever value you want here) – but the chasm between what we say and what we do is often wide. One of the hardest things to do in life is actually live our values.

If my first anecdote wasn’t convincing enough, the famous “From Jerusalem to Jericho” study spells out our cognitive dissonance more scientifically. Psychologists asked 67 seminary students studying to be priests (so, presumably, a group of people who are values driven), to deliver a talk on the Good Samaritan, a parable from the Bible about helping others in need. Students were randomly assigned into two groups, hurried and unhurried. The “hurried” students were told they were running late for the talk, while the “unhurried” were told that they had time to get there. Along the students’ way to give their talk, unbeknownst to them, the researchers placed a man who is clearly in distress and in need of help. For the group of students who were in a hurry, only 10% stopped to help the man, in the unhurried group, 63%. If we live our values only when it’s easy and convenient, are those truly our values? And what does it actually mean to live a values-driven life?

This phenomenon doesn’t only happen on the individual level, it also exists on the institutional level. One of my favorite Stanford Social Innovation Review pieces, “Non-Profit Paradox,” articulates what so many of us who have worked in the non-profit world have experienced – that non-profits often internally perpetuate the social ills they are externally trying to address. For instance, the health organization that offers it’s employees terrible health coverage; the domestic violence organization that has an abusive work environment for it’s employees; the organization that promotes inclusivity but has alienating in-group cliques to get promoted.

Principles Meet Practice

So how do we reconcile our cognitive dissonance? I think the first thing we need to admit is that living our values is hard. I talk about a lot of different values in my writing, so I’ll use the example of curiosity and openness, which I’ve explored extensively. I would like to imagine that when approached with someone I disagree with, my immediate inclination, based on my values of curiosity and openness, would be to be exactly that – to be open and curious with them. But the truth is, that my immediate inclination is still to want to retreat to my comfort zone of “I’m right and you’re wrong/evil/stupid.” I try very hard to catch myself, and say “hey, Jenn, this is your time to practice your values,” and sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t, and sometimes I catch myself, but still have a hard time being open and curious the way I would like to be.

You’ve probably seen the person who says that they value getting different voices at the table only to then make unilateral decisions, or the person who says they value forgiveness but can’t let things go. They all probably do truly believe that these are things they value, and would be just as surprised as the participants from the earlier simulation example, to be told that they weren’t, in fact, living their stated values.

Which leads me to the second thing we need to admit, which is that we (yes, you, too) don’t always live our values. We can all point to times in our lives where we have talked about something that is important to us, but when it comes down to making a decision, we don’t actually use our values as our guide.

But when we are beating ourselves up about not always living our values, the third thing we need to admit is that the truth is, living your values can be exhausting. It takes an acute awareness and a policing-like intentionality, and this is because living our values doesn’t come naturally. Our knee jerk reaction is many times not in line with the larger things we believe about how we should be and how the world should be. That is because our default reaction is often going to be the easiest or most painless way to get something done, while our values-driven decision often ends up being the hardest thing that takes the most amount of work. So it will always be easier to say, and so much harder to do. But we all know how “do as I say, not as I do” ends – with a great chasm between where we want to be and where we actually are.

In order to be an effective leader, working on bridging this chasm is important in order to really know who and how you are in the world. Defining what your values are and being able to notice when you are living those values and when you aren’t gives you a power in awareness to actually work on being the leader that you aspire to be. Working on bridging this chasm in ourselves is also important because we are always modeling. The behaviors we exhibit are seen and copied. In writing and in acting, there’s the old adage “show, don’t tell.” I think that’s true in leadership too. We all admire the general who is on the frontlines with his troops or the boss who is willing to take on a portion of the busy work because they’ve said everyone has to do their fair share. They are models for us, and we in turn, model them, and others notice, and that helps good, but hard, behaviors continue.

So, when you’re answering the question “what type of person do I want to be?” stating answer isn’t enough, you need to create a plan for how you are actually going to live it, otherwise, as you can see, it’s very easy not to.

Practicing leadership-oriented mindfulness allows you to create an environment of intentionality in the way you make decisions, interact with others, and view the world.  You may have rolled your eyes at the oft over-used term, but while the recent commercialization and commodification of mindfulness has unfortunately diluted its meaning to the general public, that doesn’t take away its intrinsic value and worth – if you practice it mindfully.

It’s important here to distinguish leadership-oriented mindfulness from personal mindfulness and collective mindfulness, also important practices, that will be covered at a later date. Leadership-oriented mindfulness is noticing, understanding why, and acting upon as part of the practice of being a more effective leader. It can be helpful to think of two buckets of leadership-oriented mindfulness, internal mindfulness, or decision-making self-awareness, which I’ll explore more in this piece, and external mindfulness, or the realization and appreciation of others as entities in and of themselves as well as understanding how others experience you, which I’ll explore in a future article.

Viktor Frankl, psychologist, holocaust survivor, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, talks about the space between stimulus and response, and how in that space lies the power to choose our response. Cultivating mindfulness allows us to access that space; allows us to choose our response; allows us to be intentional in our actions.

I recently participated in a mindfulness coaching program with Executive Dharma, and they synthesized down those automatic responses into three categories – complying, protecting, and controlling. Their idea is that in interactions, our innate reactions fall into 1) complying, because our sense of self-worth and security come from being liked and accepted, conforming, and living up to others’ expectations and so our reaction is to agree and go along with; 2) protecting, because our self-worth and security comes from being right and so our reaction is to be aloof, cynical, hyper-rational, superior; and 3) controlling, because our self-worth and security comes from accomplishment, personal achievement, power, and control and so our reaction is to try to take matters into our own hands.

They argue that we default into these categories when working with people, and that while it’s not necessarily a bad thing to make a choice based on being in these categories, it’s important that you realize why you are making the choice to begin with.  Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize winning founder of behavioral economics and author of Thinking Fast and Slow  (whose On Being interview last week is a must) would agree that our “fast-thinking” reactive response is at the opposite end of our “slow-thinking” proactive response and bringing an awareness to that dichotomy is essential. One helpful mindfulness practice in your interactions is to try to notice and see what you do that is an intentional choice versus what you default to because it is natural and comfortable. The way you react might be the right way to go, but did you actually mindfully choose to react that way?

The thing about intentionally though, is that in a vacuum it holds no intrinsic value. Daniel Goleman, guru of emotional intelligence, recently argued that without emotional intelligence, mindfulness is mostly meaningless. And I tend to agree. Being grounded in the present doesn’t mean very much on its own, there needs to be a values-based “why” behind our intentionality in order for it to be relevant. One practical way to practice the merging of mindfulness and emotional intelligence is through reflection and discernment.

Harvard Business Review recently published a great article about regaining the lost art of reflection, defining the practice as “examin(ing) underlying assumptions, core beliefs, and knowledge, while drawing connections between apparently disparate pieces of information.” It’s particularly easy not to make time to reflect and to justify not making that time in our age of hyper-stimulation and over-consumption. But reflecting is what ties leadership-oriented mindfulness all together. Being mindful in the moment works in the short-term for immediate reaction, but reflection as a part of your mindfulness practice is what cultivates long-term, future-oriented strategic thinking that can shift from being reactive to being proactive.

All benefits aside, we can’t just throw around mindfulness as a platitude and expect it to solve all our leadership woes. Practicing mindfulness is actually really hard work that takes commitment and intentionality. Practicing mindfulness also doesn’t mean that you are always going to make the right decisions, or that it will save you from failure, perhaps at best, it will help you fail better. What it will do is help you slow down, allow you to notice, create the conditions for you to make decisions based on intention, and create the space for you to reflect on those decisions to make better and more informed future decisions.

There are also a lot of different ways to practice mindfulness, from creating moments of silent meditation, to mindful practices employed in meetings, to finding totems that remind you to pay attention (at Thich Nhat Hahn’s monastery they prime you to remember to pay attention every time you hear a bell), and there are many different ways to integrate reflection practices into your routine, from morning journaling to critical incident reflection to implementing frameworks for debriefing situations. Figuring out how to integrate mindfulness into your life in a way that works for you will help you to regularly make it a practice you employ.

Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know. People who change their mind a lot are often called indecisive, are branded as uncertain or that they “waffle.” These qualities are associated with a lack of confidence, or even worse, a lack of leadership. Political careers have been ruined because candidates have been branded as “flip-floppers”; business careers have been tainted because a CEO came in saying they were going to do things one way and ended up doing them another. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes this criticism is more than warranted. But the culture behind our reaction to someone changing his or her mind is dangerous.

By creating or continuing to perpetuate a culture that demands “consistency” and criticizes changing our minds, we risk people not only neglecting to be introspective and analytical about their choices, it also keeps people on the same wrong path because they are too afraid to admit that they have discovered that another path is better.

Why are we so fearful of the openness and curiosity it requires to cultivate a culture where changing one’s mind is acceptable? Why is this considered courageous instead of what is to be expected in a non-static world? Part of it is that we associate our decisions with our identity. In a way, this makes sense, as we have convictions and we feel a certain necessity to stick to them. But imagine if you still believed the same things about the world that you did when you were a kid. Why would anyone, when thinking rationally, believe that what they believed at the outset of learning something, or the first conclusion they made about something, would be the best and most accurate way to think about it? And yet we hold our beliefs to be unwaveringly true, and in the face of opposition, so many times, rather than considering the contrary, we only hold on tighter.

Admitting you were wrong, or changing your mind, is perhaps the strongest you could ever show yourself to be when it comes to leadership. To be able to say – I thought one thing. Then I learned something new. And now I think something different – shows that you are thoughtful, iterative, and understand complexities. As the world changes, shouldn’t we continue to grow and learn and change our mind as new information presents itself that there are better ways?

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t make decisions, that everything should be thrown into disarray because people keep changing their mind all the time and can’t make a final decision. It just means, be open, be iterative, be curious, don’t be so sure of yourself, and admit when you’re wrong, and change.

 “That’s your responsibility as a person, as a human being — to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don’t contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you’re not thinking.” – Malcolm Gladwell

Practice: Challenge yourself to look at all sides of a decision, even when you think for sure you know the right answer. Even if this is something that you’ve already decided upon a long time ago, revisit, and see if you still believe now what you believed then and if there is evidence to back up a better decision than the one you made. Allow and encourage others to do the same, and do not think of people as unreliable if they come to you and say that they have changed their mind.