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For me, that strong back is grounded confidence and boundaries. The soft front is staying vulnerable and curious.
Armored Leadership Being a Knower and Being Right
Having to be the “knower” or always being right is heavy armor.
needing to know everything is pretty miserable for the knowers and everyone around them. It leads to distrust, bad decisions, unnecessary rumbles, and unproductive conflict.
to be a knower is driven by shame and for some even trauma. Being the knower can save people in hard situations, and it’s easy to buy into the belief that being a knower is the only value we bring to relationships and work.
Daring Leadership Being a Learner and Getting It Right There are three strategies that I’ve seen work to transform always knowing into always learning
You’re often quick with answers, which can be helpful, but not as helpful as having the right questions, which is how you’ll grow as a leader.
reward great questions and instances of “I don’t know, but I’d like to find out” as daring leadership behaviors. The big shift here is from wanting to “be right” to wanting to “get it right.”
Like most hurtful comments and passive-aggressiveness, cynicism and sarcasm are bad in person and even worse when they travel through email or text.
the word sarcasm is from the Greek word sarkazein, meaning “to tear flesh.” Tear. Flesh.
Cynicism and sarcasm often mask anger, fear, feelings of inadequacy, and even despair.
If what’s under cynicism and sarcasm is despair, the antidote is cultivating hope.
According to the research of C. R. Snyder, hope isn’t a warm and fuzzy feeling; he actually defines it as a cognitive emotional process that has three parts.13 This is a process that most of us, if we’re lucky, are taught growing up, though it can be learned at any time: The three parts are goal, pathway, and agency. We can identify a realistic goal (I know where I want to go), and then we can figure out the pathway to get there, even if it’s not a straight line and involves a Plan B and scrappiness (I know I can get there because I’m persistent and I will keep trying in the face of setbacks
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Often, people’s cynicism is related to despair. As the theologian Rob Bell explains, “Despair is the belief that tomorrow will be just like today.”
7. Armored Leadership Using Criticism as Self-Protection As Roosevelt said, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.”
I will drill you down on exactly who makes up your we.
You got a mouse in your pocket?”
you aren’t allowed to criticize without offering a point of view in return—
Martin Luther King, Jr., defined power as the ability to achieve purpose and effect change.
When people don’t understand where they’re strong and where they deliver value for the organization or even for a single effort, they hustle. And not the good kind of hustle. The kind that’s hard to be around because we are jumping in everywhere, including where we’re not strong or not needed, to prove we deserve a seat at the table. When we do not understand our value, we often exaggerate our importance in ways that are not helpful,
sometimes we overlook our own strengths because we take them for granted and forget that they’re special.
Ken Blanchard, the author of the 1982 bestselling leadership guide The One Minute Manager, explains, “Catch people doing things right.”17 It’s much more powerful than collecting behaviors that are wrong.
When we operate from compliance and control, we also have a tendency to hold on to power and authority, and push only responsibility down.
Accountability and Success Checklist: T—Who owns the task? A—Do they have the authority to be held accountable? S—Do we agree that they are set up for success (time, resources, clarity)? C—Do we have a checklist of what needs to happen to accomplish the task? We also borrowed the Scrum technique of “What does ‘done’ look like?” when we assigned tasks,
“Sure. What does done look like?”
Same scenario, but instead of saying “Sure. What does done look like?” Murdoch says “Sure. Let’s paint done.”
Paint done. For us, it’s significantly more helpful than “What does done look like?” because it unearths stealth expectations and unsaid intentions, and it gives the people who are charged with the task tons of color and context. It fosters curiosity, learning, collaboration, reality-checking, and ultimately success.
Paint done. BEN: I’m trying to make the point that the shift in how we format our invoices actually
true belonging: True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness.20 True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are. The greatest barrier to true belonging is fitting in or changing who we are so we can be accepted.
many people lead from a place of hurt and smallness, and they use their position of power to try to fill that self-worth gap.
IF YOU WANT to see the ego go to DEFCON 1, get anywhere close to shame. What makes embracing vulnerability feel the most terrifying is how taking off the armor and exposing our hearts can open us up to experiencing shame.
in our family being sick is lazy, and if you’re tough enough, you can walk off anything. Trust me when I tell you that no one who lives by this loves it, but the shame is so enveloping that it’s hard to break free. Unlearning this belief has been one of the hardest and most painful lessons of my life, and a battle I have to constantly refight, given the culture’s reinforcement of it.
We judge in areas where we’re most susceptible to shame, and we judge people who are doing worse than we are in those areas.
Emotional literacy, in my opinion, is as critical as having language. When we can’t name and articulate what’s happening to us emotionally, we cannot move through it.
emotional literacy is also a prerequisite for empathy, shame resilience, and the ability to reset and rise after a fall.
In a world of emotional literacy, we would be able to recognize and name between thirty and forty emotions in ourselves and others.
communicating our understanding of the emotions, can feel like the biggest risk because we can get it wrong. And not if but when we are off base, we need the courage to circle back. In fact, as long as we show up with our whole hearts, pay attention, and stay curious, we can course-correct. This is why therapists are frequently stereotyped as saying “What I hear you saying is …” It’s a check-in that allows someone to say, “Nope. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m not sad. I’m pissed off.”
in non-therapisty language, you could say: “I’m sorry about the project assignment. That sucks and must be so frustrating. Want to talk about it?” This question tells your colleague that you’re willing to “go there” and rumble openly about what they’re feeling.
This exchange alone builds the connection and alignment that we need to have a meaningful, trust-building, and even healing conversation.
Shame and grief are two examples of emotions that are hard to fully express, so we turn to anger or silence. This is an easy concept to understand, for one reason: The vast majority of us find it easier to be mad than hurt. Not only is it easier to express anger than it is to express pain, our culture is more accepting of anger.
Anger is easier to express then other emotions
empathy is first: I take the perspective of another person, meaning I become the listener and the student, not the knower. Second: I stay out of judgment. And third and fourth: I try to understand what emotion they’re articulating and communicate my understanding of that emotion.
Kristin Neff. Neff describes mindfulness as “taking a balanced approach to negative emotions so that feelings are neither suppressed nor exaggerated ….
mindfulness can get on my nerves sometimes, so I opt for paying attention. Neff’s findings on mindfulness, especially the piece on not overidentifying with or exaggerating our feelings, are completely aligned with what we found in our work.
WHAT EMPATHY LOOKS LIKE
empathic miss. Everyone knows what that feels like—when you share something with someone that is personal and vulnerable, like a struggle—or even something exciting or happy—and you don’t feel heard, seen, or understood. It’s a sinking feeling, where you feel exposed and sometimes right on the edge of shame.
Sympathy. If Suzanne had said, “I’m so sorry. You poor thing.”
The two most powerful words when someone’s in struggle are “Me too.”
“Me too” says I may not have had the exact same experience as you, but I know this struggle, and you are not alone.
Sympathy says Wow, that’s bad, I feel so sorry for you. I don’t know or understand what your experience is like, but I’ll grant you that it looks pretty bad and I don’t want to know.
Empathy is a hard skill to learn because mastery requires practice, and practice means you’ll screw it up big-time more than once. But that’s how practice works.
