Though the Arc of Time is complex, you teach yourself to perceive it, assess and understand it, and then nimbly shape it.
Balancing Across the Arc of Time
Your practice of meta-leadership is a complex exercise in balancing time. Not every decision, person, action, or operation has the same value. Herein lie your difficult meta-leadership calculations across the Arc of Time. What are your priorities? What happens now? What can wait?
This balancing is a continual activity and an ongoing quest. Spend your day on one activity and you have less time for others. Attract a new client and you have a critical question: do I expand time by hiring staff or recalibrate time by adjusting workloads? You balance resources, personalities, options, and investments along a continuum of priorities.
You lead in complex, dynamic environments where change is the norm. The balance you achieve is therefore temporary. Almost as soon as your practice is in balance, you are out of balance again. The challenge is to adapt, recalibrate, and adjust. Your job is to meld all your priorities into a workable, balanced arrangement.
This understanding of balance and balancing informs your meta-leadership thinking and practices. In Dimension One, the person, you balance individuals’ emotions, attitudes, words, and actions, both those of others and your own. You likewise seek balance in Dimension Two, the situation. How will the velocity and direction of all the forces and counterforces affect your balance? For Dimension Three, connectivity, you link the activities of different silos and constituencies. In promoting connectivity, you have to balance the timing to get everyone together on the same schedule.
The presence or absence of balance is apparent through your meta-leadership lens. When people’s activities and productivity are in balance, your interactions are smooth, engagement is high, and there is unity of effort. When that balance is off, people squabble for resources, priorities, and attention.
TSA Administrator Peter Neffenger faced the challenge at airports of balancing security and time. As you read in Chapter 12, there was significant conflict within the aviation industry over the long security wait lines. After the Brussels bombings, Neffenger realized that time had become his adversary: long wait lines at airports were presenting large and dangerous soft targets to terrorists. He met this challenge by turning time into an ally. He leveraged the urgency of this new danger to recruit the airlines and airports to solve the wait-line crisis together. This meta-leadership accomplishment turned old adversaries into allies and partners.
Your balancing objective is to guide people toward mutual success. You engage them in a coalition of the willing who are clear on the current state and have a strategy and plan to achieve a desired future state. What is broken and in need of a fix? What is waiting to be accomplished? Over the Arc of Time, manage your progress toward driving high achievement and sustaining it.
Life is filled with situations, some great and others awful. Victories and successes are fun, triumphant, and encouraging, while failures are disappointing and discouraging. Time is a factor in all of them. Only time will tell what is lasting and what is fleeting.
Naturally, it is far more difficult to rise above adversity than to celebrate successes. Loved ones die. People get divorced. Poor decisions are taken. Start-ups fail. Bankruptcies are declared. Hurricanes and tornadoes rip through communities. Illnesses wreak havoc. Mistakes are made. Accidents upend dreams and alter lives. Processing the lessons of adversity over time, however, builds an essential human quality: resilience. The truly resilient bounce forward through adversity to emerge stronger than ever, having absorbed insights, discovered strengths, and learned about themselves and the people around them. By virtue of the experience, they are better able to cope the next time they are hit.
Time has distinct qualities, depending on how old you are. Time is expectant for a twenty- or thirty-year-old who’s looking forward to launching adult life and a career. A fifty- or sixty-year-old’s life and career reflect ample acquired knowledge and a growing sense of legacy. Forty-year-olds sit at the middle of the trajectory of the human Arc of Time, benefiting from both their experience and their anticipation. These different views of time affect what feels like a long or short amount of time to you, what matters to you and what doesn’t. As a meta-leader, you are probably bringing together people at these different stages of life with their varying agendas and priorities.
Resilience develops through these different perches in time. No matter what the challenge, resilience takes time. Time to heal, learn, and change. What is a crisis for one person may be a welcome and solvable challenge for another person. What might be a long-overdue transformation for one is a feared disruption for another. As you lead, your meta-view helps you weave together the diverse perspectives of different generations and different experiences.
Your life is a series of transitions through Arcs of Time: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, retirement, and whatever comes next. Each phase shapes you and signals your future.
We met Jirayut “New” Latthivongskorn while he was a student in our Harvard leadership class. New grasped his sense of purpose early in life and conveyed it to others. He’s someone whose life mission found him, not the other way around. Despite setbacks, he found the resilience to keep going.
New’s is a classic immigrant story with a familiar theme: personal dreams that collided with public policy obstacles. At nine years old, along with his parents and two siblings, he arrived in the United States from Thailand. They moved into a one-bedroom California apartment. Working long hours in a Thai restaurant, his parents urged New to study and work hard to get ahead.
Not long after arriving, the family faced a wrenching decision: return to Thailand or remain beyond the valid date of their visa. While the family did not fully understand the implications of staying, they did know they wanted a better future. They saw their Arc of Time, particularly for the children, stretching forward in the United States. “Will be” outweighed “was” and the risks of “is.” They opted to stay.
Young and ambitious, New learned early about the contentious complexities of immigration policies that imposed wrenching choices and obstacles on him and his family. Through that experience, he discovered his identity as a leader.
New did well in school and enjoyed a normal childhood until his midteens. That balance was upended when his undocumented status created barriers to the typical rites of adolescent passage: obtaining a driver’s license and getting a job. As California public universities have no citizenship requirements, he applied to five University of California campuses. Each school accepted him, and UC Davis offered a full tuition scholarship. New’s sense of balance returned and he enrolled. The American dream for which he worked so hard was presenting itself to him.
Immigration problems again arose a few months before he was to graduate from high school. Shortly before he was to begin college, UC Davis withdrew his scholarship and told him to return when his status changed. Scrambling to start college, he enrolled at UC Berkeley, though without a scholarship. Resilient and determined to earn a degree, he worked to pay his way.
A creative writing project, designed for undocumented students, led to “a lot of unpacking and thinking about my immigrant identity.” New felt a calling to join and lead on issues facing undocumented immigrants. He was a “Dreamer,” so called because of a US immigration policy, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, that recognizes the undocumented status of some immigrant children as the result of their parents’ actions, not their own. New joined the fight for the first national Dream Act, a movement that captured his leadership passion. Disappointed but undeterred when the Dream Act failed in Congress in 2010, he pivoted to use his leadership efforts to help pass the California Dream Act, testifying at the state capitol. The state law passed in 2011 and expanded access to institutional and state funds to undocumented immigrant students.
Looking toward his future, New’s aspiration was to be a doctor. That was a big and risky life pivot. Though unsure i
f his immigration status would render him ineligible, he applied to medical schools. He told us, “Undocumented med students were like unicorns. People kept telling me that they had heard of them, but no one could actually name one. I thought they didn’t exist.” New persisted and became the first undocumented student admitted to the University of California–San Francisco Medical School.
His success turned into his meta-leadership mission. With two peers, he cofounded Pre-Health Dreamers (www.phdreamers.org) to support undocumented students pursuing health and science graduate education and careers. What started as a quest for unicorns was transformed into a community-building movement. Pre-Health Dreamers grew to more than one thousand members providing peer-to-peer guidance, networking, resources, and advocacy. As we write, New Latthivongskorn is one of one hundred Dreamer medical students nationwide.
Six years after founding the organization and preparing to launch their own careers, New and his cofounders faced an Arc of Time dilemma. Should they keep the organization going or close it down, declaring victory in their initial mission? This was a pivot point at which personal Arcs of Time diverged from the organization’s Arc of Time.
“I had thought about postfounder transition early on,” he said. “I knew that an area where I wanted to work was developing leadership in others. Passing the baton was one way to do that.” Although the founders remain involved in Pre-Health Dreamers, most of the work was transferred to a new team.
New Latthivongskorn’s experience is a story of meta-leadership across his transitional Arcs of Time. He turned his personal story into his meta-leadership mission, connecting with others to translate his experiences into opportunities for other Dreamers. Demonstrating abundant resilience despite the obstacles he encountered, New navigated multiple pivot points, investing his passion and energy into a growing movement. You can learn more about New Latthivongskorn online in his 2018 TEDx Berkeley talk.
Human beings are naturally resilient. It is an inborn coping and survival skill. How that resilience manifests, however, varies greatly from person to person. For organizations and communities to be resilient, leadership is critical. New Latthivongskorn forged a pathway and then opened it to others. Leaders chart the way forward in the face of adversity. Meta-leadership practices provide a framework to drive that purpose.
Your meta-leadership test—during crisis, change, or when it matters most—is transcending your own personal resilience to promote resilience in your larger social circle. To amplify resilience across the network, you connect a broad range of collaborators who may be deep in the basement. You model, encourage, and spread calm and assurance that the calamity will be overcome and the changes will demonstrate progress. Over the Arc of Time, you build the critical mass of a resilient team, organization, or community.
A meta-leader always expects to meet a measure of failure along the way—hopefully modest and not catastrophic—and so failure must also be a part of your resilience narrative. If you are unwilling to periodically fail, you are unwilling to discover the new ideas and solutions that could reap exciting innovation and success. Learn from your failures. Pick yourself up. Turn failure into the fuel of your resilience. Winston Churchill opined, “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
Meta-leading for resilience does more than ensure survival. It rekindles movement—over your Arc of Time—toward a better future. It stokes the conviction that you and your followers will ultimately restore balance and prevail through your challenges. Meta-leading for resilience takes willpower, tenacity, trust, and great personal strength. You transmit hope, confidence, and commitment as you embody and raise your indomitable human spirit.
You live on the Arc of Time, a progression of “is–was–will be.” As a meta-leader, you can be proactive about the when of what you do and the where of the places you go, taking others with you. To do so, balance the wide view of who you are, the situations through which you lead, and the many people who follow you and whom you follow. Over time, resilience is yours to achieve.
Questions for Journaling
Write a short resilience narrative about yourself. Complete the sentence: “A resilient me was…” Recall an event. Be specific. Then develop a second narrative: “A resilient me will be…” What behaviors will be in evidence? Who or what will you call upon? Who will you help? Are there gaps between your narrative and your reality? How will you close them? Then try this exercise with your family, your team, or your organization.
Chart an Arc of Time experience you have been through. Describe your experience and that of others through different phases of the event. What factors were in play during those different phases?
How do you manage time balance in your life? How do you balance work and family? Giving and getting? Listening and talking?
FOURTEEN
THE META-LEADERSHIP IMPERATIVE
You’re It
It is time to launch your meta-leadership. As you apply and integrate the practice dimensions, appreciate their fundamental interdependence. What happens with one—the person, the situation, the connectivity—affects the others, as well your larger purposes and objectives.
In this systems view, people, events, and emotions are linked. They interact and interrelate. You are less likely to overlook important activity and people when you perceive these pieces as parts of a wider, comprehensive whole. As you see it, you help others see it too. With others, your collected strength is the moving power that animates your combined principles, practices, and ideals.
As a meta-leader, you will do more because you take a fuller view and have access to a broader scope of people, problems, options, and resources. Meta-leading your team, information becomes more readily available, expertise is more willingly offered, and tangible assets are more generously shared. Competition as a prime motivator is reduced because you and your followers define success less in terms of prevailing in turf battles and more in terms of achieving overriding objectives. The focus shifts to generating momentum for what you (plural) hope to achieve together.
Retired US Coast Guard commandant Thad Allen speaks of the importance of “peerage.” This is your network of people to whom you turn for advice, perspective, or support.
Leadership is indeed lonely. There are times when you can’t bounce questions and concerns off your boss or your trusted subordinates. Your colleagues in the organization may be too close. Your spouse may be too eager to take your side.
Turn to someone who has been in a situation similar to yours, who can offer unvarnished commentary. You know this person to be fair, honest, and trustworthy. Someone who has been in a similar situation is more likely to see what you are missing—and won’t be afraid to tell you. Look for peerage before you need it. In high-stakes, high-stress situations, it is an invaluable resource. It is also a precious gift you can provide other leaders riding through a crisis of their own.
Incorporating the three dimensions of meta-leadership into a seamless routine may seem overwhelming. However, with accumulating experience, human brains intuitively build patterns and calculate how to navigate complex problems. These skills and perspectives become embedded in the mind’s toolbox. With practice and greater familiarity, you will assimilate the dimensions of meta-leadership into your default guide for leading others. You will routinely ask yourself: What would a meta-leader do in this situation?
Learning and practicing the three dimensions demands focused attention, though eventually it becomes second nature. The more you do it, the more you become automatically mindful of your own reactions and keenly observant of others.
Dr. Richard Besser, acting CDC director during the H1N1 virus outbreak in 2009, was schooled in meta-leadership and trained to teach it. During the H1N1 outbreak, with news of growing numbers of infected people in the United States, he shifted into crisis meta-leadership quickly. It guided the many interactions and decisions he faced.
“When I heard about this yet unspecified virus and
its potential impact, I immediately turned to the meta-leadership dimensions,” he told us. “I was not in the basement—or at least not for long. I had been part of many responses to infectious disease outbreaks. But I had questions: What is the situation? What are the people within the CDC telling me, and how are they handling the threat? I had to quickly lead up, getting the attention of Washington. Since the secretary of Health and Human Services was not yet appointed, I was soon leading up directly to the White House. There was a lot of leading across and beyond to do as well. I had to engage the Department of Education about school closings, the World Health Organization, and state and local health officials.
“Actually, being on top of the situation and mindful of the organizational connections helped me keep myself out of the basement,” he noted. “Even though the influenza itself was out of our control, I was confident that I was on top of what I could be, and that gave me a greater sense of confidence and assurance. And I think that rubbed off on others, who themselves had building confidence that we could figure out this virus and then get ahead of it.”
Rich Besser is now CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In this position, he isn’t doing day-to-day crisis leadership. Nonetheless, he shared with us, “I use the meta-leadership framework all the time in my current work. First, I try to recognize when I go to the basement. It doesn’t have to be a national emergency that sends you there. I take steps to recognize and recoup. Meta-leadership keeps me on my toes with the different groups with whom I work. As CEO of the foundation, I lead up to the board of trustees. I lead beyond to other philanthropies, government agencies, businesses, and communities. Building the necessary connectivity, the question is how to have influence well beyond our authority.”
You're It Page 29