4. Focus on What You’re For, Not What You’re Against
Rather than getting sucked into a protracted, bitter feud with anyone, it’s much better to let your adversaries waste their energy fighting each other. Mandela didn’t go to war or terrorize his former captors. “He didn’t take the bait,” Branson said, “and you shouldn’t, either.” Virgin America, for example, didn’t get distracted by turf battles and name calling, and instead focused on building a community of customers who loved its fresh, edgy vibe.
“We’re too easily driven by instant gratification, both good and bad,” famed educator and author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Steve Covey told me during a long dinner at his home outside Salt Lake City.3 Our primal brains are hardwired by fight-or-flight urges, which means that we’re easily seduced by anything that feels remotely urgent rather those less-exciting things that have longer-term strategic impact. “It’s tempting to behave like Pavlov’s dog, leaping at anything that shows immediate threats or rewards,” Covey cautioned. Be wary of urgent things that steal your time from long-term commitments.
5. You Don’t Have to Be Perfect to Make a Difference
“Do not judge me by my successes,” Mandela admonished. “Judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.” When you’re suffering a setback in your startup, imagine how much worse Mandela had it – and just how creative he had to be in a cramped cell every night. From dawn to dusk, he dragged stones in the blinding heat. You can’t steel yourself year after year dreaming that hopeless circumstances will change, he said. You have to change the way you deal with them. Being flexible in finding a new door every time the last one slams shut is the difference between those who find their way and those who self-destruct.
I will never forget Nelson Mandela’s warm embrace as he almost collapsed in my arms after midnight during his last visit to the World Economic Forum (WEF),4 the invitation-only summit in the Swiss Alps where CEOs, presidents of nations, artists, educators, and entrepreneur billionaires convene every winter. I was executive producer of Schwab.com, and I was participating in panels at the WEF and interviewing hundreds of leaders in Davos for a reprise to the business classic, Built to Last,5 by Jim Collins and legendary Stanford professor Jerry Porras. The bestselling sequel, Success Built to Last: Creating a Life That Matters6 (with Porras and Stewart Emery) feels like Dale Carnegie’s epic adventure How to Win Friends and Influence People7 updated for the new millennium.
Almost every thought leader I met for face-to-face interviews pointed to Mandela as a perfect role model for leadership. In our conversation, the Nobel Laureate smirked and told me that perfection was never a part of his plan and that he “never achieved it.” In the years before Mandela, an activist lawyer, had been sent to a death camp, he was rarely without zealous overconfidence about his mission to end apartheid. Although he initially advocated a peaceful solution, Mandela eventually took up arms when the path of peace appeared to be a dead-end. The fact that he didn’t start out as a complete saint with perfect grace or humility before his long walk to freedom makes his journey even more useful to the rest of us.
“You have enduring impact not because you are perfect or lucky,” Sir Richard sighed as he finished a beer, “but because you have the courage to stay focused on building a better future rather than dwell in the past.”
Leaders find love in their work and life when they find the courage to turn their wounds into wisdom and their passions into purpose.
Reflection Questions
Who do you look up to as a hero or leader?
What characteristics or actions of theirs would you most like to emulate?
Do you love your work? Your life? What elements about them might you begin to appreciate if you look at them from a different perspective? What might you want to change?
Notes
1. Richard Branson quotes from live interview with Mark Thompson, at his home on Necker Island, British Virgin Islands, 2015.
2. Charles Schwab, live interview with Mark Thompson, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kpkh1pm4A8.
3. Steve Covey quotes from live interview with Mark Thompson, at his home in Provo, Utah, 2012.
4. Nelson Mandela quotes from live interview with Mark Thompson, at The World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, 2000.
5. Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (New York: Harper Business, 1994).
6. Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery, and Mark Thompson, Success Built to Last: Creating a Life That Matters (New York: Plume, 2007).
7. Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936)
12
The New Work of Leaders
How Does Your Leadership Narrative Show Up?
Stephanie Pace Marshall
Stephanie Pace Marshall is an internationally recognized educational pioneer and inspiring speaker and writer on leadership, learning, and the design and creation of transformative learning environments. She is founding president and president emerita of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy; the founding president of the National Consortium of Secondary STEM Schools; and past president of the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development, International. She is author of over 40 published journal articles; an author for Organizations of the Future (Drucker Foundation) and an editor and coauthor of Scientific Literacy for the 21st Century (2002). Her 2006 book, The Power to Transform: Leadership that Brings Learning and Schooling to Life, received the 2007 Educator’s Award from the Delta Kappa Gamma Society, International. She is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce in London and a trustee of the Society for Science and the Public in Washington, DC. She serves as chancellor of the Lincoln Academy of Illinois.
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Stories become testaments, old or new, that choreograph the life of a community.
–Stephen Larsen
The Invitation
In 1997, I received an unusual invitation: “Come and spend a week with a group of medicine men and women ‘spirit doctors,’ healers, and elders of the Pitjantjatjara Aboriginal tribe, explore the nonlinearity of ancient ways of knowing, and co-create a new, more sustainable human story for the new millennium.”
Despite challenges, I accepted the invitation; the possibility of cocreating a sustainable human story with some of our oldest living ancestors was magnetic.
Months later I arrived in the Red Center of Australia, and for the first time in my life, I felt completely disoriented. I did not know how to be, belong, or think there. Everything I thought I knew, every way I had navigated and made sense of my world, was challenged. Most frightening was my loss of identity, my sense of who I was now, in this place.
I had said yes, with great clarity, and had traveled far to engage in a most elusive and irrational journey. I needed to understand why. Throughout my life, I had seen countless examples of narratives (even false ones) trumping data. I became curious and captivated by the asymmetrical power of story to change hearts, minds, and behavior.
Fortunately, before I became irretrievably lost, that quiet voice inside that often tells us what we don’t want to hear, spoke up: “You came here to learn and cocreate, and you no longer know how. So you must surrender, let go of what you think you know, listen, and pay attention.”
Here’s what I heard and learned. Aboriginal culture has its origin in dreamtime or world-making. Aborigines believe that before the world awakened, their ancestors emerged from sleep beneath the earth and began to sing their way across the land, seeking companionship, food, or shelter. Since the earth was still forming, their wandering and singing the names of things and places into the land actually shaped the landscape, creating mountains, watering holes, caves, plants, and animals. Eventually each ancestor reentered the earth, transforming themselves into a part of its topography forever. As they wandered and sung the land into existence, each left songlines, a “meanderin
g trail of geographic sites” that crossed the country and were the result of specific encounters, captured as story.
Songlines are musical narratives and geographical maps, “a sort of musical score of a vast epic song-story that winds across the continent, telling of the ancestors’ adventures and how the landscape came into being.”1
Aborigine children are born into and inherit a stretch of a songline; the song’s verses are their birthright and the roots of their identity. It is this continuity of song and story that keeps both the land and their connection to it alive. Since songlines are maps embedded in the land, there is simply no word for lost in Pitjantjatjara. Walking and singing these song–stories in the appropriate cadence in which they were created tells the Pitjantjatjara where they can find shelter, food, and water; singing them in reverse tells them how to go home.
The night before we left, we were given a remarkable gift. Sitting around the campfire, we witnessed the tribal elder sing and dance a songline; then he paused and we thought he was finished, but he began to sing and dance again. Our guide was astonished: “The Elder has changed the songline,” she said, “and nothing will be the same.” Over time, it became clear that this new songline was the roots of a different, more sustainable human story; the presence of Western leaders and Aborigine elders had inspired and enabled its emergence. Together, we had cocreated a new story.
This experience profoundly changed me. I shifted how I understood the essential work of leaders and embraced a new framework for grounding our work: story, map, and landscape. I did not disavow my need to develop expertise and skills in the work traditionally ascribed to leaders; rather, I chose to stand in a different place by paying attention to both the overstories (actual events) and the understories (journey of our hearts and souls) within my organization.
Years ago, I heard a renowned photographer respond to the question, “What’s the secret to taking a good picture?”
“Technique is important,” he said, “but the art of taking a good picture is knowing where to point the camera.”
The same is true for leadership. As leaders, we must consciously point the camera in places previously unheard, unseen, or unrecognized. When we illuminate our personal and organizational narratives, we see, hear, and experience them differently – and can then choose to change them.
Songlines and their seamless integration of story, map, and landscape are relevant to our new work as leaders – as storytellers and mapmakers. We, too, are born into a songline – a constellation of stories and identity-shaping narratives of who and how we are; as we walk these patterned stories, usually unconsciously, we feed them and keep them alive. They become our maps, whether prison or portal, and we become the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. We become the stories we live.
During this uncommon journey to the world of the Pitjantjatjara, a profound insight unfolded for me, and it frames how I now think about my work:
Mind-shaping is world-shaping.
When we change the story, we change the map.
When we change the map, we change the landscape.
When we change the landscape, we change our experiences and our choices.
When we change our experiences and our choices, we can change our minds.
When we change our minds, we can change the world.
Changing the story changes everything. Leaders can create conditions by design to illuminate and unlock new stories of potential and possibility and to set them in motion so new maps can be walked.
Firestorm or Gift?
The following story illustrates how paying attention to story, map, and landscape is a powerful driver for organizational change. Several years ago, one week before my institution was to open for another year, the admissions staff had mistakenly sent letters of invitation to 32 students on the wait list.
Distraught, the staff presented a plan to address the error. They would call each family, apologize profusely, but not admit the students. I listened, but said no. We had extended an invitation and our integrity was at stake. We would admit these students and welcome them.
The news of my decision spread like wildfire. We needed everything – dorm rooms, beds, mattresses, computers, residential counselors, faculty. The buzz, both positive and negative, drowned out every other conversation. We had one week to make it all happen.
Aware that I needed to know and understand our internal narratives and what the community was feeling, I asked a trusted colleague to write down every comment she heard and send them to me anonymously. Then one evening, I read all the comments, and detected two dominant patterns or narratives. One I called the firestorm (a story of impending division and fragmentation); the other I called the gift (a story of emerging pride and generosity).
I presented two visuals: one, a blazing fire, and the other a gift box with a big bow. Each image was surrounded by the community’s comments. I described these narrative patterns as two emerging stories over which we had complete control and asked my colleagues which one best defined who we wanted to be. We could choose the firestorm, grounded in a narrative of scarcity, and likely ensure we would have a dismal year; or we could choose the gift, grounded in a narrative of abundance.
As the year unfolded and the 32 students thrived, it was clear that the story we chose to live was the gift.
I later heard from many who wanted to embrace this story, but felt their responses were inadequate when confronted by the firestorm advocates, that the public naming of these two stories as choices gave them a place to stand and an authentic voice in cocreating our desired future. In response to negative comments, there was no argument; all they had to say was, “You’re living in ‘the firestorm,’ and that is not my story.”
This profound leadership experience yielded an epiphany: We are wired for storytelling. Facts largely activate the language areas of our brains, but stories activate and engage our brain holistically. We are relational beings, and stories enable us to identify with the experiences of others and connect them to our own. When we change our stories, we change our choices. And when we change our choices, we can change our minds.
Today, we behave as if we believe that more information, sophisticated data analytics, and additional and better strategies will predictably produce the outcomes we seek. But what transforms organizations into generative and creative environments are deeper relationships, and authentic conversations of meaning and purpose and life-affirming stories of identity: stories of who we are, what is possible, and how we want to be together in our work.
As leaders, we must know what to look for and how to see it, what to listen for and how to hear it, what to tell and how to tell it. We must also attend to the understory – the emotional and soulful dimensions of who we are.
“I never predict,” says Peter Drucker, “I just look out the window and see what’s visible but not yet seen.”2 Our work now is to point the camera on the often unseen and unspoken narratives in the collective consciousness of our organizations and shine a light on them so we can choose who we want to be. Sometimes the leader’s role is to remind us of who we really are.
Lessons Learned: What Has Become Clear
Leaders and Leadership
We lead who we are and cannot create what we have not become. Leadership is first an inside job.
Successful leadership is not first about organizational strategy, but rather it is about personal and organizational meaning, coherence, and clarity of identity (who we are) and of purpose (why we are).
The greatest power we have as leaders to ignite and engage our organizations resides in the authenticity, clarity, congruence, and courage of our internal moral compass, made visible through the stories we name and live. There can be no space between what we say, what we do, and why.
Our current conceptions of leadership are far too small for our capacities and imagination. They are grounded in a faulty mental model; a distorted view of power, motivation, and meaning creation; and often false proxies for assessing
authentic success. This dishonors who we are. As a result, we internalize a mental map that drives us to replication and modeling the strategies and tactics of traditional definitions of leadership success. This is a profound illusion. As Peter Drucker is reputed to have said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast, and leaders create culture.”3
Leaders care for the well-being of the whole. They create conditions for everyone to be seen and heard into speech; they see beyond the visible events into the organization’s meaning-making capacities and identity-shaping patterns that form the essence of its mission and purpose.
Wise leaders illuminate both their organization’s visible overstories and invisible yet palpable understories. They do so with clear intention so the unseen patterns that shape our minds and behavior do not drive decisions based on illusion, but rather on clear and conscious choices about the narratives we choose to live.
Work is Love Made Visible Page 10