My three-year-old daughter has started telling me to “put my listening ears on.”  It’s a little scary to realize how adept she is at knowing when I’m not actually listening to her.  I’m reminded constantly how much parenting (and leading … and living) is about listening. 

And the hardest kind of listening requires more than just my ears.

I’m no expert on Buddhism (in fact, I just misspelled the word on my first attempt) but what I have learned has inspired me. One practice in particular that has really helped me personally are the 5 daily remembrances – 5 truths that we can say out loud to ourselves every day.  I remember the first time I heard them, one in particular made me recoil: 

I will be separated from everything that is dear to me.

Unfortunately for the people I encountered in my social life, I used to love talking about my school when I was a principal.  Sometimes, when I was going on and on about my school, I would start getting a certain look from people … the kind of look you get when someone is wondering whether you’re in a cult.

While I don’t think my school was a cult, there is a danger that arises when we spend too much time in our organizational bubble – an environment where choices have been made and standards, norms, and labels have been chosen.  We start to lose sight of the fact that the norms or labels that get used within our bubble are subjective, and they don’t speak to a “universal truth” that exists outside that bubble.  

This is the time of year many leaders are thinking about the kind of culture they want to build on their team.  We’ve worked with nine different teams this summer to help them get more deeply connected and more aware about what’s really happening with each other.  And in some cases, that’s meant helping them unlearn some of the previous ideas they’d internalized about what “good teams” are and feel like.

One of the biggest ideas to “unlearn” is one that I spent most my career propagating: that good teams are “positive” – all the time.

Technically, we may only be a few weeks into summer, but for many education leaders across the country, “summer” is over.  And they are hard at work preparing for the next school year. 

I remember this time so well from my years as a school and network leader.  Feelings of optimism and excitement about the new school year were tempered with anxiety about being ready for it - along with a sense of disbelief that my long-anticipated summer break was already over, and here I was, already feeling behind and overwhelmed with under enrollment and vacant positions.

The definition of the word “urgency” is “importance requiring swift action.”  Teams that operate with this kind of urgency learn what’s most important and then stay focused and disciplined on applying their effort in a timely way.  

But what do most of us really mean when we say we want “urgency?”

Is a good leader “emotional?”  

Depends on how you define “emotional.”  A lot of us probably imagine the leader who ACTS on their emotions - without actually saying them…

Your body, your heart, and your head are all keeping score.  Which scoreboard are you paying attention to?

We have three intelligence centers.  First, our body is constantly speaking to us through gut feelings, tension that we hold in our muscles, cortisol responses, etc.  Second, our heart gives every experience an emotional quality that tells us something important - whether we’re aware of it or not.  And finally, our head is giving us all kinds of thoughts, ideas, and analysis about what we’re experiencing. 

All of them guide us.  All of them keep score.  But at least within my leadership,  I was conditioned to focus only on the scoreboard in my head…

“Imposter syndrome” is the chronic self-doubt that - despite external evidence to the contrary - you are not fit to be “the leader.”  Many people experience this as a nagging anxiety that there is just something about them that is somehow not fit for a certain position or level of leadership.  But I wanted to shine light on the opposite problem:  what I’ll call “leader syndrome.”  And leader syndrome is the feeling or belief that there is something about me that makes me inherently fit to be a “leader.”  While it’s likely to be read as confidence, I think it’s the flip side of the “imposter syndrome” coin, and problematic for its own reasons.

The knee-jerk reaction to fix or change the people we are leading is so strong.  For most of my career, I tried to fix or change at the very first hint that someone or something was not what I felt it should be.  I might have had a 5% window into what was actually happening, and switched into action mode.  

So many of the leaders we support have also been conditioned to operate this way, and often feel overt pressure to demonstrate that they’re aggressively fixing and changing anything that doesn’t meet “the bar.” 

There’s a BIG problem with this approach…

At some point in the next six months, is your team going to spend time stepping away from the work and focusing on “building team?”  If so, I would love to make a case for team un-building.  Before team “building,” spend time on team “being,” where a true opportunity is created to build awareness around what people actually experience and the only goal is honesty and curiosity…

Have you ever gotten a piece of praise that strokes your ego but makes your heart sink?  Perhaps you get the validation you’ve been chasing after, but somehow – on some deeper level – it doesn’t feel so good when you actually get it. 

We all have egos, and the theory of the enneagram tells us that each of our egos are chasing one thing in particular, and whatever that thing is, it can never be fully obtained.

Early in my career I internalized this idea that “feedback is a gift.”  And I think there’s no question that highly functional teams utilize feedback in various forms as a powerful tool.  But like any tool, it can be misused.  And I’ve noticed within myself - along with hundreds of leaders that we’ve worked with – how the act of feedback can become performative or even harmful.

For most of my career, I’ve been a big believer in defining your values as an organization.  In my previous role, I helped lead an organization of 2,000+ people to redefine an organizational set of values.  I’ve seen the power of values.  And I’ve also misused them.  

And that’s the challenge with values:  they’re easily misused, and sometimes, even outright weaponized. 

For most of my career, I was a judgment specialist.  I equated leadership, in large part, to judging … labeling something or someone as not good enough.  Pushing.  Correcting.  I did a lot of judging and also nurtured the judgmental instincts in others.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about judgment: when we feel judgment, it just means we’re missing something.  We’re not seeing the whole picture. 

There’s a growing body of research to show that the highest functioning teams are the most honest.  They can share their actual experiences, thoughts, and feelings without fear of repercussion.  And that allows them to shed the tremendous cognitive load most teams carry by constantly thinking about HOW to say something, whether to say it, or what magical combination of words will avoid upsetting THIS person while still influencing THAT person.  

Most teams spend an outrageous amount of energy doing that sort of performative “dance” with each other.  Even though our bodies and hearts hate that dance, we still do it.  We do it because of fear.  We do it because we don’t feel safe enough NOT to do it.  

For about the first two years of your life, you didn’t really know how to be dishonest.  You didn’t know how to sugar-coat a message.  You were terrible at managing your image.  You lived in a state of total emotional honesty and you were “aligned” in your behavior. In other words, the way you felt was the way you behaved.

Now, as an adult, that idea might sound immature and “unprofessional.”  Around the time we turn two years old, we start developing an ego (internalized ideas about who we are) and a set of coping strategies for how to navigate human relationships, get what we want or need, and try to avoid what we don’t want.  No longer do our hearts and bodies automatically inform our behavior.  Our thoughts start to take the driver’s wheel, and we no longer just live the present moment; often we navigate it instead.  

Visualize yourself surrounded by the people you work with.  With some of them you might feel closely connected, like you are “with” them.  While with others, you might feel more distant or even “against” them - as if there is a barrier that exists to truly understanding and connecting with them.  

The more we start to understand that barrier, the more we see that it may not be between us, but inside of us.  And that barrier has a name: ego.   

It seems like every week there’s a trending story about the latest company that’s fighting the power struggle of getting people back to the workplace.  I don’t know how this will end. Clearly, there’s benefits to working from home - and those may be too powerful to overcome for many people.  But it seems like many companies are just attempting to lure their employees out of their homes with workplace perks and/or reverting to ultimatums when the perks prove ineffective or impractical.  And what about schools and hospitals and places where people can’t work from home?  Are they at a permanent disadvantage for recruiting talent?

I’d argue - maybe not.  And maybe the biggest “lure” for millions of employees across sectors might be available at an endless supply and costs nothing.  But it will require leaders to stop taking a reductive view of their people and may challenge them to lead differently.

I spent many years as a leader avoiding my own pain and trying to create the illusion of a pain-free team.  I constantly thought about how to keep everyone’s focus on how well things were going, and ensure that my leaders were responding immediately to even the smallest challenge team members were facing - lest their experience become painful in some way. 

It helped me create a team culture that was very “positive.”  I’m not sure it helped me create a team culture that was very safe.