insights

I was asked to give the closing lecture to this years graduating class of my old alumni last week. Something to allow reflection on their leadership journey and to help prepare for the next stage was the request. So we worked with Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey Cycle.

What was interesting was that some of the Masters graduates had travelled far and wide and had many more paths to explore on their journeys. Others were not on a journey. They had covered a great distance, but without travelling too far from home. Each had got different benefits from the experience. So what is it about leadership development programs that make them work - and work for different people in different ways?

The answer came at the same time as an accidental reunion of fellow journeymen from the Kimberley Odyssey we completed in May. Between us we have trained and worked with hundreds of leaders and read thousands of books and research articles on leadership development and all the questions they raise. That doesn’t mean the answers came easily.

At the Breakfast Brainstorm on Leadership we attended, all the participants had the opportunity to work through the same questions: about leaders being born not made, the role of mentors and false guides, the importance of development through challenge and trials, the role of self-awareness and why only some answer the call.

Within the many elements of the many stages of the complete leadership development cycle touched on in this forum in many parts - there emerged one theme. ‘You can not hope to lead others if you can not lead yourself.’ Leadership is different in its style and form in different environments, but it is the same in essence. It is about personal leadership first.

This gave me cause to reflect on the essential nature of leadership and the perspective required to lead, with the conclusion: ‘If you are ever to lead others you must be prepared to go on the journey yourself.’ That is your journey - not anothers.

From this we learn that leaders are both born and made, each person having their own unique leadership potential, that they must choose to find in themselves, before it can be developed. In the rush to develop leadership we sometimes take the ‘person’ out of the personal development component. In finding another’s style of leadership we may never find our own. When we understand this can we cease looking for ‘leadership’ and begin to find the true leaders.

The failure of leadership programs are rarely in their intent, but often in their design. When we realize that any program that does not ’see’ the unique complexity of each individual within its form will only develop a type of leadership - but not the leader within, we begin the real work and a journey into the unknown.

For those that have commenced their actual journeys - Go safely and with courage (and enjoy the view).

(More on the Hero Monomyth)

“To become oneself is mans’ true vocation” - Soren Kierkegaard

I recently was doing work with Rio Tinto’s project management team for the Yandi expansion and as an aside we looked at the 3 A’s of stress management.

To alleviate a stressful situation it helps to decide if it is something you can Alter, Avoid or Accept. Different strategies apply to each. Knowing which approach is appropriate doesn’t change the circumstances, but does mean you do not have to stress about it. This marks a shift from the management of stress to the questionning of whether the stress should exist.

Today the latest Journal of Humanistic Psychology (Vol.44/No. 3) arrived and in it is an article on ‘hardiness’. Hardiness is the ability to embrace an ambiguous future rather than just do what is done in the past. Essentially it is the ‘courage to be’.

Researcher Salvadore Maddi has conducted a 12 year longitudinal research project into the multiple components of hardiness which he groups into three C’s - Control, Commitment and Challenge. What is interesting is the link between the 3 A’s and the 3 C’s. The A’s are the approaches, the C’s are the capabilities needed to execute them. Both are needed as different facets of the whole.

Paraphrasing Maddi’s conclusion: “To tolerate and resolve stressful situations one must see them as:
a.) natural developmental pressures (Challenges to Accept)
b.) resolvable rather than unmanageable (Control to Alter) and
c.) worth investing in (Commitment or Avoidance).”

Those managers with high hardiness scores thrived on stressful situations and outperformed other groups. Those that had low hardiness scores, when faced with a new challenge, chose the past and were at risk of eventually entering an inescapable cycle leading to meaningless and boredom. As a result Maddi and his colleagues have been working out how to develop ‘hardiness’ and existential courage in organisational leaders.

The next stage is when an organisation itself develops this existential courage (avoiding a similar cycle of decline resulting from the acceptance of a stressful workplace).

All of this links back to the role of coaching in leadership development and the process of reversing ‘learned pessimism‘ in organisations - where the stressful actually then becomes the meaningful quest. This leads us to the insight that to find purpose in the challenges of our work, we must learn to break the cycle of belief (and acceptance) that life is meant to be stressful.

Understanding the 3A’s, (the 3B’s - see below) and the 3C’s is a simple way of beginning.

(and for those who understand the Enneagram - here is a way to manage the whole complexity- FCG Stress Enneagram)