Authentic Leadership

Often in society the narcissist and the aggressive are rewarded. Much has been written in management literature about the prevalence of narcissistic qualities in leadership roles. Let’s face it, from the first moment we learn to interact with others, as children, we learn there is a pecking order, that the strong succeed, and that you must fight to be on top. The corporate world is full of examples that highlight the validity that these ‘truisms’ continue into adulthood and society in general. These tendencies extend into the way in which individuals maintain their position as much as how they obtain them. Examples include:

• Surrounding themselves with sycophants who praise and applaud the leader, and who will sing all is good while the ship is sinking so as to remain onside with the leader, until there is another leader with more relevance or power
• Making demands and issuing orders without caring what the impact is on the person or group, perhaps relying on bullying tactics to get what they want when meeting opposition, and often with the underlying assumption that their opinion counts more than fact-based research
• Blaming others for things that have gone wrong, never stopping to question their own contribution to poor outcomes or a crisis situation, even changing the truth to divert attention from themselves, or worse still onto someone else
• Sitting in the large chair behind the large desk while visitors to their office are offered a small, uncomfortable chair ensuring the visitor physically must look up to the leader
• Reaping praise and applause for a job well done without considering and recognising those who actually made the achievement possible

Unfortunately examples of such behaviours abound.

What interests me is the authentic leader. I have been observing one person demonstrating authentic leadership while faced with significant challenges, and it is inspiring. Attributes of the authentic leader include:

• Retaining responsibility and accountability without blaming or sniping at others
• Managing their own emotional response throughout a crisis, and providing a calming presence for others
• Actively seeking the best possible outcome for all involved
• Remaining true to their values regardless of pressure from others, or the behaviours exhibited in their direction by others
• Maintaining their integrity, being honest and truthful, and calling on others in a nonjudgmental manner to do the same
• Modelling resilience and being a resource for themselves, maintaining their own sense of self and self-respect
• Functioning from a place of personal power, being consistently and actively assertive, present, taking appropriate action, and being authentic and requiring that of others

It is unfortunately rare, and wonderful, when such examples are manifest in leaders. I appreciate being around such individuals because it is inspiring to me, and provides me with impetus to examine how I am and check in to determine if I am performing as I would wish to be noticed.

Recognising and Releasing Patterns

Abstract: As children we learn patterns of behaviour from our caregivers. In releasing the patterns we become free to be more fully our Selves. This article offers some examples of how to free ourselves from our own patterning. 

Psychology informs us that we inherit behaviours from our parents. We may directly learn or pick up behaviours from them. We may also develop behaviours to counteract their treatment of us as children; a reason some patterns seem to skip a generation, each generation responding in opposition to the one before. These behaviours can be so well entrenched that we are oblivious to their existence, or the thought processes they support and promote, and the filtering and distortion they create with how we perceive the world. Beneath them our true, unblemished selves exist.

Twelve years ago, while on a course, I was presented with an exercise to determine which parent was the source of my behaviours. I struggled because my father had exited my life when I was seven and I had not had contact with him since. I did not know whether he was alive or dead and I didn’t care. The instructor said, “If the pattern is not from your mother, it’s from your father.” That was the start of getting to know my father.

Certain milestone events forced me to confront my father. In leaving my first marriage I was caught by the fact that my eldest child was the age I had been, also as the eldest child, when my father left. Was I leaving to repeat a family pattern or because it was the right thing for me to do? I eventually recognised it was the right thing for me. However I also learned of some qualities I possessed in common with my father; autonomy and spontaneity in particular, that were suppressed in my marriage and were part of my drive to leave. Subsequently, I’ve done a lot of work around my patterns of behaviour, particularly those that serve to protect me, which also act as a shield and barrier to expressing my true Self. Some of these include people-pleasing, pessimism, and copious quantities of shame and inadequacy. Over time the effects of these have lessened as I have addressed underlying beliefs, values and perceptions.

A couple of years ago, after 40 years absence, my father rematerialised, sending me an email wishing to reconnect. Aside from the initial waves of shock, anger, disappointment, hurt and anxiety, the process of connecting with him via email brought up years of patterned protection against being hurt. Then a gorgeous woman entered my life, a beautiful and precious soul to whom I thoroughly opened and exposed my heart. I had never felt so alive, so free, dropping many of my protections developed from years of survival. Then she surprised me by exiting my life as dramatically as she had chosen to join it. The effect was profound. I felt abandoned. I connected with hurt, rage and anger that had been buried since my father had left. I had and took opportunities to express, in safe settings, the pent up emotion that had been stored and suppressed since I was a child. She provided a fabulous opportunity to uncover and connect with buried emotions, and in the process of releasing these I also gained some incredible insight into patterns underpinning the lockdown.

A significant pattern I unearthed was how everything I have done in life has been based on surviving rather than thriving. Interestingly, a significant portion of my book still waiting for me to move to publishing is about shifting from Survive Reactions to Thrive Responses, and now I understand some of my reticence in getting published. I still had a key to turn before I could authentically speak from that place of Thrive. Now I recognise how I have rejected opportunities that did not fit with my concept of surviving, pushed people away, and ring-fenced myself as a protection. While I have done extensive work on the individual protections and behaviours, the whole paradigm of survival was so pervasive I could not see it, like I imagine a fish cannot see water.

My father eventually arrived on a plane from England to meet. Healing took place. Of most profound significance to me was the clarity with which I have seen in him the patterns of behaviour I have been working to dismantle in myself for so many years. His return stirred up all my old patterning, and I was able to, as far as conscious awareness allowed, release rather than to re-enact them.

While few people can be blessed with a year like that one I experienced, there are things that can be done to identify and release patterns that we have:

• Observe your own results. What are you doing that gets in the way of success or that distorts or narrows your concept of success?
• Seek feedback from people who know you about behaviours that get in your way. This could be family, friends, and colleagues. Where consistency shows up in feedback from multiple people and/or across multiple settings, there is a good chance there is a real behaviour for you to work with.
• Counselling, coaching or other forms of guided journey into self.
• Journaling, drawing, dance or other unguided expressions of self.
• Defining and affirming new concepts of self that contradict old patterns. Work with the resistance that arises and move into a new way of being.

What gets in the way of your success, whether that be in professional, personal, relationship or other arenas? What patterns do you trip over when pursuing things that matter to you? Often our protective patterns show most influence and presence when we undertake something of significance to us, interrupting us to stop us being ‘hurt’ by failure or rejection or some other feared painful outcome. Moving positively into areas that matter can be supported by developing awareness of the patterns and addressing the underlying beliefs that drive our behaviours. 

Working with Self is a life-long experiential journey. It is rewarding and exciting. It is worth engaging with. I hope my journey inspires others to engage more fully with theirs, and I look forward to publishing my book, Appreciate the Fog: Embracing Change with Power and Purpose, for publication.

Leader-Led Change

Planned organisational change may be driven by many factors. Examples include seeking efficiencies and greater productivity, addressing dysfunction and conflict, revamping inadequate processes and systems, merging with a business partner, or setting your mark on the organisation as a previous manager has departed.

Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee in their Harvard Business Review Primal Leadership article in December 2001 wrote: “A growing body of research on the human brain proves that, for better or worse, leaders’ moods affect the emotions of the people around them.” However, leaders not only set the mood and have a direct impact on the emotional worlds of their people, as the article describes, but also set the culture and behavioural tone and norms of the organisation. So, when considering change, what do you need to change about yourself and how you function for your organisation to perform better?

Deming, the quality guru, suggested that 85% of the responsibility for quality rested with management, to provide the appropriate tools, training, processes and other enablers, and after all that was provided, 15% of the responsibility rested with the workers. I believe that also applies to the mood, attitudes, behaviours and norms of the organisation as a whole.

Enormous energy is exerted in organisational restructures. Poor performance is identified and rooted out. Ineffective systems replaced. Reporting structures are adjusted. However, for all the effort a significant and often poorly addressed issue is the cultural and behavioural conserve held among the management team. While the organisation is being driven through significant and often unnecessarily painful change processes, the attitudes, behaviours, and cultural norms within the management team remain unchanged, unrecognised as contributing to the overall organisation’s performance. The decision makers are able to say “the problem is out there” and rarely take a critical look at their own contributions.

Consider:

What do you do to set the tone and culture within your organisation?

Are your words and actions aligned?

Do you demand and expect respect without extending the same to those who report to you?

Do you demonstrate the loyalty you expect of your team? Or do you excuse your choices and actions that perhaps sideline and disenfranchise individuals, while calling for everyone to engage fully and authentically, and wonder why there is a disturbance within the rank and file? Do you permit others’ to spread rumour and conjecture, or undermine the work of those in your team?

Do you provide a high performance environment? Do you cleanly delegate work, providing clear boundaries on how the work should be performed and what the measure of success are, and allow the team member to grow and develop in the role? Or are you a control freak, driven by fear, who micromanages and strangles growth potential? Do you honour the established boundaries around agreed packages of work or do you allow scope creep to erode the authority of those under you? Do you then also hold them responsible for failure to perform?

Are you professional in your behaviours and relationships? Do you excuse angry outbursts, unreasonable demands and other corrosive behaviours because you’re busy and under stress? Do you meet the commitments you make? Do you hold yourself to the same standards you expect of others? Do you walk your talk?

Is your decision-making clear, calm, fact-based and rational? Do you expect this of your team, but when faced with a decision you rely on management imperative to make a rushed “gut” decision, rationalising it is from your years of experience, flying in the face of all you claim you want practiced within your organisation? Worse, do you then change your decision when next posed with a new opinion (perhaps without informing those impacted)?

Do you provide clear direction and leadership? Have you noticed the puzzled expression, or disdain, across your team as you issue instructions? Do you lack clarity, such that you are not able to understandably express what you want? Or have you changed direction yet again? Do you respond openly to questions seeking clarification or do you expect subordinates to read your mind (perhaps even when you can’t)?

It has been my observation from a couple of decades of consulting that these and other such issues are frightfully common. Why? Because leaders are human and no one is perfect. The problem is when a leader chooses to avoid checking on their way of being. In my opinion it would be ideal for the leadership of an organisation to honestly assess their behavioural and attitudinal contribution to the performance and mood of an organisation as part of any change process. Obtaining valuable, truthful feedback takes more than demanding it. Few leaders are blessed to be surrounded by people willing to say, “You are not wearing any clothes”, so obtaining such insight requires time, a sense of safety among those asked for input, and trust that negative feedback will not jeopardise the position of the person offering the feedback.

As a leader, are you leading from the front, enabling others to follow? Have you assessed your own short-comings in relation to the direction and practices required within the organisation and established a roadmap for your own development? Or are you metaphorically barking instructions through a megaphone on what the team should do, and excusing yourself because you’re a coach, not a player.

If you want to create positive change, be part of the change process, not separate from it. Ensure that your capacity as a leader and manager is maturing and developing, and that you have made some conscious, positive changes to your style, that you’re not as you were ten years ago. If you are not emulating the behaviours you expect your team to portray, get real with yourself and stop excusing your own poor performance.

Options available to you include coaching and mentoring, personal and professional development, primarily targeted at the long-overused patterns of behaviour and attitudes that hold you and your team back from truly excelling.

The Relationship Dance

With each new relationship formed, whether personal or professional, you must learn a new dance. Professional relationships do function within a more restricted space and are focused on specific purposes (usually) so the steps required to form and maintain them are somewhat more routine than personal relationships, but in all cases there are some specifics that need be addressed for a successful relationship to develop.

Ensure the purpose and vision of the relationship is aligned. When there is a lack of alignment one or both of the parties may experience disappointment, frustration, and resentment. They recognise there is a mismatch between where they are placing their energy and focus and that of the other party. Without resolving this, sooner rather than later, a lot of energy can be expended and the relationship may be unnecessarily damaged.

In a business environment, a customer may be clear about the project they are pursuing, and seek the involvement of a supplier. If the supplier either does not fully understand the project, fails to appreciate the significance of the effort required, or leaves unexplored any number of other matters then a mismatch is likely to arise that leaves one or both wondering about the motivation and intent of the other.

When two people come together in a personal relationship, understanding the purpose and intent of each other is useful, but this may also be under continuous change. Picture two people, one interested in romance, the other in friendship. Their approach to the relationship is likely to be quite different. If that difference is not dealt with all sorts of misunderstandings are likely to arise, and those may lead to what many would call a natural breakdown in the connection. This is true with any mismatch, even when both parties want the relationship to work.

Establish mutual trust. Trust is something we offer others, and is based on our assessment of the intent and behaviour of the other. It usually takes a relatively long time to develop, and can be lost in an instant through a single action. Generally trust is offered a little at a time. Each increment offered allows greater closeness/intimacy with the other party, involves self-disclosure, and leaves us more exposed and vulnerable in the process.

Remove barriers to connection. Vulnerability naturally leads to fears arising, based on our experience, that act as barriers to a thriving relationship, and they may even place us into flight mode, with us fleeing what is a perfectly good situation. Our fears often arise from what we have encountered in past relationships, and may have little to do with the current one. Working through and resolving those issues can free us to be fully present to what is available and on offer to us in the current relationship. That is one major reason relationships are often considered as healing, because as we stay present to the current relationship, own the issues that arise for us, and resolve them, we are healing in situ.

The problem is you may have experienced in the past situations where you have opened up, and the other party, whether in a business or personal setting, has manipulated or taken advantage of you. As you seek to work through your issues, you often have to learn to trust yourself again, as much as you learn to trust the other. Working through your issues with the other party, being clear about concerns you face, and their source, can aid the development of the current relationship, and deepen the connection.

Also, it is worth observing and noting any behaviours you exhibit that cut the budding connection. For example, I have noticed with myself that with new connections, if I strike fear I tend to break eye contact abruptly and the connection is severed or strongly impaired. The fear arises from within me, may be barely visible to me, but the reaction happens, and that relationship is marred. With some consciousness of that mechanism I am now better able to monitor myself and stay present to what exists between me and the other person. I have found this to be of particular significance in working with groups in a facilitation role which is all about relationships formed and strengthened in the moment.

Authentically Offer More Of Yourself. The more you offer of yourself the more the other party is likely to reciprocate. This is not suggesting you become a doormat to be walked on. Use your intuition and be aware of what is happening between the two of you. In a relationship there are three entities: the two parties and the conduit between through which value is exchanged. Offer more of yourself, and you’ll soon know the quality and nature of what the other party is offering. The exchange will blossom in a beautiful fashion when both parties are truly present, available and engaged with each other in an open and authentic manner.

The dance of relationship involves so much more that evolves over time, but miss any of these steps, and getting started in a meaningful manner is nigh on impossible.

Dealing with the Shakes of Life

Have you ever felt fragile, as if your internal world is unstable and likely to crack and fall? Have you experienced the growing dust cloud that arises at such times as bits of your world crack and fall from the structures you have constructed that provide you with a sense of safety, your clarity lost amid a sense of anxiety, sadness, hurt, fury, agitation or a host of other emotions?

Earthquakes are highly topical with the two recent Christchurch earthquakes followed by the enormous Japanese quake and tsunami. A similar process, even if the mechanics are different, occurs within us. When the way we perceive the world collides with our experience, we have the internal equivalent of an earthquake. The impact may be imperceptible. Or it may be a gentle rocking that leaves us shaken, checking for cracks and areas that need strengthening. Sometimes, less frequently, we can feel totally ripped apart, as if all we held dear, rely on, consider secure, is ripped from us, and little remains that we have trusted or relied on for safety and stability. At those moments we start on major reconstruction projects of our inner world. These major shocks may arise from our health failing; from the loss of loved ones, whether through relationship breakdowns, illness or death; from the loss of our jobs; or threat to things on which we base our identity. The triggers for big shakes are different for everyone, but life does seem to serve up these big ones from time to time.

I remember a conversation with a dear friend where she shared something that totally rocked my world. I was confronted with a new view of her that left me feeling very afraid and unsure of myself, and plunged me into several weeks of major trauma that had me nearly end the friendship. It was an amazingly strong confrontation of some beliefs, perceptions and expectations I held which were potently called into question. Major reconstruction was necessary within my world. In reality I heard and misinterpreted what she said, but that misunderstanding led to an enormous upheaval within me.

I now look at that experience with years of hindsight, and smile, knowing there was nothing untoward in what my friend shared. However it did not fit with the structures, rules and protections I held. At the time I felt devastated; I had crashed into a massive wall. That experience led to me making major changes in my life. I reviewed my belief system and values, and shifted from lifeless and buried by my own protections to a more free, open, authentic and present way of being. The process involved tremendous anxiety and much pain as the change process shifted me into a brand new way of being, requiring me to step into previously unknown states with less internal structure and support. There were many aftershocks and some other significant new quakes. The process still continues. While I don’t usually enjoy the shocks when they occur, I do appreciate the role of such moments within my life for my ongoing development as a more authentic person. I also notice when I feel fragile and vulnerable. Such moments signal a shake has occurred, or is starting, even if I don’t know what has triggered it, and things are being opened up for more internal change. I now endeavour to be more fully with myself in such moments, be with whatever sense of chaos arises, and drop any resistance that I may hold. That enables a stepping into and embracing of the new.

Authentic Relationship

I find myself mulling over Authenticate, one of the elements of personal power, meaning that in relationship with another we ensure that we are authentic in how we present ourselves, and that we overtly expect authenticity of others. In other words, I will do my best to be authentic, and I will call you on those moments when you are not being authentic with me. Easier said than done! I often hit my own protective patterns of seeking to please others, hiding myself so I do not anger, annoy or otherwise cause a negative outcome with another person, and a host of other disingenuous protective behaviours. While I would prefer and do aspire to be authentic in every moment, I don’t manage it. I recognise the same inability to be authentic exists for others too.

One positive outcome of authenticity is the eradication of power struggles and game playing. With authenticity every word, thought or action is as we mean it, and fully aligned with our being. There are no idle threats or inflammatory statements to hurt and push others away. In a truly authentic exchange honesty about how we feel, what we think, and the outcome we want is a given. This is especially important in a moment of conflict.
I find myself sitting with a statement made recently to me by someone I care about, that they did not believe the future held much likelihood of us being friends; our relationship was thus ended. I could spend my time thrashing around, wondering if this was meant as stated, or if it was made from a place of hurt. I could stew about it and wonder what to do. I could stew about what led to this point and question and second guess everything that happened, and what could be done to resolve the situation. Or I could accept it as being an authentic statement and take it at face value, that the relationship has concluded.

One thing about authenticity is that if I fail to be authentic, it becomes my responsibility to deal with any damage my actions create.

Of course, a counter to this philosophy is to recognise that compassion may suggest a softer approach. Forgiving the other person even if they have not asked for forgiveness serves to free us of the pain we experienced from the others’ actions and may enable a bridge to be built for healing to occur. Ultimately each of us do have to take responsibility for our actions, but we may require some loving support to get there. In an Authentic Relationship there is commitment to be with the other person through such moments.

Few of us are willing or even able to take responsibility in those moments where we lash out from a place of hurt. We are reacting from fear and pain, not able at that time to be in our power. In such moments we erect protections to keep us safe. Owning what we said or did requires us to counter our protective instincts and dismantle our protections, become vulnerable. Pain and fear have a nasty impact on us, with primal patterns of fight and flight coming to the fore. In such moments longer term impacts are outside our consideration. Do we write off a person or a relationship because in and following such a moment the other person failed to be authentic?

Additionally, our own lack of compassion is a fear-based reaction that compounds the cycle of hurt. “They did that so I am right to do this.” Or “They have not taken responsibility for that so there is nothing for me to do.” Of course, the other person then says, “Well they did this so I am justified to do that.” The cycle has to be interrupted for a positive outcome to be possible.

Authentic Relationship occurs when each person remains in relationship through such disintegrations. Each recognises their own negative warm up in the situation, where they are reacting from a place of pain and fear. They remain willing to and do actively work with their partner to change their joint warm up, and interrupt the cycle of pain, enabling an adequate outcome to be achieved.