I’m starting to prepare my workshop on the Gold Coast of Australia in December. This year’s workshop is called The Leadership Lab. It focuses on the inner development of the leader, something I’m very interested in. I’m fascinated by what is not included in leadership development. Conventional leadership training usually focuses on 1) so-called soft (yet hard to master) skills such as communication, coaching, team work, 2) technical skills such as strategy, financial management, negotiation, innovation, leading change, and 3) power, influence, and understanding one’s own leadership styles.
What’s missing though, is learning how to use your skills under pressure. The moment is not the classroom. If you don’t practice under stress, you can’t perform under stress. It’s that simple. Cops understand this, the military understands this, athletes understand this. But leadership training doesn’t always understand this. You cannot access your tools under stress unless you have trained to access your tools under stress. Arny Mindell focuses on this aspect of facilitation in what he calls “the second training.”
The following three areas pose psychological challenges that leaders face. Each day, we’ll look at one of them:
1. Self
Being able to perform under extreme pressure can only be learned by studying yourself under pressure. Leaders have to have a rock solid capacity to find balanced and fluid, to be able to remember the big picture in the most turbulent of situations.
Under pressure, funny things happen. Our attention narrows on the immediate threat; our ego, pride, and emotions kick in, and everything in us, physiologically and psychologically is primed to make quick, reactive decisions. Unless we practice using our skills under stressful situations, we won’t be able to recall them when we most need.
2. Role
When leaders step into the role, they have a lot more to contend with then just their own personal psychology. The role is a vortex of energy, expectations, emotions, projections and responsibilities. It’s an extremely complex thing to inhabit. It’s both personal and impersonal, real and imaginary, all at the same time. Roles are like lightning rods; they attract and absorb atmospheric pressures and tensions, that are meant for the system. The more we take those pressures and tensions personally, the more the pressure of the role will sink you.
3. Rank
Along with the role, comes status and authority, power and expertise. Some of it is personal, why we were chosen for the role, and some of it belongs to the role. Using power well depends on our own personal power. And that in turn, depends on our history. We do not enter positions of power as blank slates. Our own history of power and authority, our own social identity intersects with the power of the role, creating a potential perfect storm of variables. To use power well, we have to learn and unlearn what we have already experienced about power. We lead with and from our wounds.
Looking forward to learning more about this with my friends and colleagues Down Under. Oh, which reminds me – #4: the cultural dimensions of power and leadership!
Dear Julie, wow this is exciting! In my teaching, supervision and coaching on leadership development I find Oz training and development folk are enthralled to discover that yes we are bigger than the role and the role is bigger than us, some of which is organised by what Mindell calls “the field”. As you outline it’s simultaneously ‘personal and impersonal, real and imaginary’. Discovering that personal ‘pressures and tensions, are meant for the system’ is a potential liberation.
Here’s to thinking about the pressures that we suffer from as valuable aspects of systemic change and to practicing from this perspective pre-workshop.I’d love to collaborate with others through posting our action-research findings and questions on the blog. Thanks so much for setting up this possibility, cheers Dr.Jane Martin
thanks Jane, I look forward to hearing what others are doing and finding on the topic
Hi Julie.
I’m feeling into the sense of being a lightning rod, tuning into and channeling the fields atmospheric pressures. And sitting with the question of using the power within my wound, my cultural wound, with awareness. not sure if I’ve got all that yet, but great framing and I’m enjoying the experience.
Warmly, Lynn
Oh wow Julie – this sounds like the juiciest workshop ever! looking forward to it all – love Silvia
Hi Julie,
Could you tell more about the “lab” for leaders you want to create?
I like the idea of creating labs (instead of classrooms) and have been experimenting with creating labs for learning myself – in the context of participatory processes and open-ended learning experiences in public spaces like museums, science centers and national nature parks.
It is pretty challenging, yet, very creative and inspiring work as you never really know what you will get and how it will develop with the people present!
Must be very challenging indeed with the issue of leadership (under pressure)!
Love,
Barbara
Nothing that sophisticated yet… just the nature of the seminar. lab like in the sense of experiential, practicing and trying out new things
Hi Barbara,
I’d love to know more about your work with participatory learning processes in those settings you mentioned. Something about what you say fires off my imagination about the possibilities of using it for building collective community leadership…
(not sure if this is straying from the topic of this blog? (if so we could email privately)
cheers
Penny
Hi Julie,
Looking forward to being in the “lab”. As the turbulence of economic, social and global crises become a central theme in our world, the need for leaders to develop their “inner” life becomes more critical. Thanks for focusing on this topic and collaborating with us “down under”. warm regards Lynne Baker MBA.
All very exciting and much needed, and good to connect with others around this topic,
yes to: ‘posting our action-research findings and questions on the blog’ or wherever is best to facilitate sharing,
I’m fascinated with community leadership, and the patterns I see occurring, eg; the sorts of people attracted to leadership positions, the cultural forces that support certain types of leaders and leadership styles, what leaders and would-be leaders struggle with, the constant splitting apart of groups, and polarisation within and between groups. One of my passions is discovering/designing/facilitating participatory community processes which support personal and cultural change in this area. And of course, exploring all this in myself:-) looking forward to the workshop! love, Penny