Best Of Zen

What Color Is Your Parachute?

If your parachute isn't golden, you might be looking for some help finding your way to your calling, your next career move or your legacy.   So here's an exercise that not only helps you look in a mirror, but to see yourself as others do.

Try this at a meeting to create greater self-awareness and groupsourced career counseling in less than 30 minutes. Alchemist Chris Grant designed this exercise for The Vine and called it resume unbound. 

Giving us five minutes, Chris had each of us write out two or three phrases under three headings on a single piece of paper:

• my values at work
• the value I add
• skills, characteristics and qualities.

Then, you and the person sitting next to you take five minutes to exchange resumes, explaining what you have written before standing up and wandering the room holding your partner's resume.  In the next five minutes, you must talk to at least three people, pairing up to ask what they would do if they could borrow the person you represent for a year.   With surprising answers in hand, you return to your original partner to download life-altering career suggestions.

My partner was the ultimate blend of Jim Collins and Deprok Chopra.  He came back with three suggestions for me:  run a think tank; be a facilitator and consensus builder; or become a community organizer.   Works for me and it makes a much better elevator speech!

Mentor for Life

At the Shackleton workshop, we were asked to tell the group about our favorite leader, someone we knew personally and who served as our role model of leadership. After a dozen stories about past bosses and heroes, I was compelled to say that my mentor is my mother.  I can hear her laughing now, but the more I have thought about it this week, the more I know it is true.

Even in prosaic roles, as a manager doing performance reviews or organizing a project or speaking up at work when something needs to be said, it's my mother who has shaped my behavior, not B-school.  Her mother lived by the golden rule, and it still seems like the right standard for business and life. 

Fortunately, I had the good sense to write my mother a letter at the end of my first semester in college and tell her how just much of what she had been trying to impart to me for 18 years actually stuck.  Faced with a series of choices those first few months away from home, my test was to bounce it against the admonition I heard every morning when I set out the door:  Make your mother proud of you and be careful crossing the street.  That made most choices pretty simple.

And, it was 18 years after that when the letter was returned to me that I discovered just how important it is to tell people not just that you love them, but how they change your life.  My mother died in an automobile accident, and the letter was in her purse when she died.  Her friends told me later that she would take the letter out and show people what I had written years earlier.

My mother was funny, generous and kind.  She was no fool, but never made you feel like one.  She had a hard life, but never complained or regretted her choices.  She worked hard, laughed a lot, and had dozens and dozens of friends she maintained over many years. She was my cousins' favorite aunt and her bosses' most reliable colleague.  She worked full time and raised three children. She believed in buying quality shoes for growing feet, and always found the money for a book one couldn't live without.  But more than that, she believed in you.   She just knew you were doing your best, and that was more than enough.

So, yes, my model for leadership is my mother, and I think she would be proud of me--well, most of the time, anyway.  (And come to think of it, her example of who to be led me to my husband, who is like her in all the ways that matter--and it's no coincidence that he has a great mother, too.)

Like Sir Ernest, my mother could turn her back on the past and step into the future. She stepped up to deal directly with adversity, and stepped back to let others do their part.  Like Shackleton, she was a realistic optimist and a leader.

Realistic Optimism

Like pornography, most of us know leadership when we see it.  Experts list dozens of attributes, traits, and behaviors that when mixed in proper proportions magically produce great leaders.  Others observe followers and reduce the equation to trust, followers' belief in the competence of the leader to get them to the goal.  A few have abandoned the 'great man' theory, and find that leadership emerges when and where it is needed and that leadership is organic.

Extreme conditions test any theory, and few tests can approximate the experience of the crew of the Endurance and their leader, Sir Ernest Shackleton.  The goal was to cross the continent.  The achievement was survival.  In 1918, the entire team was rescued after being stranded in the Antarctic for two years.  All attributed their success to one factor, their leader and his optimism in the face of impossible odds.

Yesterday, I was fortunate to be one of 18 people--a mix of land use and association professionals--to sign on to a one-day adventure, guided by the author of Shackleton's Way, Margot Morrell, and Linkage facilitator and executive coach Dick Gauthier.  One of the exercises in the workshop included the use of an assessment tool, the results of which arrayed participant's scores in the four quadrant box all consultants adore.  One scale was realism, the other optimism.  The assessment brought home Shackleton's secret, his extreme realistic optimism, best illustrated by his reaction to watching his ship succumb to the pressure of the ice pack.  He gathered his crew, turned his back on the sinking ship, and said, "So now we will go home." 

Contrarian that I am, I couldn't help thinking of Abraham Lincoln.  Isn't he the opposite of Shackleton yet also one of the greatest leaders the world has known?  Does realistic optimism hold up?  I think so because Lincoln was not a pessimist. (See my January 11 post on  Lincoln's Melancholy.)  He was what Victor Frankl called a 'tragic optimist,' all too aware of the danger of the future but deeply secure in his belief in the group, the promise inherent in "the abundance of man's heart."

In the workshop, I also noticed that the developers--members working in both the public and private sectors--live in the same space as Sir Ernest, realistic optimists all. Association professionals, on the other hand, appeared to be aspiring to the median score. And there lies the opportunity. Rather than worry about what's missing, be realistic, but turn your back on setbacks and don't hold back.

In boldness, there is magic, as Goethe said.  Leadership is about stepping up, committing, knowing what really matters, and trusting our ability to find a way. 

In the extremes, there is greatness and in members' hearts there is promise.  Go for it!

Tell me more

We all want to be heard, yet how well do we listen? 

One technique to improve the odds is to respond more often with the phrase, "Tell me more."  One-on-one, "tell me more" signals respect and a willingness to listen. It implies that judgment has been suspended.

In meetings, you will need to change the rules to ensure active listening.  If not explicitly negotiated at the outset, group norms will determine the order, frequency and duration of each person's speaking time.  Tinker with the dynamic by deferring to, or extending, a lower status individual's air time. Invite more people into the room.  Change the seating pattern. Eliminate the table.

If you are trapped between two persistent states of talking and waiting to talk, find ways to default to listening. Even if you approach it as performing random kindness and senseless acts of beauty, the same benefits follow.

Improving Your Vision

Vision, clearly communicated, is the ultimate delegation tool.  With a shared vision, each of us is  confident to make decisions and take actions, knowing we are moving toward a larger goal.

As a leader, even if you have 20/20 vision, you will will need to supply:

• Regular eye exams for your team; 
• Bifocals for project managers to focus on the immediate task and see ahead; and,
• Lasik surgery for others to escape from out of date lenses.