EMM – More than a Graphic

If you’ve been digging around in our book, Healing Leadership (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006R5PXA4), you’ve probably stumbled across the Energy Management Model (EMM) (http://healingleaders.com/eplmmap.aspx). At least we hope you have.  The model is the central point of our thinking; that leadership is more about energy management than anything else.  To repeat the point:  Successful leadership has little or nothing to do with “best practices” or “techniques”.  It has everything to do with presence in the system.  The EMM is a kind of insight portal.  It offers a way into and through a process of acquisition, use and replenishments of personal energy reserves. An important point is, leadership presence is least healthy when energy is depleted.  And, ironically, that’s how we operate.  We deplete our reserves nearly completely before it occurs to us, or we are forced, to resupply.  This is backwards.  We should be replenishing reserves continuously, or more continuously than merely coming home and collapsing in front of the TV or into bed.

The model pulls key thoughts together:  Self-awareness, self-care, self-dare, understanding positions on emotional triangles, management of personal anxiety and the practice of self-defining presence.

At center is Spiritual Connectedness.  It is the apex of presence where we practice connection to whatever higher state of consciousness we need and choose for our well being.

One of my all time favorite preachers, Richard Foss, a now-retired Bishop of the Lutheran Church often regularly said in his sermons, “I don’t know what you’re going through in your life, but I DO know THIS..”…  Then, he spoke the truth of the faith as he understood it.

Pull the model.  Print it. Carry it with you.  It is your tool.

Peace and Courage,

Howard

Blame Displacement In Effect

Remind anyone of the world we’re in?

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/issuecartoons/2011/05/16/cartoons_20110509#slide=3

Peace and Couarge,

Howard

Occupy Leadership!

Ok, that’s it! Enough! A line must be drawn.

Leadership training and development has been hijacked by the 1%. It’s time to give it back. It’s time it returns to the 99%.

What prompts such an intense reaction in me? What could be so vile, so sinister, so destructive as to literally turn my stomach?

Today, in the mail, I received a flyer from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. yes, I’m going to use their real name. While I have no guile toward people involved, it is time someone stands up and reveals their curriculum, their ideals and their ideas for the destructive and devastating force they have become.

Here’s the content of the flyer, verbatim. (Misplaced commas and all)

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“Power and Influence”

New – Strategically managing business relationships  April 11 – 12.

Successful leaders must not only make the right decisions – they must also influence others to support and execute those decisions. Implementing strategy, initiating change, and executing decisions all require the ability to influence, inspire, and shape other’s behavior.

The Power and Influence program will help you to learn the practical tools to become more powerful and influential in your dealings with coworkers, managers, and partners. You will learn to:

• Acquire power and lead others even when you lack formal authority
• Manage your team and inter-personal relationships more effectively
• Harness the latest scientific evidence to create powerful and lasting influence
• Master a practical toolkit for crafting strategic verbal and non-verbal communication

Tuition $2500

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Where do I begin?

1. Power and Influence

The very title oozes with arrogance and assumption of control. It is clear from this piece that they are using “power over” rather than “power with” others. Rather than “power with.” It involves making decisions for people and then trying to manipulate them rather than defining oneself and giving choices. Anyone who has tried this with teenagers knows there is a huge problem with this approach – IT DOESN’T WORK! You may gain initial ground that gives the appearance of success. But rest assured, the systemic forces of homeostasis and the status quo will rebound with a vengeance. The result is a situation that is worse than the initial situation the leader was attempting to change.

2. Manage interpersonal relationships

Really! Are you kidding me? How is it we can control how others interact unless we lock them in solitary confinement? How is it we can set an outcome between two other people and expect to be able to control this so we can get our way. (I can tell you as a marriage and family therapist, that kind of superpower would have been handy!)

3. Harness the latest scientific evidence to create powerful and lasting influence

Excuse me but this sounds more like an advertisement for a new diet plan. Powerful? Lasting? What are they selling here? Again, it is the same old failed model of top-down control. Only this time, they christen it with the “sci-co-babble” of the social science model to give it credibility (as if power and lasting influence were brand new discoveries direct from the lab.) Again,this buys in to the illusion of control. After all, “lasting” is sort of a long time.

4. Master a practical tool-kit for crafting strategic communication

It’s all about having the right tools and knowing how to use them. Push the button. Throw the right lever. Flip the right switch.  Where are such things as character, maturity, courage, creativity and vision? The art and complexity of leadership is reduced to plumbing.

I find all of these points beyond naive. It is naive to think that the invasive and destructive forces in organizations can be managed and educated away. Immaturity, sabotage, anxious and destructive behavior are merely problems to be managed rather than faced decisively and clearly for the toxic forces they are.

Maybe you think I’m being unfair but I can’t be kind about this. Aside from being ridiculous, arrogant and misleading these ideas are destructive. They are destructive in shoring up the illusion and the expectation of control. What happens to leaders when the inevitably fall short? What happens to followers along the way. They end up shredded, that’s what happens. Demoralized, data-addicted leaders, thinking the problem is they didn’t study enough, they didn’t use the right “tools” at the right time; leaders on treadmills of trying harder; demoralized employees/members baffled by the latest and greatest productivity initiative; dispirited employees/members, weary from being treated like they are children – all result from of this kind of thinking.

Oh there’s one more result of this kind of thinking, the “pushers” providing the never ending streams of techniques, tools and data  to the newly created addicts are getting rich. They’ve got a good scam going. The students should be paid to take this kind of abuse instead of the other way around.

It’s time to occupy leadership! Now!

Steve Geske

Victimhood Redux

Three  years ago I wrote a real time experience in observing least mature behavior among a group of men I know.  You can read it in a newsletter here.  (It’s the second article…but read the first one, too.) http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs002/1101927169235/archive/1102459812057.html

So here’s an update.  The same guys are still meeting at the same time and place and still complaining about the world they inhabit.  This doesn’t surprise as much as disappoints me.  A few days ago I overheard their (not particularly evolved) complaints about the stupid people who inhabit the world and how we are all headed for catastrophe. It’s about what they were saying three years ago.  Amusingly, none of the guys expressed any sense of irony that the imminent destruction of the universe they’ve been predicting for years has yet occurred.

I am pretty sure these guys are exactly where they want to be.  Anxiety, fear and danger are their Saturday morning companions. They have become experts on being stuck.

Did I follow my own guidance when I recognized the environment I had stumbled into?  Yup!  And I’ll do it again.

Peace and Courage,

Howard

Non-anxious leadership meets the lake

I was captivated recently listening to acquatic ecologist and author Darby Nelson (http://www.darbynelson.com/) speak about the acquitic invasive species threats to our beloved Minnesota lakes.  Nelson believes our thinking patterns about ecological balance, health and survival are compromised by our emotional responses.  (Sound familiar???)  He says since “emotions, not logic” seem to drive our behaviors and different (or differing) perceptions drive those behaviors,  we are often blocked from both seeing threats to healthy lakes and imagining the correct responses to those threats.  “We see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear,” he says.  Nelson told the story of a local official who, seeing woody deadfall along a lake shore, insisted it be removed because of its unsightly appearance.  In fact, such woodalls are natural and important sanctuaries for fish breeding.  This stimulates fishing which is an important economic feature in the area where the official lives.

Nelson’s term “inate habits of mind” – where we are compelled to keep doing what doesn’t work – sounds a lot like leadership stuck in gridlock.

See our book here

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006R5PXA4

Peace and Courage,

Howard

What Gridlock Looks Like

In our book, “Healing Leadership” we assert that maturity is the antedote for gridlock.  We explore the indicators of gridlock and paralysis in depth. Here’s the short list on, “What Gridlock Looks Like”.

• Organizational Paralysis
• Absence/Abdication of Mission
• Disoriented Planning
• Chaotic Communication
• Resistance and Sabotage
• Toxic environment
• Adapting towards the least mature
• Ineffective Actions
• Reactive responses
• Focus on Symptoms
• Blame Displacement

For a deep dive on these indicators see our book http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006R5PXA4

Peace and Courage,

Howard

“What do YOU think?” (don’t tell me)

If you are detecting the absence of this question in your conversations with others in your company or on your team, you should be concerned.  If you’re not asking this question regularly in your discussions, conversations and dialogues with others, you’ve got work to do.  What appears to be creeping into our culture – and business systems are not immune – is increasing fear of contradiction.  The act of breaking the cycle of monologue, wherein leaders expend voluminous energy selling their ideas and leave little or no room for response, challenge and alternative thinking, is becoming increasingly difficult for those leaders.  The degree of this difficulty is related to the degree of paralysis which exists in the system.

We discuss paralysis and gridlock in our book (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006R5PXA4) and point to the Four Modes of Being; Anxious Absence, Anxious Presence, Non-anxious Absence and Non-anxious Presence (the preferred state of being) as a model which helps reflect and define states of anxiety where a leaders resides.  Only in Non-anxious Presence – where leaders possess the courage to fully “show up”  can the question “What do you think” be successfully asked.

If  you’re not ready to fully hear what the other does think, don’t bother asking until you are.

Peace and Courage,

Howard

The Unknown Known

A New Years Resolution for me.  Leaders are welcome to borrow.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s thinking (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/unknown-knowns-avoiding-the-truth.html?scp=1&sq=unknown%20known&st=cse) has got me recalling some of the probably countless times in my career when I have failed or refused to know the known.  There was the time when I knew a television news team I managed didn’t have the chemistry to draw successful ratings; the time when I knew there was something fishy about a marketing campaign for which I was ultimately responsible; when a corporate policy was poorly conceived and when a client with whom I spent serious consulting time wasn’t ever going to “get it”.

I had decided to unknow the known.

I managed by hope.

We are, I think, compelled to default to avoiding or dismissing the known when the energy required for (sometimes risky) response seems unavailable to us.  This is the most charitable reason I can think of.  There are, I fear, less chartible and even sinister reasons for this phenomenon (politics anyone?), but lets think about business leadership here and chalk up avoiding-the-known to anxiety and energy depletion.

Our Energy Management Model implies and invites truth seeking within self.

Let our New Year be a (re)beginning of knowing the known and acting with courage.

Peace, Howard

We are excited about the publication of our new book, Healing Leadership – A Survival Guide for the Enlightened Leader now available on the Kindle format. We are offering it at a reduced introductory price of $9.99. You can get it here.

EMM for the New Year!

We at HealingLeaders continue to find the Energy Management Model as we set forth in our new book to be crucial for survival as leaders. Because it is process-focused instead of content focused (step 1,  step 2, etc.) it not only provides guidance in terms of answers, it continues to provide questions regarding core issues in our lives.

One situation that you may identify with is the toll the Holidays seem to take on us each year, this year very much included. Besides being physically and emotionally draining, the Holidays can produce a lot of frustration at our vulnerability to being “tipped over” every year despite our best efforts. What is going on to perpetuate this in us year after year?

Enter the Energy Management Model! Though any of the four dimensions of the EMM can provide valuable questions and direction for any situation, the place I like to begin is Self-Care. I see this as the foundation for how we function in our lives.

So how does the “Self-Care Dimension” of the EMM shed light on what’s going on with us during the holidays and point toward greater balance and a higher level of functioning?

When I look at what happens to most of us around the holidays from this perspective, what I see is a radical break from our daily routines. Parties, gatherings, feasts, shopping and preparation make the holidays special. They also disrupt our physical and emotional rhythms.

As a parish pastor, I used to visit the elderly in nursing homes. I observed their rigid schedules and near obsession with routine. I saw it as a decline in being adventurous and the inflexibility that comes with a closed mind. I remember verbally “arm wrestling” with Bertha who was 93 at the time. I found out she was not going to get out and enjoy the holidays. After repeated encouragement on my part to do so, she stopped me cold and looked me in the eye. She said, “Pastor, if I go out in this cold for a single afternoon, it will take me a week to recover from the pain I will have due to my arthritis.”

What I began to understand was that these dear people hadn’t become rigid. They had simply, and mostly out of necessity, become wise about the value and the power of daily rhythms to support health and well-being. They knew from experience what scientists will tell you from research – the body loves daily rhythms!

With this in mind, I’m considering a different strategy next year. What if we set some boundaries around the demands of the Holidays that preserved our daily rhythms? I see four daily rhythms that I would identify as important:

1. Sleeping
2. Eating
3. Exercising
4. Energy Balancing (Spiritual practice)

What if we maintained our sleep schedule, our eating schedule, our exercise schedule and our regular spiritual practice during the Holidays? No exceptions! It sounds simple but for me that only adds to the appeal. I think it is worth a try.

Thank you EMM!

Peace, courage, and a Happy and Healthy New Year!

Steve

********* Shameless Plug**********

We are excited about the publication of our new book, Healing Leadership – A Survival Guide for the Enlightened Leader now available on the Kindle format. We are offering it at a reduced introductory price of $9.99. You can get it here.

Cognitive Illusions

Freeman Dyson reviews “Thinking Fast and Slow”, by Daniel Kahneman:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/dec/22/how-dispel-your-illusions/?page=1

Money Quote:

“What practical benefit can we derive from an understanding of our irrational mental processes? We know that our judgments are heavily biased by inherited illusions, which helped us to survive in a snake-infested jungle but have nothing to do with logic. We also know that, even when we become aware of the bias and the illusions, the illusions do not disappear. What use is it to know that we are deluded, if the knowledge does not dispel the delusions?”

A suggestion to correct “cognitive illusions” and balance the conflict between the System One and System Two Brain?  Employ vocabulary for clarification.

Leaders take note:  Data can misinform and challenging your own intution can produce better decisions.

Howard