RLL #13: "Human Nature and Leadership, Part 2--Humility, and Reason to Hope"

RLL #13: “Human Nature and Leadership, Part 2: Humility and Reason to Hope:

“Pride is the chief cause of misery in every nation and in every family since the world began.” So states C.S. Lewis, and as we examined last week, pride really is at the root of every problem that we face: laziness, selfishness, ignorance, apathy, and all the rest. The problems in the world are not hard to see when we watch the news, or listen to people chatting in the check-out lines at the grocery store, or when we simply reflect on much of what has occurred in the past year. So much of what we hang on to is negative, and it is the result of pride, either our own or someone else’s. This week especially, though, we get to see and remember that there is also hope. There is joy. There is love. And these things stem from humility.

A couple of years ago, out of the blue, I got a phone call from a family friend that we used to attend church with. She was calling to tell me about something that had happened at our children’s school that day. There was a boy in my daughter’s class whose parents were going through a particularly harsh divorce: both sides angry, both sides hurting, and children unfortunately caught in between. One of the results of this was that this boy was unable to get many of his personal items, such as clothing, from one parent’s house, causing him to have to wear the same clothes to school for most of the week. When other students caught on to this, they began to tease him and give him a hard time. According to my family friend (and, later, the boy’s father, who also contacted me to relate this story, not knowing that our friend had already done so), the only person who stood up for the boy was my daughter, one of the smallest (I’m only 5’3”, and my kids are also pretty small) and youngest students in her class. She told the bullies to back off, and she tried to encourage the boy who was being teased, and she did all of this without any prompting from anyone.

Now, aside from the obvious “I want to brag on my child” (which is pride, by the way, but not necessarily the destructive pride we saw last week), what is the point of telling you this? The point is that what Carly (my daughter) did is exactly what we need to be doing as leaders: focusing on helping others, without regard to ourselves. She risked also being made fun of (especially since these kids are in middle school, for many people the most brutal part of childhood), ostracized by her own friends, etc, to stand up for a boy who needed an ally. Had she been thinking of her own social standing, popularity, etc, she might have chosen other than she did. However, because of wanting to help, wanting to serve, and (without realizing it) wanting to lead through that service, she stood up for someone who needed it. And isn’t that also what leadership is all about?

As I am fond of quoting C.S. Lewis, I will do so yet again: he says that “Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It is thinking of yourself less... Humility is simply not thinking of yourself at all.” Humility is focusing on other people rather than on ourselves, and it is because of humility that hope exists.

Here’s the truth: we are ALL broken, imperfect, and fallen. We all make mistakes. We like to think that we’re the kid who will stand up for others when they need it, but the truth is we’re also just as capable of being the bully making fun of someone in a weaker position than ourselves. Everyday we hear stories of pain suffering, abuse, corruption, and we experience many of these things in our own lives. The good news is that the pain and suffering isn’t the whole story. But in order to move beyond it, we must first come to accept a very difficult truth: WE are the problem in the world. Our selfishness, our pride, are the things that lead us to ill-treat other people, both in individual relationships and in large groups. Just as a quick exercise: how many of us can point to a relationship that has been damaged in the past year directly as a result of differing political views on some topic? This is because both sides are more interested in being right than in doing right things.

The only solution for these problems is the humility to admit that we don’t have all the answers. How do we do this, and why should we? Let me hit on a few quick points that are very appropriate in this context of Christmas.

1. STAY HUMBLE--In the 16th century a man named John Bradford witnessed a group of criminals being led to the gallows. In a moment of pure insight, he realized that he was, in his human nature, not any different than those men (a remarkable insight for a time period defined by strict social and class hierarchy), saying to himself, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” This is true of you and of me: we are humans, and therefore we are broken, and we are capable of all manner of wrongdoing. And the more we think we are NOT capable of those things, the more danger we’re in of doing them. Why? Because, as the great philosopher (and creator of the ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ comic strips) Bill Watterson says, “We’re all someone else to someone else.” Remember that, as humans, we are prone to sin, to error, to selfishness. And because of that, we need to be reminded every day to choose the good, to do good.

2. CHOOSE THE GOOD--I have a tendency to put my foot in my mouth. Just this week, I was in the grocery store with my wife, and I began a sentence about something happily nostalgic with the words, “What was her name…?” (Hint: gentlemen, this is almost NEVER a good way to begin that kind of sentence.) After realizing how that sounded, I was able to begin again, clarify what I was talking about, and we moved on after chuckling at my tendency to unintentionally gaff verbally. This happens so often that we have a phrase to use whenever I think that what I have to say may come across differently than I intend it to: “I mean nice.” That essentially means, “If this can be taken more than one way, I mean it in the most positive way possible.” My wife knows that I want to love and honor her, and so she has developed a habit of choosing to believe the best about what I’m trying to say and do. Imagine how different all of our interactions would be as leaders if we simply choose to believe the best about other people. I’ll write more about this another time, but in brief, I do NOT mean that we should naively ignore problems, warning signs, etc. But in general, let’s choose to believe the absolute best that we can about others, remembering that we also are human and therefore prone to make mistakes.

3. SERVE AND LEARN--as we’ve seen in previous posts, leadership is about serving others to help them become the best they can be, and to do that we must constantly be learning more about them so we can help them better. In humility, we also will learn more about ourselves: we’ll see our own shortcomings and flaws more clearly, as we stop focusing on ourselves. This may sound counter-intuitive, but think about it logically: how many of us, when we’re making a mistake, KNOW we’re making a mistake? We don’t! If we did, we probably wouldn’t make it! As C.S. Lewis tells us, we know about drunkenness when we’re sober, not when we’re drunk. We know about consciousness and sleep when we’re conscious, not when we’re asleep. So as we choose to focus our efforts on helping others, we will also come to see our own mistakes more clearly, and it will cause us to give grace toward others who make the same mistakes we do.

4. CHRISTMAS--(for those who are not religious, please bear with me for just a paragraph) for believers, this is the time when we celebrate the ultimate act of humility in the universe. The Creator, the omnipotent and omniscient God chose to humble Himself and come to earth as one of us, living the perfect life that we cannot live (yet strive for anyway), and die for us the death we deserve (because of our sins) to die, and then defeated death so that we can be reconciled to Him. There is no greater example of humility than that. In a similar (yet infinitely smaller) way, think of the impact of seeing a billion-dollar company’s CEO sweeping up after the Christmas party, or pitching in with grunt-work to help meet a pending deadline. When those in authority choose to humble themselves and help out those under their charge, it makes a powerful impact on us. As a Christian, I believe that God did this through Jesus, and Christmas is the celebration of that humility. That is source of my hope--that God became man, so that we might be reconciled to God. And in the meantime, my job is to serve others so that they might come to know Him and become the people they are meant to be, the best possible versions of themselves.

[N.B.: I , along with Chesterton, Lewis, Augustine, and every other honest believer will 100% admit that Christians throughout history have made mistakes (even HUGE ones), have caused problems, have treated people poorly. Any and all accusations you want to make about hypocrisy have truth in them. However, I would ask that you not judge Jesus by our faults; rather, I’d ask that you judge Jesus on His own merits. That is, if He is true, what could be a better source of hope than God choosing to sacrifice Himself for our sakes? If you want to learn more, please go pick up a copy of ‘Mere Christianity’ and give it a read.]

If we do these four things, there will be three positive results. First, as leaders, we’ll realize that not everything is about us. And that frees us from the burden of feeling solely responsible for the results of whoever we are leading. We are responsible, yes; but we are more responsible how we serve the people we are leading than anything else. Second, we will be more focused on doing good things without being concerned about who gets the credit. This results in better relationships, better outcomes, and a deeper impact on those we lead. And third, when we choose the good and thereby create a more positive environment, this  will cause our audiences to follow us in that positivity. As we learn in the wonderful football/race relations movie ‘Remember the Titans,’ “Attitude reflects leadership.” If we want to lead in a positive, uplifting, encouraging environment, then we are responsible for helping create that environment. And we can best do that by staying humble, remaining hopeful, and choosing the good.

I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and may God bless you all!

Action Step: today, choose to believe the best of one person that you have previously been holding something against. See how it changes your perception of them, their actions, and their choices.

RLL #12: "Lazy, Selfish, and Ignorant--Human Nature and Leadership, Part 1: The Problem of Pride"

RLL #12: "Lazy, Selfish, and Ignorant--Human Nature and Leadership, Part 1: The Problem of Pride"

Caveat-- I think this is important information, but I would ask one favor of the reader: DON’T read this post unless you are willing to come back and read the next one (due out next Sunday), because this post may come across as a bit pessimistic. In order to fully understand the point, you’ll need to read next week’s, which will balance out the apparent pessimism with hope. Thank you! - Joel

Last night, my wife and I were at dinner at a relatively upscale restaurant with some friends in Birmingham. We chose this particular restaurant because our friend is the manager, and his wife (and their young son) was one of our dinner companions, and at this time of year his busy work schedule means that this is one way for them to steal a few extra minutes together. While we ate, Steve (the manager-friend of ours) came by the table a couple times to check on us and see his wife, and it was a very enjoyable dinner. Just before the end of the meal, Steve reached over and patted his son, the almost-two-year-old Baby David (as he’s known in our circles) on the back, only to discover that when he drew his hand back it was sticky and dripping with a sticky, gross, suspiciously fecal substance.

Baby David had unfortunately been having some tummy trouble in recent days, and apparently was not as “over it” as we had all believed before we went to dinner. He had had what parents refer to as a “blow-out,” with his diaper failing to contain the seemingly gravity-defying (and frankly mind-boggling) amount of little kid poop that he had expelled sometime during the meal. I’ll leave out any more details, in respect to those who don’t enjoy these sorts of stories (I enjoy telling them, probably because I’m a guy and poop jokes and stories still make me laugh at age 35 as much as they did when I was a child of 10); suffice it to say that, in an instant, Steve had grabbed the diaper bag, I had picked up Baby David, high chair and all, and without another word, we had whisked him off to the changing station in the restaurant bathroom. We got him cleaned up, changed, and ready to rejoin the group (and the high chair also got cleaned up, as well as the floor around the table…) in under 10 minutes. We were pretty impressed with ourselves, actually.

Now, it’s almost Christmas, on a Saturday night, in a busy and crowded restaurant during the height of the dinner rush. Steve was at work and had a job to do, but in the instant he realized that his son had had his blow-out, a new set of priorities had taken over. His reaction was immediate, decisive, and ultimately effective. Because he is a good manager, his section of the restaurant survived and thrived without his being able to answer questions or put out fires while we were dealing with Baby David, and because he is no longer a new father he was able to quickly deal with the poop-crisis. Steve was trained to make quick decisions about rapidly-changing circumstances to try to deal with the situation in the most expedient way possible, and in that moment, his work as a father and his work as a manager came together in a very positive way.

Unfortunately, what most people don’t realize is that Steve’s reaction was not natural or even normal. It was learned, and it was intentional, much like most aspects of leadership. The lesson here is two-fold--first, the bad news: leadership is work, either constant growth or regression, consistent learning or steady forgetting; second the good news: leadership is also learned, a set of behaviors, philosophies, and practices that can be cultivated over time. Certainly some people have specific gifts, skills, or traits that are helpful, but the truth is that everyone can learn new (or improve already-existing) leadership skills if they put in the effort.

Why is this important? Because the truth is that human beings, in our natural state, are not positive creatures. Bear with me, because this will bother some readers; I apologize in advance, but if you will read on with humility and honesty, I believe you will also come to see the truth of what I am going to say. In my classroom, I often remind my students that human beings are four things (in varying amounts and to varying degrees, yes; but we are all of these things at different times): 1) lazy, 2) selfish, 3) ignorant, 4) apathetic.

If given the choice to do work that we don’t want to do or to shirk that task in favor of some more enjoyable (but often less productive) activity, most of us will choose to shirk most of the time. We are lazy; I see this in myself most often when it comes to grading essays on tests (or stalling by doing ANYTHING else). If there is one piece of pizza left and two of us, I know that I want the piece of pizza, and if I have to I might share; we are selfish. If we are not forced to go to school, or get more training for work, or learn something new about ourselves, most of us (unless it is a subject we enjoy anyway) will simply be content to stay ignorant (n.b. Ignorant is not an insult but rather a statement of fact: it simply means “not knowing”) of whatever that information may be. And finally, until a problem touches or affects us personally, most often we are content to not care enough to stir ourselves into addressing the problem because we are apathetic. I know these things are true of me. And, I suspect, if we are all honest, we can admit that these things are true of all of us at various times.

The truth of these statements can be seen or experienced by almost everyone who has worked in a daycare, a church nursery, or an elementary school. No one has to teach children to pitch a fit, to snatch away toys, or to not want to clean up after activities. Yes, there are stories of children helping each other on the playground, or befriending someone very different from themselves. But do these stories not touch us so much in large part because they are such an exception to the general rule? No, no one has to teach children to be lazy, selfish, ignorant, or apathetic. We must be taught to be better.

We must be taught to that hard work is a virtue to be cultivated, rather than simply a duty to perform; and we must be taught that hard work doesn’t mean do the bare minimum (how many of us heard that from parents, teachers, instructors, etc.?). We must be taught to share, to let others go in front of us (rather than breaking places) in line, to hold the door for others. We must be taught that knowledge is power, that education really can change the world and our futures, and that putting in the effort to learn is always worth it in the end. We must be taught to be concerned about others, even when the issues we see may not negatively affect us personally. And, perhaps even more importantly, we must be reminded of these things over and over again, for the rest of our lives, lest we forget the simple Golden Rule of kindergarten: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” As C.S. Lewis said, “We need to be reminded more often than we need to be taught.”

What does all this have to do with leadership and pride? First, we need to recognize that every role we experience in life is either a leadership role or it is preparation for a future leadership role. As a parent, a teacher, a restaurant manager, an athlete, an employee, an entrepreneur, or anything else, we must realize that we need to consciously work on becoming better every day, even if that ‘better’ doesn’t translate to a bigger paycheck. Second, we must apply realize that our task is to help both ourselves and our audience become less lazy and more hard-working, less selfish and more giving, less ignorant and more educated (not necessarily formal education; more on that in my book!), less apathetic and more concerned about helping others. We’re all part of humanity, and therefore when one of us is affected, all of us are affected.

Third, and finally, the root cause of all of these issues is pride, or self-centeredness, or self-focus. [Here, this means only the negative aspects of pride; for a more in-depth look at this issue, please read the chapter called ‘The Great Sin’ in C.S. Lewis’ ‘Mere Christianity’ where he distinguishes between different meanings of the word. I strongly recommend this book for many reasons, whether a person is a Christian or not.] We want to be the center of attention, the center of our own universes, and this is not something that we have learned. We simply are that way. Until we know any better, we can’t really help it: we want what we want, and that seems the end of the matter. It is only as we get old enough to have conscious thoughts that we realize other people also want what they want, and sometimes these things conflict. That is where we run into problems because pride is also inherently competitive: it is interested not just in having its own way, but in having its own way even at the expense of others.

Just this evening I saw a child have no interest in a cracker on her plate, until her father tried to give that same cracker to another child; all of a sudden the first child demanded the cracker back and yelled when the father refused it to her. This child is under two years old, and no sane parents would teach their child this type of behavior, so we can assume this is something they are trying to address and correct in their child. This is the beginning of the child learning how to be a better person by following her parents’ leadership and teaching.

Leadership, if you recall, is the art of positively influencing the people around you to become better versions of themselves. It is crucial that we do this and do it well, and in order to do that we must first admit the problem: that we ourselves need to improve in order that we may also help others improve. We must confront the problems of our laziness, our selfishness, our ignorance, and our apathy head-on in order that we might overcome them in time and with the aid of others.

One final note: if you are not any of the four things mentioned above, then I apologize and wish you the best, and I look forward to learning from you how you overcame those things in your life. But, if you think you have never been those things, I would humbly ask you to reconsider and reevaluate: another word from C.S. Lewis to close: “If you think that you are not conceited [another word for prideful], it means that you are very conceited indeed.”

Action Step: This week, take 10 minutes to honestly evaluate your leadership and find one area where pride has negatively affected you, and commit to addressing that problem. Then email me and let me know how you did it or how I can help you. I look forward to hearing from you, and Merry Christmas!

RLL #11: "Art, Animals, and Adaptability: G.K. Chesterton and Leadership as Art"

Real Life Leading #11

Art, Animals, and Adaptability: GK Chesterton and Leadership as Art

“Art is the signature of man,” so wrote G.K. Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, first published almost a hundred years ago (1925, to be exact). In that book, one of Chesterton’s goals was to lay out an argument that humans are fundamentally different from animals, despite the increasing acceptance of arguments to the contrary . One of the main parts of his argument is that throughout history, going all the way back to cave drawings of animals, humans have created art, whereas animals do not. He does concede that animals build: beaver dams, bird nests, etc.; but these are built out of instinct and necessity and for functionality, making it fundamentally different than the artwork created by men and women for thousands of years. He goes on to drive the argument home by pointing out that cows don’t write voluminous histories of their goings-on, and even if they did, who would want to read them; birds don’t make grand nests with carvings of other birds for beauty’s sake. No, he says, in art we see that mankind is fundamentally different than the animals.

I believe that Chesterton’s argument is compelling, and I also believe that it has a certain applicability to leadership: namely, that leadership is an art form that must be trained, honed, and adapted to various situations in the same way that different art forms and movements have held sway at different times and locations in history. It is debatable whether there is such as thing as “right” art or “wrong” art, though there are obvious differences between “good” and “bad” art, even if some of those differences are in the eyes of the beholders. So in leadership, there are many different styles, and many different traits and skills, all of which are useful in different situations and at different times. Thus, there is no magic pill or silver bullet approach to leadership: there is no one ‘right’ style or approach that is always the best in every situation.

We must take a moment here to be clear: I am not saying that there are not any fundamental principles or traits. I am not endorsing a postmodernist approach to leadership in which everything is relative. (In fact, I’d argue that a postmodern approach to leadership would simply be Machiavelli by another name, but that’s another topic for another day.) Just as in coaching sports, there is no “one size fits all” approach to the game that will always yield victory, so in leadership there is no “one size fits all” style that will produce the best results in every situation. No, in leadership, one should always be committed to core principles, worldview beliefs that form the foundation of all that one does as a leader (things such as integrity, character, honesty, respect for others, etc.) while also being willing to adapt and change approaches as necessary.

We’ve all heard parents, teachers, or coaches say things that begin with, “Back in my day…” and then go on to lament how things are no longer the way they were in some more or less idealized past. Perhaps the best example of this is the grandfather in the beloved classic movie ‘The Princess Bride,’ who says, “In my day, television was called books!” Often these statements are simply thinly veiled complaints about how things have changed. However, there is also often a grain of truth (and sometimes more than a grain) in them when we consider that things DO change, and not always for the better. However, as Chesterton taught us, humanity is still humanity, even when cultures, countries, and even currencies change.

The art of leadership, then, is learning 1) which approach is best suited to each situation, and 2) when/how to adapt to various styles based on the differing factors. Let us consider some of these factors and explore ways in which we may need to adapt our leadership based on them. One of the major things to consider as a leader are the various demographics of the audience you are leading: age, gender, size of the audience, background, etc. If this seems obvious, that’s ok: it should be. And yet, until we have actually led diverse audiences, we may be unaware of just how our leadership should adapt.

For example, it wasn’t until I taught both fifth graders and ninth graders during the same school year that I realized just how different students are at age 10-11 compared to age 14-15. Same thing with coaching different age players: the needs are different, the skill levels are different, and so my style and approach must be different. In the same way, I have spent the past four years coaching high school girls soccer, and in those years, I have learned that my approach must be drastically different than it was in my previous six years of coaching mostly high school boys. Again, perhaps that should have seemed obvious to me (and no doubt it is obvious to people more observant than myself), but it was not until my second year, after having had numerous players reduced to tears due to the tone of voice I used when correcting mistakes, that I realized I needed to change the way I coached since these were teenage girls, not teenage boys. Full disclosure: I am thankful every day for these lessons, as I now have a teenage daughter of my own, and I have no doubt that I would be a worse father had I not had a few years of ‘practice’ with coaching girls this age.

Other factors to think about when considering your leadership approach include the purpose of the group and the (for lack of a better term) lifespan of the group. If the group is academic in nature (as in a classroom), then the approach will be somewhat different than toward a group that is either athletic or of a business nature. Many of the leadership principles are the same, as evidenced by the high degree of applicability of leadership books written by coaches (for a great example, read RLL #6 about Coach K’s book ‘Leading With the Heart’, at https://www.speakerjoel.com/real-life-leading-blog/ms22tdejfnrg4mdych8xgr2s68dmnw). Nonetheless, one does not lead a company or corporation in the exact same way that one leads an athletic team or a classroom or even a family.

Finally, a leader must consider the ‘lifetime’ of the group in question. For example, I have coached at a few different college soccer camps (Methodist University and Duke University in North Carolina), and when I did so, I had to remember that these were players I would only interact with for less than a week. Therefore my approach, though demanding, was not the same as it would have been toward a team committed to a whole season, or toward a soccer program that I plan on building for many years. In addition, I approach leading my family differently than all of these other situations because the lifetime of my family is longer than any athletic program, classroom, or business with which I affiliate.

So, as Chesterton pointed out, art is what separates man from the animals, and the art of leadership involve both a commitment to one’s principles as well as a willingness to adapt our approach to different situations depending on numerous different factors. We must all use our natural gifts and talents to best serve those we lead, while remaining committed to what we believe to be right and true. In addition to all of those things, we must also be open to continuing to learn more about how to grow, how to adapt, and how to lead in different situations.

Action Step: this week, look at your various leadership roles and think of at least one example of how you lead differently in each one, and then email me to let me know what you came up with.