Four “Be’s”

This time of year people of the Christian faith celebrate Christmas, which at its essence is a celebration of incarnation: the belief that God cared enough about the world to enter into it.  There is a powerful leadership lesson for us in this notion of incarnation.  We know that leadership the craft of leading, and that the verb “to lead” is to show the way by going there in advance. To lead is to display a pattern of behaviors that have their root in conditions of being. “What I do” is then a reflection of “who I am.”  We tend to concentrate on the “what” as leaders, when we would often do better to begin with a focus on the “who.”  There is no easy formula.  But there are at least four things that we have to be, and all have to do with incarnation; entering into the worlds of the people whom we lead.

We have to be there.  The lion tamer Gunther Gebel-Williams is said to have had this piece of advice for his son as the young man entered the lion taming business.  “When you enter the cage,” he told his son, “you have to be there.”  It was my own son who first suggested this to me during his teenage years when he recognized my habit of not really paying attention to what I was doing and who I was talking to.  (It may have been manifest by my clipping through five or six children’s names before I got to the one I wanted.)  My toddler daughters used to take my cheeks in their little hands and turn my face towards theirs so that they knew that with eye contact I was really listening.  As my son would remind me, “Dad you have to be present.”  How much grief would we save ourselves if we resolved to be “attentional” and intentional?

We have to be the man (or woman.)  Leadership, like parenting, teaches us that there are ultimately only two feet on this planet that we really control: the ones we are walking on.  We may think that we can affect the actions of our subordinates or even of our children but in the end they are going to make their own decisions.  The very best thing we can do to influence those decisions also happens to be the only thing we can really do anyway, and that is to be the man or woman that we hope that they will become.  We lead best when model best.

We have to be the one.  Every day there will be opportunities for us to touch the lives of others.  We will have to decide whether we recognize the opportunity and respond with grace and truth, or blissfully walk past it as we rush to meetings, or hurry to finish our email.  Even being aware of the opportunity to touch another’s life requires a shift of consciousness, a different way of thinking.  Educator and psychologist Haim Ginott said this of teaching (but one could easily replace “teaching” with “leading:”) “I’ve come to a frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized.”  We have to be the one for those who look to us.

We have to be the change.  Gandhi taught us that instead of our tendency to point out the shortfalls and faults of others we would do well to begin with a hard look at ourselves.  It was Jesus’ teaching as well, to remove the beams from our own eyes before we try to pick the splinters from the eyes of others.  As we become conscious of those parts of ourselves that need change with humility, our efforts to change are far more likely to affect change in others than any other effort we might attempt.  We tend look out the window and readily see the faults of others.  We would usually be better off turning from the window to the mirror.

Books on the craft of leadership are legion. Many leadership experts have a check-list of actions or a formula for leader success.  As economist George Box said, “All models are wrong but some are useful.”  Models and formulas have a place.  During the holiday season, we do well to think through what incarnation means in our places of work.

We know that truly effective leading is much more about our efforts “to be” than any of our efforts “to do.”

Chuck Callahan  Henry V 4.3 – Lead from the Front  https://henryv43.wordpress.com/