Integer Leadership Consulting

Which is better for leaders who have experienced a significant failure in leadership: Resilience or posttraumatic growth? The reason this question is central is due in large part to the end result of either option. Resilience is often the right choice when a leadership failure or challenge is not catastrophic meaning it does not result in the loss of employment (even though the event does result in emotional bruising and professional embarrassment). Here resilience is about the decision to “make your way back” to a level of efficiency and leadership influence which existed prior to the event. This decision is about determination, perseverance, overcoming the odds, proving your metal and proving other’s wrong. Resilience, when viewed from only a utilitarian perspective, is about self-vindication. It can be characterized by an impatient and irrepressible urge to scratch and claw one’s way back to a position of leadership status and power.

The danger that lies with this understanding and experience of resilience is that little internally changes. By this I mean that while you can regain your footing professionally little in your cognitive and emotional infrastructure changes when, in fact, it may need to change. Why is this significant? Because the rare opportunity that failure provides the leader is to examine the reasons or rationale that gave rise to the action which led to the failure in the first place. This is the where the richness and value of resilience coupled with reflection lay. The reality, however, is that many leaders bypass this critical evaluative opportunity and move right through to the re-establishment and re-stabilization of their positional power. While one’s position and hegemony may be recovered, the risk is high that at some point in the future the failure will be repeated.

Next installment…why leaders can so easily bypass (ignore) the opportunity to reflect and learn from their organizational failures and why this increases the risk of additional leadership failure.

I am beginning a series on Resilience and Posttraumatic growth as it relates to those in positions of organizational leadership, in particular, those who are key decision-makers from senior executives, to mid-level management to those who are just emerging as talented and gifted leaders in their organizations.

This discussion will focus on the meaning of resilience as it applies to leadership under pressure and with high expectations and secondly, the meaning of posttraumatic growth for leaders who have experienced catastrophic job loss leading to a major crises. The question I am raising is this: what does it mean for leaders to “rebound” or “make their way forward into new forms of leadership” after dealing with a major career derailment and setback?

Any review of the literature available today in major book retailers will tell you that, with very few exceptions, business leaders face daunting expectations. Not only are decision-makers under a great deal of pressure, not only are they dealing with significant and often unrealistic expectations both internally and externally, they also have a poverty of resources to turn to when they fail. Failure is a common theme within the ranks of non-profit and for-profit organizational leadership. With very little recourse and no road map to chart their way through exceptionally difficult terrain, these leaders can find it hard to regain their footing and move through the most difficult personal and professional season they will most likely ever face.

In the next post: Understanding the meaning of Resilience and the Nexus with Organizational Leaders.

The Three Disciplines of Self-Leadership are….

1. Cultivating Inner Personal Meaning

Deepening Self-Awareness

The capacity to be vigilant about and grounded in your own strengths, limitations, uniqueness, history and emerging identity regardless of external pressures to detach from what you know about your deepest truth(s).

Maintaining spiritual moorings

Sustaining a dynamic connection with a spiritual foundation that provides an interpretation or story of your purpose and journey.

Depth Perception of others

The ability to identify and celebrate the deeper value, worth, dignity and longings of others and to contribute toward their growth and personal discovery through service and empowerment.

Commitment to growing forward regardless

The relentless and indomitable pursuit of forward movement into and out of the vicissitudes and vagaries of life .

3. Constructing an engaging Personal Vision

An engaging vision for yourself

A vision that encompasses your passions and dreams, is aligned with your uniqueness and your present realities and invites you to reach, stretch, and extend but not grasp or claim. A great resource to read for an indepth reflection on personal vision and passion is Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak

A courageous vision for your leadership in the organization

Since leadership is fundamentally about relationships of influence, keep clarity about how your exercise of leadership will advance, strengthen and transform the organizations in which you serve. This includes an ongoing professional development plan driven by a strong internal locus of control.

4. Assessing Personal Impact

Living with Humility and abandoning hubris

Remaining open, teachable, malleable, rather than hardened, closed, rigid, and protected.

Learning from rather than resisting seasons of failure

Becoming resilient by allowing life’s failures to dismantle false constructs and illusions and to deepen understanding and wisdom and enlarge the capacity for love and courage.

Part II: Exploring A Philosophy of Self-Leadership

Self-Leadership is neither a “utilitarian tool” to promote one’s advancement through the organization nor is it a “soft” practice that is an “optional” approach to personal and professional development

Rather…..

Self-Leadership is an Essential Personal Discipline that sets the stage for continuous personal change and organizational impact

Why Must Leaders Lead Themselves?

The Stewardship of Your Personal Life

The spiritual foundation of my purpose, destiny and timing.
Endowed with gifts, talents and abilities.
Cultivating the raw material of my life to maximize impact.
Protecting that which is fragile in order to safeguard the delivery of that which I possess.

Your Obligation to the Organization

Seeing vocation as a “calling” (from the Latin, vocare, voice).
I am under contract to bring my best to the organization.
Yet the contract is insufficient by itself to compel me to bring excellence. Delivering excellence is about clarity of purpose.

Your Critical Contribution to the World

“Be the change you wish to see in the world”…Gandhi
Your impact is unique, necessary and unrepeatable.
You will impact others, communities, organizations and the global network in ways that others will not.
The absence of your contribution will weaken any system in which you would otherwise be involved.

Those who are Benefited by leaders who practice Self-Leadership

Oneself
Family
Colleagues
Organizations
Customers/Clients
Local, national and international Communities
The contribution toward the global good

Reflection

How would focusing on each of these areas change the way you think about, approach, execute your work and your leadership Influence?

Below are a few thoughts on building a sound rationale for Self-Leadership. While we might “vote for” Self-Leadership, few have thought about what a sound argument for Self-Leadership might look like. I offer a few thoughts below in brief:

The Principles and Practices of Self-Leadership

Part A: A Definition of Self-Leadership

The ongoing discipline of cultivating inner personal meaning, constructing an engaging personal vision and assessing personal impact through assimilation of solicited feedback

Cultivating an Inner Personal Meaning
Constructing an Engaging Personal Vision
Assessing Personal Impact through assimilation of solicited feedback

Self-Leadership is nothing less than an ongoing personal discipline that has direct and profound professional consequences

Spend some thoughful and reflective time exploring the Self-Leadership Reflection Questions below:

Based on the definition above, in what way have you purposefully and intentionally invested in self-leadership?

Who are the people who inspire you to craft a life of self-leadership? Why?

I was in no way surprised.

Once again, we have an example of an organizational/political leader, gifted, talented, articulate, and prominent, who makes a choice that brings “this stage” of his storied career to an abrupt and brutal end. Clearly, his wife and his three teenage daughters will pay an incalculable price for his flawed choice. They, along with him, will pay a price that, at this early point in the downfall, is unfathomable. Most likely, Spitzer will feel the pain, shame, and guilt of his choice every moment of every day for the rest of his life. As the massive loss and suffering invades his deepest sense of self…as he comes back to reality…he will often and always rue the day that he decided to compromise his promises to his wife, his daughters and to the public he served.

Yet we should not be surprised or in any way amazed that Spitzer would place himself in such a precarious position with so much to lose. This is the issue and temptation with every leader: separating, truncating or compartmentalizing a self-constructed or self-fabricated reality from the true reality. Leaders make this mistake repeatedly regardless of their power, position, and success. And we, the observing public, act in amazement every time it unfolds before our eyes. From my perspective, this deleterious fall and commensurate carnage from Spitzer’s failure acts as a bizarre side show of sorts which the public “enjoys” observing. There exists in either our culture or our own individual hubris a dysfunctional and voyeuristic mentality that takes pleasure in watching others destroy themselves especially when those others are public figures who stand for principles, standards, ethics, and values…like Spitzer. I digress. What I personally observe is the rapidity of his demise, the lightening quick rejection and ostracizing of this human being. I see an incredible but predictable display of human failure coupled with the predictable destructive antagonism of those around Spitzer who, “of course,” would never engage in such base, self-serving behavior.

A Leadership Failure Post Mortem…

For a moment, separate the ethics of Spitzer’s actions long enough to notice this. What created the schism within his internal world which allowed him to proceed with the assumption that he could act inappropriately and then successfully camouflage his actions? This extremely brilliant man, possessing more education and experience than most, constructed an internal view of the world that was externally highly inaccurate. How does this happen? My sense is that, for leaders in particular, another reality can or must be created that, though false and potentially destructive, allows the man or woman to “live into their flawed constructions of reality” but which nonetheless meets a deep need perhaps even unknown or unrecognized by the leader. Again, not surprising.

In my next blog I will address the work that Spitzer will most likely face regarding the task of reuniting his deeply held schemas or perceptions with reality…what actually “is.” At some point in the not-too-distant future, his suffering and pain MAY be sufficient to confront and begin to dismantle these schemas, these false internal constructions of reality. What he does not know or understand is that this failure will be his “greatest gift”….it may be the one and only conduit that finally takes or more accurately forces him to the deep places which will reveal how he got to this point. It may show him the incredible chasm that exists between his internal construction of reality and the external realities of his life. What he has left “if and when” he comes to this place is unknown, and that is really not the issue here. What is the issue is this opportunity Spitzer has to reunite his deepest perceptions with external givens. Herein lays the real work and pain. This work will cost him most everything he is and has if he chooses this course of action. Then again, he may do nothing and resist the opportunity. He may blame his actions on an unfulfilling marriage, work pressures or the stress caused by unrealistic public expectations. Again, this should not be surprising.