Take Me To Your Leader

Posted by fxckfeelings on October 20, 2011

When a team under-performs—be it athletic, corporate, familial, or anything in between—it’s natural to feel they either needs a hug or a kick in the butt. In actuality, a good leader provides neither and both, reminding them of their strengths without taking responsibility for making them feel better, and showing them how they need to improve without blaming them for being what they’re not. You may not always get rewarded with a raise, a hug or a shower of Gatorade, but you will get results.
–Dr. Lastname

I think I’ve been very patient and restrained in responding to my 18-year-old daughter, who left college after her first month because she felt she wasn’t welcome there. It’s really not the college’s fault—they asked her to move off-campus because she violated dorm rules several times within her first 2 weeks there (she didn’t tell me how) and being kicked out of the dorms made her feel so rejected and upset that she packed her things and came home without trying to live off campus and without telling me first. She’s a good kid and needs my support now more than ever, so I’m trying to forget the $19K she flushed down the drain and help her think about what she’s going to do next. Do you agree that my goal is to be patient and not get into a fight with her?

It’s impossible to be an effective parent, or a leader of any kind, if you equate naming problems with hurting people. If you’re in charge and you’re not a little lonely, you’re not doing it right.

Admittedly, if you’re angry when you identify a problem and you express that anger, you will probably hurt the person you want to reach and the discussion will bog down in conflict and guilt. In that case, you’re not just unsupportive, but ineffective, and that’s a lose/lose.

Fortunately, however, you sound like you have a warm and accepting relationship with your daughter, and that your angry impulses are not about to seize control. Since you’re particularly well equipped to discuss her problem, perhaps the feeling you need to control isn’t anger, but guilt and false responsibility.

Again, a good leader is responsible, as long as that responsibility has limits. After all, you’re not responsible for making her happy or restoring her sense of confidence, but for giving her a path for gaining the self-control she must acquire before she can become confident, and to do that, you must schedule an unhappy, come-to-Jesus talk.

You know she (and you) shouldn’t risk another $19K on college until she gets control of feelings and behaviors that, right now, are making her decisions for her. I presume she didn’t want to break dorm rules, but that she couldn’t manage her feelings, whatever they were—a need to drink, be accepted, or take risks. Similarly, she couldn’t fight her feelings of hurt and rejection and save the $19K investment by staying at school. She can’t afford to waste money like that again until the two of you have reason to think she’s got more control.

Your goal, hers and yours, is not to find a place she’ll be happier or a way to make her feel better. No matter what college she goes to, she’s going to feel unhappy, rejected and disrespected and encounter the feelings that beat her this time. Your goal is to prepare her to tolerate and manage those feelings, regardless of how strong they are.

Tell her you’ve identified her problem, and that she’ll be taking a semester at Mom U, majoring in Feelings Management. You’re confident she will get stronger, and you have ideas for building her strength that probably require her to get a job, do her share of household tasks, and save most of her wages in a college fund. You’ll let her know how she’s doing and graduate her when she’s ready.

You’re not interested in discussing her hurt or burdened by resentments of your own. You know where she needs to go and you have no reason to feel guilty about calling a fuck-up a fuck-up, especially since you’re mindful of her strengths and willing to offer a good way forward.

She might not like you at first, but, as with any good leader, you’ll find redemption in the history books (or at least in your checkbook).

STATEMENT:
“I wonder what went wrong to get my daughter bounced out of college and I wish I could protect her from the pain and get things back on track, but I see a problem that she’s got to deal with first, and it’s not one I can solve for her or that will be solved by helping her feel better. I will tell her what she needs to do and give her a schedule with payoffs for sticking to her tasks regardless of her feelings and impulses. I won’t hurt her feelings and I won’t feel responsible if she feels hurt. I’ll take comfort from the fact that I know when I’m doing my job.”

I’m the principal of a private school that is running pretty well—better than ever, given the staff we’ve been able to recruit—but it isn’t as popular as our nearby rival, and our enrollment hasn’t been growing as much as theirs. We’re not doing badly, given the economy, and we really have a great bunch of kids, but, honestly, I can’t help admitting feelings of failure, which I think my staff also feel, given the fact that we aren’t as popular as our rival, perhaps because its charismatic principal exudes confidence. I exude worry. Sometimes I wonder how I can shake this feeling, given that it’s rooted in reality.

There’s nothing wrong with worrying or wondering how to make your school better—that’s what a principal is supposed to do—but it’s always dangerous to compare your performance to the more successful school next door, because then you’re always a loser. That’s the worst trick that your feelings can do to you when you try to become better; convince you that you’ve fallen short and it’s your own damn fault.

It’s your job, as a leader, to keep those dangerous thoughts from dragging people down, beginning with yourself. Do that by accepting what you’ve got, regardless of how it compares to your neighbors, and this includes the personality that God gave you, along with whatever load of charisma you happen to have.

Sportswriters, coaches, and other idiot moralists would argue that acceptance is an excuse for defeat. What you’ll find, if you try it, is that it allows you to take pride in what you’re doing with what you’ve got, rather than getting morose and then more morose about looking morose. Worshiping performance is what gets the sportswriters nasty when the Red Sox lose, and it doesn’t work any better in sports than it does in real life.

Begin with your strengths. It sounds like your school is well run, with good kids and a good staff, and you’re good enough also, if not the greatest. Now do for yourself what you routinely do for your students (after all, they aren’t all above average); celebrate your strengths and figure out, realistically, what you can do with them.

Try to improve your performance wherever possible. If you want to acknowledge doubts and feelings of failure, do so, but only after making it clear that your feelings have nothing to do with your observations or values and that, when you think of whom you work with and what you’ve done together, you see good accomplishments and good ways to move forward.

There’s nothing inherently honest about your true feelings, particularly when they’re a reaction to high standards and impossible comparisons. What’s always truer is to apply your values and experience to the reality in front of you and decide, without any comparisons, whether you’ve done your best. Instead of seeing a loss, see the truth.

STATEMENT:
“I wish my school and I were doing better but, when I look hard at our strengths and weaknesses, I see many strengths and significant achievements. If we compare our weaknesses to others’ strengths, we’ll wind up kicking ourselves for being losers and thinking like losers. If we treat those feelings as unwelcome and unworthy intruders and compare ourselves to nothing other than our own standards for doing our best, we’ll do fine. “