Day 1: Everyone Wins When a Leader Gets Better
Bill Hybels: Founder & Senior Pastor of Willow Creek Community Church and the Global Leadership Summit
“Everyone wins when a leader gets better.” — Bill Hybels
Think of a time when someone was talking to you, and you were looking directly at them. Your eye-lids are flirting with each other, and your eyeballs are glazing over. You keep telling yourself that you can’t be rude, and that you need to focus. Your brain gets a voice of its own, kinda like this…
Look away. Go ahead. Look over there. At that thing over there.
They’ll stop talking soon. I hope.
Alright, look up at them. Look agreeable.
Yeah, we’ve all been there.
Bill Hybels’ theme for the Global Leadership Summit was to practice humility — valuing someone else’s importance as higher than our own. I am completely guilty of over-valuing myself in conversations with people who “don’t know better”, or who I believe might be wrong (or different, or disagreeable, or annoying, etc…). I catch myself waiting for them to finish speaking so that I can transition the conversation towards an opportunity to walk away…or attack.
This is what you call a bias. I favor my own opinions, convictions, and worldviews as more valuable than someone else’s. There are words for that kind of behavior. Words like prejudice, intolerance, discrimination …hate— take your pick. Those words don’t taste very good, and we’re all guilty of them. We complain about these words in the media every day, but we can’t recognize the practice we have with them even in our daily lives. And we still ask ourselves how there’s so much hate in the world — where it comes from. We literally practice it every day.
“That’s a little extreme, Ezra, because seriously — CHATTY CATHY has no idea what she’s talking about.”
You’re probably right. Still, humans are emotional, and we are the ones who decide to put emotional weight on things — and therein danger lurks.
This is how I conceptualize the significance of putting emotional weight on things (particularly things that we battle as right vs. wrong):
“Is killing a child worse than killing an adult?”
Try to answer this question as objectively as possible. Imagine “a child” and “an adult” as being exactly the same on paper — pure, innocent, good, whatever. Now imagine killing one of them. You don’t need any context for this exercise — just know that you have to kill one. So then, which did you pick to kill? Is it fair to ask which death is worse? Rather, are you a better or a worse murderer for choosing one over the other? The point of my made-up-exercise is not why you picked the adult over the kid (gotcha), it’s that emotion is the common-denominator that leads us to feel why one actions is better, or justified, over the other. If you genuinely don’t feel inner-conflict by reading this exercise…then, uh…please call someone…
So trust me, I believe you about “that guy/girl”, but do you really want to be the person who undermine’s someone else’s autonomy? I know that we’re not talking about murder here, it’s just a conversation, but is it any different? The point here is that we put emotional weight behind our actions — whether a conversation or a crime — and our emotional inputs can compromise us in any scenario. If you can’t control your emotional response (I’m not talking about suppressing them, though that can be a strategy), then you are actively taking away someone’s right to have their own perspective. Doing that, as they say, is a double-edged sword. Undermining someone else’s perspective takes away their right to be right, but that also takes away their right to be wrong. If you take both of those away, then you make yourself the tyrant of a conversation. Don’t be a conversation-Hitler. For all you know, your emotion is blinding you, and you’re the one that’s wrong.
So what do we do?
“Show proper respect to everyone, love the family of believers, fear God, honor the emperor.” — 1 Peter 2:17, NIV Bible (presented by Bill Hybels on this topic)
In a nutshell, I think this means you need to control your behavior.
Civility yields respect, and respect creates a shift in culture — Bill Hybels
Don’t just be tolerant. Be respectful and be polite. The speaker you disagree with doesn’t have to be right or wrong — just focus on discovering where you stand on the matter/conflict. When you know where you stand, and if you still can’t decide to work with the speaker, then show respect through understanding. “Distract” yourself by trying to find the attributions that may have created that person’s perspective. Only then will you be sufficiently informed to find a way to move-on.
RANT OVER.
Monday, 08/21/2017
So where did all this come from? Well, today, Day 1 of my leadership challenge, I caught myself glazing over when someone was talking to me. He was talking nonsense, and he kept saying “but” and arguing with me and anyone else present about how there isn’t an answer (some of us had some…)
I wanted to shoot him in the face.
Instead, I was lucky enough to have Bill Hybels’ theme looming over me, and I forced myself to listen rather than force my answer on him. As this guy went on and on about who-knows-what, I started thinking about what I could learn from this. I thought about why he’s hit this mental block, and what it means for us — I tried to understand where all this nonsense was coming from. Honestly, I felt a lot better when I did this. Things suddenly started to look a lot brighter for me than for him. I figured that maybe this guy wouldn’t last long at the company. Perhaps he’d just flame out and shut-up, or lose interest and quit, or remain stagnant while I rise above to leave him behind. This train of thought helped me stop worrying about whether he was right/wrong, because now I had to worry about whether I would be right/wrong. Would I really accomplish more in the end? That question straightened me out quick. I actually felt a little scared, even. The point is, I was able to gain perspective, and appreciate that this guy was stressing over things he didn’t have to be — and it was his own problem. I tried to help, and he wouldn’t take it, so it’s entirely on him because I clearly can’t bring him the value he needs. With that, I was able to find closure and calm myself before this guy’s rant was even over.
When this guy finished ranting, I challenged myself to exercise my newfound calm and explicitly asked him if there was any way that I could help. Not surprisingly, he said “no”, and spent a few minutes explaining how it’s not something I could… :P … So I felt doubly-better because I almost got riled up when this guy probably just wants to run his mouth for exercise. So I let him.
And just like that, the “conversation” was over, and I was able to get back to work. I saved myself from argument, from emotional strife, and an awkward relationship at work. Now, I have a better understanding about how to work with him.
Hybels closed his talk by proposing a challenge to us at the Summit. He challenged us to spend 15min of “chair time”. This couldn’t be more perfect for me — a furniture salesman. He challenged us to spend 15min every day reflecting on life, specifically thinking intentionally about who exactly we’re becoming. I spent my 15min in my home-office, sitting in a Herman Miller Aeron Chair, reflecting on today’s conversation. The rest just flowed out of me.
I trust this time of reflection can help you too — even if your outcome didn’t have a resolution like mine, and especially if your outcome was a little more “heated” than mine. With a little practice and perspective, I trust that you’ll know what the right thing you need to do is.
Thought Starters:
- Was the best value I could bring to my colleague really just to listen?
- Do you think that it’s a leader’s responsibility to find the best way that someone needs to receive help? To what extent to we have to make that effort before it becomes “forced help”?
- Do you have a favorite chair that you can quietly reflect in? Which is it, and where/why?
- When was the last time that you were rude to a co-worker, and can you go back and repair a broken-bridge?
Ezra’s 10-Day Leadership Plan.
LEADERSHIP DAYS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10