The Problem that Solves You: Difficult Situations as Answers to Critical Leadership Questions
It is a precondition for leadership that the leader is a person who is on an ongoing and non-terminating journey. What is crucial [to this journey] is the reawakening, the reinvigoration and the resurrection of human existence and its ability to relate actively to others and to oneself in such a way that it is able to make the world reappear in a new light.
― Sverre Raffnsøe, Copenhagen Business School · Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy
Chase is a well respected senior manager in his company. He’s known for his capacity to steer complex changes processes and for cultivating a culture of innovation. Though Chase is generally regarded as fair-minded, it’s also been reflected to him in more than one 360 review that his aloof way of relating can leave those around him unsure of their standing and whether he’s really got their back.
At the moment, Chase in in a meltdown. Though it doesn’t look like it from the outside (since Chase is a master of keeping his cool), he’s destabilized, humiliated, angry, and ready for battle. In fact, he’s entertaining the idea of firing Josh, the junior manager who just moments before managed to unwittingly embarrass him in front of an important client.
Suddenly, Chase “comes to,” as if waking from a dream.
He’s present. He’s still in a meltdown, but he’s registering it. He’s no longer “beside himself” but rather “with himself.”
He’s noticing that his heart is racing, that he’s sweating, and that he can’t “see straight.” He’s acknowledges to himself that he’s not only angry with Josh but angry with himself for not “recovering” the embarrassing moment with a self-deprecating comment.
And he’s registering (with considerable shame) how firing Josh would be disastrous on multiple levels and how the very idea is evidence that he’s blindly reacting rather than skillfully responding. (Though what could be easily lost on Chase is how the very recognition of his own reactivity is itself responsive.)
In this window of responsive recognition, right along with his anger, embarrassment, and shame, there is also a faint feeling that something significant is happening, that a new future is trying to unfold, and that the situation itself is asking something of Chase, though he doesn’t yet understand what.
Missing our mark and assuming a new orientation
As leaders, we often think of “transformational change” as “complexifying our perspective” in order to solve complex problems in our organizations by applying ever more complex solutions. In fact, it is this capacity to “effect change” that we often use as the primary metric for determining whether we have achieved “transformational change” in ourselves and in our organizations.
But what if our metric is all backwards? What if transformational change is less about assuming a complex perspective to successfully solve a complex problem “out there” (as important as this ability may be) and more about cultivating a capacity for responsively recognizing the significance of a problem or situation and creatively relating with it in a way that allows it to solve us? (That can “work with” whatever it is inside us that is preventing us from opening into and more deeply fulfilling our leadership potential.)
When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready.
― Paulo Coelho
Choosing our way into change
What if transformational change was something a leader could “choose” their way into as an ongoing process? Not necessarily with “big” choices that made news in the organization or that would necessarily attract much notice (at least not right away) but with “micro” choices? Choices so small (but so significant) that in the very moment of choosing them the leader herself underwent transformational change?
Choice of this sort would have to be of a very special kind, a choice that would change us, one micro choice at a time. In fact, it would have to be a choice that we didn’t choose, at least at first. Rather, it would be a choice that chose us.
Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of ‘psst’ that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.
― David Foster Wallace
The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero. ― Joseph Campbell
The Hero’s Journey (which in this context is a mythological map made famous by Joseph Campbell for fulfilling our leadership potential) is our everyday life and everyday relationships with all its peaks, valleys, plateaus, perils, promise, and possibilities. It is best understood not as something that unfolds once, over the many years of a lifetime, but rather as a recursive process that is always already underway in the “adventures” and “ordeals” of any particular situation. (Like the one Chase is currently experiencing.)
The language of Joseph Campbell is worth returning to: Summoned. Called. Chosen. All of these words imply a choice that has been extended to the hero (for our purposes, the leader) from something greater than herself. The summons, calling, or “choice” does not originate from the leader but rather from “destiny” ― from a new future in process of being actualized. (This destiny, or “futurity,” is “built in” to any situation or significant problem, and relates directly to the fulfillment of our leadership potential).
As a sacred “Calling,” this is not so much a case of the leader “choosing” but rather of the leader being “Chosen.” Once Chosen, it is now up to the leader to responsively recognize and creatively relate with this choice. Indeed, the “leader” can only be said to be a leader to the degree she responsively recognizes and creatively relates with the choices that choose her, minute by minute, hour by hour, and day by day, forever without end.
Let this cup pass from me…. Nevertheless, not as my will be done, but Thy will be done.
― Jesus of Nazareth
The choices that choose us are often the kinds of choices that we would often have neither the stomach, the strength, nor the imagination to choose for ourselves. (Do we really think Chase would have “chosen” to be humiliated in front of an important client?) But having chosen us, these choices make a moral demand that we find a way to choose them in return, to responsively recognize and creatively relate with them.
This where the situation itself asks us to reach beyond our ego and courageously submit ourselves to the “calling” of the difficult choice that has chosen us. In so doing, we undergo the transformational change that is the ongoing fulfillment of our leadership potential as well as effect generative change “outside” ourselves in our organizations and in the world at large.
Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why didn’t Josh have my back? Chase angrily wonders. Something about this question strikes Chase and gives him pause. As if in response, he flashes back to a difficult conversation he had with Josh only three weeks earlier. “Chase,” he remembers Josh saying, “I’m never sure where you stand with me. It’s hard for me to feel you have my back.” At the time, Chase let the comment “roll off his back,” but now….
Chase can sense that what just happened in the meeting is somehow related to Josh’s feedback. In a way Chase can’t yet put into words, he realizes that the situation itself is trying to tell him something, asking him to responsively recognize the relationship between his aloof way of relating (which leaves those around him feeling he doesn’t have their back) and the very experience Chase most dreads (being “exposed” and embarrassed by somebody not having his back).
Feeling for the future
It is essential that the leader appropriates a readiness to act: a capacity to anticipate by turning into a responsive relationship with what he or she encounters. The capacity for leadership [is] a disposition towards what will happen and occur rather than towards what has already taken place. This involves acquiring a capacity for being oriented towards the future and responding to the effects of what is not necessarily in continuation with the present but on its way and coming into being.
― Sverre Raffnsøe, Copenhagen Business School · Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy
The situation with Josh is asking Chase to make a choice, to creatively relate with not only what just happened but with what is “trying to happen” by taking action that will actualize a new future and effect transformational change in himself, taking him one step further in fulfilling his leadership potential. Though Chase senses he must act in some way, he is at a reluctant, “wondering loss” about what to do.
As if in response to his wondering, Chase begins to feel a vague sense of dissonance. This dissonance is auspicious. It is the feeling of a difficult but generative choice coming into view. A choice that has chosen Chase. A choice that if Chase is courageous enough to choose, will change him.
Living inside the Question
It is clear that the structure of the question is implicit in all experience. We cannot [make sense of] experiences without asking questions.The essence of the question is to have sense [of wondering]. Now sense involves a sense of direction. Hence the sense of the question [of wondering] is the only direction from which the answer can be given if it is to make sense.
― Hans-Georg Gadamer
The living nature of reality may lie in the nature of the answer to the terrifying question we do not want to know we asked. Reality, as experienced in its most alienating forms, may then be the answer to a question that we have forgotten we asked — or continue to ask for lack of the capacity to learn from the response. The experience of reality is thus the receipt of an answer to a “lost” or “forgotten” question.
― Anthony Judge, Assistant Secretary General, Union of International Associations
While Chase was entertaining ideas of firing Josh, he suddenly became present. “Being present” or “mindful” is something we hear a lot about these days, but what does it really mean? For the purposes of this discussion, we suggest that presence refers to the capacity to responsively recognize the significance of a situation (how it is choosing us) and creatively relate with it (how we choose it) through the felt experience of being “inside” a question as the vehicle of mindfulness practice.
To be inside a question is to be in touch with the sense, however faint, that the situation in which we find ourself is “saying something,” and to have an ear for what this might be and what it might be asking of us. Being inside a question is to be alive to the experience of “wondering,” and allowing this wondering reverberate and ripen within us (over days, weeks, months, and even years) as a fully fledged, “foreground,” increasingly actionable inquiry. It means beginning to get a feeling for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s crucial insight: the problem or situation in which we find ourselves (especially when it is difficult) is the encoded “answer” to a critical question we are generally not aware of asking.
Chase is inside the Question (the Question is the spirit of inquiry in which all other questions are asked). Though he would be hard pressed at this point to articulate his wondering in words, he has a “feeling” for the way the situation with Josh is an encoded answer to questions like: How does my feeling that Josh didn’t have my back relate to him feeling like I don’t have his? Why do I insist on behaving aloofly even though I know it makes it difficult for people to trust me? What is it buying me? What might it be costing me? What might happen if I didn’t use my position of authority to hide behind? What if I risked being more “human” with those around me? Would they still respect me? Would I be seen as weak? How does my aloofness relate to my fear of exposure? How might I be the contributing to the very exposure that I fear?
Trusting the perfect imperfection of the situation
If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?
― Dogen, 13th-century Zen Patriarch
This place where you are right now, God circled on a map for you.
― Hafiz, 14th-century Islamic poet
As Chase turns toward this dissonance, he finds himself turned toward Josh. Even from across the room, it is clear that Josh has registered his mistake and, in direct contrast to Chase (yet another element of the situation that gives Chase pause), is exhibiting active signs of anxiety.
Josh is heading over to apologize, and Chase’s dissonance is growing (which means a choice is rapidly potentiating). This is the point where Chase does what he always does: continue to conceal his feelings behind a front of impenetrable “professionalism” that leaves his own and others’ humanity untouchable and untouched. This is where he will respond to Josh’s anxious apology with a handshake, a cold shoulder, and a “We’ll discuss this later.”
Only Chase doesn’t do what he always does.
Receiving the revelation of the situation and being solved by the problem (vulnerably undergoing transformational change)
The most important thing is this: to be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.
― W.E.B. DuBois
As Josh approaches him, Chase can’t help but notice how uncomfortable he looks and how he’s struggling to know what to say. Though Josh would never know this from Chase’s composed facade, Chase feels exactly how Josh looks. Chase doesn’t know exactly what to say since he can’t fall back on the behavior of his old identity. Chase can feel how the situation itself is asking him to fulfill his leadership potential, to actualize a new future by making a micro choice to do something different, something highly uncomfortable yet somehow strangely comforting.
“I’m sorry,” Josh anxiously blurts out, “I…”
Suddenly, Chase recognizes the choice before him and knows what to say, and as he does, he comes out from behind the front of his impenetrable professionalism and lets his face soften so that Josh can see that he too is struggling, that he is not only Josh’s boss but a “fellow traveler.”
“Josh,” Chase interrupts, placing a reassuring hand on Josh’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for not having your back.”
Leadership now concerns a capacity, not only to establish human relations and to allow oneself to be touched and changed, but to establish human relations that change and touch others.
― Sverre Raffnsøe, Copenhagen Business School · Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy
Ripening into transformational change
In the months and even years that follow, Chase and Josh will have multiple conversations about this situation and others like it. These situations and conversations will cultivate their own and their team’s capacity to be inside the question in order to responsively recognize and creatively relate with the choices that are choosing them. Many of these conversations will be challenging since they will ask something difficult of everyone involved, but they will be deeply satisfying and generative.
Through these situations and conversations, Chase will discover that Josh (and many others) have been under the mistaken impression that Chase is “thick-skinned,” having read his aloofness as invulnerability. Chase (and Josh) will realize that he is aloof not because he is insensitive or uncaring, but rather because he is so sensitive and caring that he fears if he does not continually project a strong front of “composure” and “control” that he will be “exposed” as weak and unworthy of respect and trust.
Chase sees that though this identity and way of being bought him protection from risking what he assumed would be the negative consequences of appearing more human, it also cost him the trust of those around him (and undermined his team’s willingness to risk the failures necessary for driving innovation), weakened his ability to skillfully respond to difficult situations, threatened him with the constant fear of exposure (since were he to consistently reveal his feelings, there would be little to expose), and generally stood in the way of him fulfilling his leadership potential.
To his surprise, Chase will come to realize that Josh, who wears his heart on his sleeve (and whom Chase has viewed as having little in common with), is a direct reflection of a core part of himself that he’s been denying and hiding — a part that holds a critical key to Chase enlarging his sense of self and fulfilling his leadership potential.
Perhaps most interesting to Chase, he will also increasingly recognize how the situation with Josh — the situation that most acutely and painfully “exposed” him — could not have been more perfectly designed to expose him to the truth about himself. (By exposing him to the very experience he most feared yet unwittingly and habitually produced in those around him.)
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
― Gospel of Thomas
The place is here. The Way leads everywhere.
― Dogen, 13th-century Zen Patriarch
Chase’s practice of being in conversations of mutual inquiry with Josh and other members of his team will eventually enter and transform the organization’s culture and even its business practices as especially tough problems and difficult situations are responsively recognized and creatively related with as encoded answers to critical leadership questions. Many years from now, Chase will look back on the situation with Josh and the potentiated learning period that followed it with a kind of awe and gratitude and will rightly regard it as among the most demanding but satisfying times of his life.
When asked about the key learning insight that the situation with Josh held for him, Chase will tell you, “Up until then, I’d thought leadership was about how I could effect change in a business situation or in members of the organization — never about how I might intentionally relate to any situation or to other people in a way that could fundamentally change me as a leader.
I thought leadership was separate from the rest of my life — a ‘hat’ I wore, something that happened ‘at work.’ Now I understand the work of leadership as a way of life, as an ongoing practice of sensitively and skillfully relating to the significance and meaning of whatever situation I find myself in. Relationship with whatever is happening is where the rubber meets the road of transformational change in myself, in my organization, in my family and friendships, and in the world as a whole.”
