Do You Show up at Work as Your Full Freaky Self?
Probably not, unless you feel “safe, supported, & stretched in meaningful ways”
The setting for this story is a military deployment, but the views presented are mine and do not necessarily represent the views of the United States, Department of Defense, Department of the Air Force, or their components.
Your uniqueness…[is]a complex mosaic…you can contribute something to an endeavor that nobody else can. There is a power in your uniqueness — an inexplicable, unmeasurable power…[but] if you are hypnotized by an organization’s culture, you become separated from your personal magic.
— Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball
First, a note on context may be helpful. I spent the first half of my career as a fighter pilot, honing my tactical skills: training for air-to-air combat, coordinating air support for ground forces, flying patrols over the US President, and so on. Over the last decade, however, I’ve been able to nurture my passion for education. Flying was undeniably fun and the fulfillment of a childhood dream; but — for me — teaching has been transformational. Simply put, being in the classroom brings out the best in me and is where I can best contribute to the organization. Moreover, I’ve discovered that what really lights me on fire is teaching and practicing innovation in the educational environment. While innovation in this domain is often conceptual (bending minds instead of bending metal), there is a sense in which innovating education allows us to better educate innovators of all types.
This brings me to the challenge I faced on my last deployment. Whether coaching innovation teams or facilitating LEGO Serious Play workshops or giving presentations on why we should “rescue Icarus,” a playful approach is encouraged and even expected. This deployment, therefore, would not only require operational knowledge and skills that had atrophied over the last decade — the last time I wore my desert uniform, George W. Bush was still the president — it would require a different demeanor.[1]
From February to June 2022, I had the opportunity to serve as a Battle Director for the Combined Air Operations Center, a multinational headquarters in Qatar. With an area of responsibility that spans from Egypt to Kazakhstan, the “central region is among the least secure and stable places of the world.”[2]
Every hour of every day, our Combat Operations Division (COD) conducts command and control for a wide variety of air and space operations across the 4 million square mile area. They monitor a variety of threats, ranging from missiles to unmanned attack vehicles, and react to other unforeseen challenges, such as adverse weather, terrorist attacks, or actions by Iranian and Russian forces.[3]
As a Battle Director, I worked closely with the COD team every day for the four months of my deployment. This included a ‘sync’ meeting at the start of every shift. For 124 days straight, I started every one of those meetings the same way, by asking the team if they felt “safe, supported, and stretched in meaningful ways.”[4]
Did I feel a little silly asking that question to a room full of military professionals in the middle of combat operations? Yes, especially in the beginning and again anytime a new person joined the team and had not heard my initial explanation of what those words meant or why I thought it was important enough to say it every single time. And then, by the end of my tour, there were enough people that hadn’t heard me unpack the phrase that I thought I’d put it down on paper. Honestly, this is my preferred method of communication. I’m not always very eloquent with crafting words extemporaneously, which tends to bring out my life-long, low-grade speech impediments. Indeed, I was able to admit this (and many other flaws) to them because I felt “safe, supported, and stretched in meaningful ways.”
I’ll also admit that writing the earlier sentence about acting differently while deployed was hard to write (as in, it made me cringe). It directly contradicts one of the core messages I promote when I speak to organizations: the value of bringing your “full freaky self” to everything you do, including your professional life.[5]
Each of us is so much more than our visible identities. Yes, standing in front of the room for our first sync meeting, I was obviously white, male and, given the symbols on my flight suit, a US pilot at the rank of colonel. I told them that first night, however, that I was also a husband, a father, a triathlete, a coach, an educator, a facilitator, and so on. Likewise, I acknowledged they were each more than what could been seen. And I explained that bringing awareness to this diversity within ourselves can prime us to see situations from multiple, divergent perspectives.[6]
Simply put, there is a strategic advantage when ‘all of us’ are present.[7] That is, when the right people are gathered together and when they bring all of themselves; when they each show up as their full freaky self.[8] Doing so multiplies the perspectives available to the team. Holding those dissimilar views in creative tension — instead of allowing any one view to dominant the group — enables us to turn friction into traction.[9]
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
Creative abrasion cannot occur, however, when people only show up in their expected roles, avoid disagreement, defer to authority, and self-censor their unique ideas (and identities). And that’s precisely what people tend to do unless they feel safe, supported, and stretched in meaningful ways.[10] So, what does that mean? And why is it important?
#1. Feeling safe is about physical and psychological security. The former has some obvious criteria (safety from physical harm, harassment, and so on). The later has been highlighted by studies of high-performance teams that concluded the distinguishing factor in their success was the ability to feel comfortable making honest mistakes.[11]
You know people feel safe when they say ridiculous things, when people laugh at themselves, when they trust each other with their concerns, and when people ask questions without fear that their ignorance will embarrass them.
#2. To be supported is to sense that others are invested in your success; that we can simultaneously stand together as a team and stand out in our unique ways; and that we are pointed towards the same horizon, even if we are finding our way through the wilderness in different ways.
If safety is being vulnerable enough to ask for help or admit ignorance, support is the encouragement and support flowing to those who need it without hesitance or keeping score. If pressed to explain why they do these things, people may just respond with something such as “it is just what we do here.”
#3. To be stretched in meaningful ways is to find your learning edge in an area that is relevant and important to the individual; to dance in that wonderful “flow” state where your ability to meet the challenge is just enough out of reach to inspire more than you realized you were capable of. It is stress, yes, but the type and amount of stress that stimulates growth.
A safe, supported, stretched team frames failure as learning, welcomes serendipitous links that may not be obvious, and has a certain energy that is hard to describe but magical to work in. Symptoms include meetings where laughter is common and interactions that start by authentically checking-in on each other (instead of mere transactional engagements or treating others as means to an end).
It is important to note that we don’t always feel safe, supported, and stretched in meaningful ways, and that’s ok. What is not ok is to be silent about it. What is not ok is to have a team that fails to develop a sixth sense for each other or is unwilling to ask questions when they sense something is awry. It is not ok to not have at least one person you feel you can go to when you need what we’d call a “wingman.” And it is not ok for leaders to address this once and consider the “box checked.”[12]
At the end of my deployment, I wondered if starting my syncs this way was worth the ‘cringe’ factor. I am confident the answer is yes. It was a relatively small investment in time to ask at the start of each meeting (sensitive, as I was, to “senior leader disease”[13]) and always well worth whatever time it took to follow through whenever someone opened up that they were not feeling safe or supported or stretched in meaningful ways. Overall, the quality of our meetings, the atmosphere of our daily shift, and the team’s ability to overcome complex problems were all testaments to the magic that happens when “all of us show up.”
There is a quote, often attributed to Albert Einstein that asserts, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem, and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” Since we mere mortals rely on collective intelligence, I’d alter the quote to note that, “if we had an hour to solve a problem, I wouldn’t do anything until we felt safe, supported, and ready to be stretched in a meaningful way.”
Obviously, that work takes place over weeks and months and not mere minutes. It is a collaborative effort, but one that leaders can encourage and exemplify on a daily basis.[14] It is an investment that flows naturally when leaders imagine themselves not as engineers, manipulating levers of a machine, but as gardeners, cultivating conditions to nudge growth in and through a complex ecosystem. Indeed, encouraging others to realize their full potential may be the most meaningful way for a leader to be stretched.
Here is a quick exercise you can do:
1. List different identities and perspectives you have (roles you play, your hobbies, elements of your ethnic and cultural background, etc.).
2. Circle the 1–3 items on the list that you usually embody while at your job.
3. Underline 1–3 that you rarely reveal at work.
4. Star 1–3 that you feel are really unique or special (these can be ones you circled or underlined).
5. Do a quick thought experiment:
a. Are your most unique perspectives part of your work life? If not, why?
b. What would it look like to bring your full self to work?
c. How can you help others on your team feel safe, supported, and stretched in meaningful ways?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Though I know it is important to do so, showing my work-in-progress has always created an uncomfortable moment of vulnerability for me. I’m thankful to those on the COD team who offered feedback on earlier drafts of this. Once again, however, this team made those moments not just bearable, but enjoyable.
ENDNOTES
[1] This challenge is not unlike other moments when I found that the “playful” approach I often advocate did not feel appropriate for the moment; moments in which it was not just irreverent, but perhaps disrespectful. The paradox is that the severity of the situation warrants our best thinking; such cognitive agility necessities divergent, playful thinking, but simultaneously makes such thinking unacceptable (if displayed outwardly). Wayfinding through this creative tension during my deployment spawned some insights, including how to sneak play into my life as well as a new research project tentatively titled “Warped Play for a Wicked World: A Definition that is ‘Not Quite Right.’”
[2] See the US Central Command website and any number of open source articles on threats in the region.
[3]Washington Post article on our interactions with the Russian military.
[4] Actually, 124 minus the 1 day I was “stretched” too far and not in a “meaningful way.” After receiving some bad news about a family member’s health (that has since resolved), it took a lot for me to just hold it together. That I could ask for some grace from the team and be vulnerable about my state of mind was a testament to how safe and supported I felt with them.
[5] Perhaps I offered this advice in the past with insufficient empathy for those in operational settings, in which I now found myself (a nod to the importance of practicing the anthropologist’s perspective, as commended in The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley of IDEO).
[6] I’ve seen this first hand in design workshops and there is some published evidence as this as well (e.g., “Thinking Outside the Box: Multiple Identity Mind-Sets Affect Creative Problem Solving”).
[7] This is really the advantage of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives, which are typically about what happens between individuals. The emphasis on what is internal to each individual should not — in any way — be misinterpreted as an attempt to diminish or redirect the important work of enhancing diversity and inclusion amongst individuals. That work is as much about human dignity and respect as it is about any sort of ancillary instrumental value. Highlighting a similar opportunity within an individual is good in itself. There is a side-effect that has practical value, however, and in this article, I’ll focus on that (what we’d call lagniappe in Louisiana — there’s another one of my identities coming through).
[8] I have wondered if this is actually dangerous to promote (because it could obviously go too far), but my experience has been that people in my organization need to hear it in bold terms — and see it demonstrated by others — in order to even expose a mildly quirky version of themself.
[9] Of course, this flow from divergence to convergence is not automatic and can be aided by a skillful facilitator. In other words, feeling safe, supported, and stretched in meaningful ways is necessary, but not sufficient.
[10] I was first inspired to craft something by General Steven Kwast, who would often talk about the importance of feeling “respected, protected, and connected.” He was also responsible for my unconventional jump from operations to academics. Lastly, in preparation for my first command tour, he suggested I read Orbiting the Giant Hairball, which has become one of my favorite metaphors.
[11] For more, see “Play and psychological safety: An ethnography of innovative work” by Jinia Mukerjee and Anca Metiu or the Google guide on team effectiveness.
[12] This reminds me of advice I once heard about being a good father, “it is like shaving; yes, you did it today — but you’ll need to do it again tomorrow!”
[13] “SLD” is mistaking the attentiveness of the audience as interest in what you are saying, and even an invitation to continue talking, instead of what it probably truly is: deference to authority and conventional customs associated with rigid hierarchies. As a 3-star General told me during my promotion ceremony, “being a colonel does not mean your jokes are any better or your stories are more interesting!”
[14] As the saying goes, “preach the gospel, and when necessary, use words.”
