Leadership: Purposes, Perils and Possibilities

Compliance or Confrontation?

In my early 20s, I landed my first professional role as an entry-level budget analyst in a mid-sized New England city. City Hall was a rough and tumble environment where strength, directness, political cunning, and a certain facility with profanity were valued. No delicate flower, I was, however, young, inexperienced, and naïve. And, as the first woman to be hired into the budget office, I felt conspicuous and very self-conscious.

A few months after I started – just when I thought things were going well – my manager, Randy, called me into his office. He told me that he'd hired another woman into an analyst role. That was the good news. The bad news, delivered without explanation, was that she'd been hired at a grade level above me, and I was to turn most of my assignments over to her.

On Monday morning, I headed to Randy's office. Red-faced and nervous, but resolute, I sat down, uninvited. I looked him directly in the eye and said, slowly and emphatically, "I want a promotion." "Yes, yes," Randy said, nodding vigorously. I paused. "I want it now," I said. Three weeks later, I had my promotion in hand.

Leadership: Wicked or Worthy?

That single encounter taught me a lot about bullies, blind spots, and belief systems. In the decades since, I've come to see that most of us enter the world of work ill-equipped to lead, gripped by internalized fears and assumptions.

As Harvard's Barbara Kellerman reminds us in Bad Leadership (2004), leadership isn't always good; in fact it's often quite bad. Bad leadership isn't the same as ineffective leadership. In fact, bad leadership can be very effective leadership that achieves harmful outcomes.

The Importance of Dignity

The central issue is that organizations are living systems, made up of complex beings with multiple identities and sometimes contradictory assumptions and beliefs. To understand this, leaders at all levels must be avid students of the human condition.

In her seminal book, Dignity: Its Essential Role in Resolving Conflict (2011), Donna Hicks integrates findings from neuroscience and biology to shed light on the day-to-day challenge of creating effective organizations and societies. Dignity, Hicks argues, is the need to feel valued and worthy. When our need for dignity is met, we experience genuine connection. On the other hand, dignity violations trigger our limbic systems and we are flooded with feelings of being diminished and humiliated.

Safety and Swamp Creatures

In today's vocabulary, we refer to this basic need to feel safe from dignity violations as "psychological safety," thanks to recent research at Google that brought a somewhat hazy phenomenon into sharp focus. Increasingly we have come to understand that psychological safety is essential for everything from having meaningful friendships to solving the pressing global problems of our time.

Recapturing our Forgotten Dreams

Most of us enter leadership because a person, an idea, a hope, or a challenge has pulled us into the journey – because a nascent sense of purpose tugs at the heart and can't be ignored. Unfortunately, in our rush to meet the next goal or get the next promotion or just survive the next day, we often forget that purpose.

Perhaps it's time to find that liberation and recapture our forgotten dreams. Leaders have the power to create safe spaces or demolish them. They dare us to explore our shadows and aspire to our better selves.