ISSUE #038 | THE LEADERSHIP CONTRARIAN
Richard Wilhelm was German and a friend of Carl Jung. Wilhelm spent over twenty years traveling China as a missionary and a Sinologist, which is a researcher who studies the things of China. During the time they were friends, Wilhelm told Jung this story.
During Wilhelm's time in China there was a severe drought in Kiaochow. It lasted approximately two years and caused the kind of damage you would expect of a drought in the early 20th century. During that time, as the story goes, Wilhelm watched the village attempt every local ritual to lift the drought. All of them failed.
As a last resort the villagers called for an old man in another province. He was supposedly a Rainmaker. When the old man arrived he asked for a hut on the outside of town. He then disappeared into it alone for three days. On the fourth day a miracle happened. It snowed!
After two years of drought it had snowed just 4 days after some old man came to the village!
Of course, Wilhelm went to the old man and asked how he'd done it but the old man said he didn't make it snow. The old man then explained that he came from a place that was in harmony with the Tao, and this village was not. So, for three days he did nothing but restore his own inner order. “Naturally, then, the rain and snow came.”
The point the old man was making was a paradigm shift and some would say, old wisdom.
As Jung would later describe, the lesson was that you don't fix a system by first working on it. You fix it by getting yourself right first.
This is profound. A leader's emotions, and the behaviors that come out of them, are incredibly powerful. When you get yourself into balance, into order, and into a place where you're effective, you bring balance, order, and effectiveness to your company. When you don't, you bring the opposite. Either way, everyone in the building can feel it.
Bob Anderson and Bill Adams put it best in Scaling Leadership, quoting one of their clients, Jim Geiger, the CEO of Liquid Web: “Leaders bring the weather.” The leader's tone, mood, presence, and behavior are the weather in any organization and everyone who works there can feel it.
It's contagious - good or bad
What I'm trying to tell you, if you haven't noticed it already, is that you have so much potential to create so much good in your company. You also have the ability to bring chaos. It's literally contagious, and it all depends on you. The easiest and most powerful method of leadership, it turns out, is to lead by example, and everyone who has worked for someone else knows it. Good or bad.
I learned this the hard way. Years ago, on the days I was really frustrated - upset, angry, dealing with something - I'd walk into the office, say good morning like always, and then close my office door. My door is almost never closed. And I'd clean.
You have to understand: I keep stacks of books and stacks of paper on my desk and around my office as a way of organizing my work. When I'm frustrated, I need everything really, really clean. So I'd shut the door so I wouldn't infect anybody, seclude myself so my bad attitude wouldn't dump on other people, and clean the entire office.
It took a year or two to find out the whole staff had noticed. Nobody said a word to me. But the moment my door closed, the message went around the office: “Uh-oh. Michael's cleaning.” And if Michael's not happy, that has the potential to impact us.
As soon as somebody says it has the potential to impact us, it's already impacting us.
I have people on staff who've been with me fifteen years. If they read this, they'll smile. They know exactly what I'm talking about.
And there's science to prove it
In December 2001 an article was published in the Harvard Business Review titled, Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance. Their research shows an incontrovertible link between a leader's emotional mood and the associated behaviors, to the moods and behaviors of everyone else in the company. They are contagious.
Whether they're negative Nancies with a critical spirit or they are happy, inspirational leaders, either way, those Leaders “Bring the Weather.” And the article goes on to say that a leader with High Emotional Intelligence inspires resilience, optimism and problem solving in the people around them. Which the research clearly links to higher performance in the company.
And the negative leaders with poor moods and low emotional intelligence correlate to low performing companies.
I find it fascinating that research shows that our brains can actually “catch” good emotional habits just as easily as catching a cold except one is far more enjoyable than the other.
Even western research comes to the same conclusion. When you and I get frustrated and cranky and even lose our temper at times, our emotions negatively impact our company and the people we lead. However, when we do the inner work and learn and grow and actually put into practice the things we have learned about being healthy, we create a healthy company in every way. When that article came out people responded in two ways. First they said, “No way.” and then they said, “Of course.” Because it makes perfect sense.
The leaders who won't do this work are usually the first to wave it off as emotional woo-woo.
The research goes further than mood. Gallup's ongoing study of more than 180,000 business units found that the most engaged teams are 23% more profitable than the least engaged, and that the manager explains 70% of the difference in how engaged a team is. McKinsey's twenty-year Organizational Health Index puts it even more bluntly: the healthiest companies deliver three times the shareholder returns of the least healthy. Healthy companies are more profitable, and they hold up better in the storms.
Leadership is not about pushing people in a direction you want them to go but about being the person they will follow. Whether we like it or not your people will follow you in all sorts of ways until they can't take it anymore and leave or fall in love with how you lead and follow you anywhere.
Those are the people I want by my side in business and in life. That's why I've invested so much of my life's resources into learning and growing. Life's just too short to do it alone and business is too hard to do alone. Especially with people that I don't enjoy.
If you're reading this newsletter I know one thing very clearly about you. You want to be a better leader and have a more successful company, whether you lead a for profit or nonprofit company. Whatever success means to you. I do like what one of my mentors, Bobb Biehl, says about the topic. He says he doesn't really like the word success. He prefers healthy because when a company is healthy it is healthy in every way including the culture and the financials. To him, success is just too ambiguous.
Take responsibility for the weather
Bringing this back around to where we started, you and I as leaders bring the weather in our companies and everywhere we lead in our lives. As part of our journey towards being great leaders and enjoying the benefits of that, we stand up and take responsibility for that weather too.
Now this wouldn't be an authentic issue if I didn't mention prayer and God's role in our leadership journey. It turns out that even with all the work and taking responsibility for ourselves and the impact of our leadership on others, there is a measure that is out of our control and Jesus wants to partner with us on the journey.
When it's out of your hands
An example of this was in 1944 during WWII. General Patton and his troops were in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge and the Third Army was grounded by extreme fog and mud. A little more than a week earlier Patton and his chief chaplain, Father James O'Neill, wrote a prayer asking God to, “restrain these immoderate rains” and grant clear skies for battle. They then had that prayer printed on cards and handed out to every soldier. Over 250,000 of them.
Patton was quoted as saying, “I want you to publish a prayer for good weather. I'm tired of these soldiers having to fight mud and floods as well as Germans.”
The prayer went out to the troops on December 22nd. The skies cleared the very next day. The Allied air forces broke the siege of Bastogne over the following days.
This is an example of a leader who realized that he didn't have the power on his own to influence the outcome of his predicament. He refused to let the weather negatively impact his men and ultimately their lives if he had anything to do with it. So he submitted to a higher force. The one who calms the seas and speaks life into everything He's created.
You see, from a story of an old man in China to the scientific research written about in Harvard Business Review and in the history books of WWII, the emotions and behavior that start from the person we are on the inside dramatically impact the people and the world around us.
I hope that this reminds you of how powerful you are and how much your emotions, words and actions influence the places and the people you lead. I hope it encourages you to grow deeper and bear more fruit in your life. Your family, your employees and your customers will thank you.
From experience, I know that you will experience a lot more peace and satisfaction from your work also. And that's a pretty cool thing.
If you read this and thought, I want that, but I'm not sure how to get there, that's the work Kathryn and I have been doing with leaders for more than two decades.
No pitch. Just a conversation about where you are and where you want to go.
Reach out. It'd be an honor.
If you read this and thought, I want that, but I'm not sure how to get there, that's the work Kathryn and I have been doing with leaders for more than two decades.
No pitch. Just a conversation about where you are and where you want to go.
Reach out. It'd be an honor.
Until next time,
Keep learning.
Keep growing.
And God bless,
Michael Redman
Half a Bubble Out (HaBO)
Business Consulting | Leadership Coaching
