Individually, we tend to assess the authenticity of another's message by whether it meets some preferred standard of validity, logicality, reasonability, or rationality that holds our personal attention. When, however, we are articulating messages as mandated leaders, we tend to forget that we already have the attention of our team. By virtue of the fact that, in the perceptions of others, we have considerable power in our organization to end the employment or career of those we are charged with leading, our team members automatically pay close attention to our words. I became especially aware of this reality when I began, for the first time, to write a speech for a Toastmasters' club I had just joined. Toastmasters is great place to become aware of one's emotional flow and its influence on, and affect from, language and meaning. I joined imagining that the extensive experience I had had creating and making presentations in front of the employees of the large organizations which were the clients of my mentors at McKinsey & Company would make my success at Toastmasters "a cinch". How false that confidence turned out to be! In the event I found preparing speeches for the much more varied and much less captive and reverential audiences of Toastmasters to be at first a trigger for many anxieties I didn't even know I had! Caught between desire to express my insights without reservation and growing concern as to whether my audience would find my hard won (and therefore precious?) wisdoms either uninteresting or offensive, I felt extremely nervous. As the hours ticked away toward my first speech, I became clearer as to why: I simply did not know, as I had always known as a McKinsey consultant, what range of perspectives my audience would bring to their experience of my speech. In short, my authenticity was in question, but in ways I had never experienced when introduced as a McKinsey consultant. The word "empathy", by contrast with the word "authenticity", is more familiar to people conceiving themselves as leaders (which, hopefully, includes us all on occasion) but, even so, its meaning seems to me to be fully understood only in the field of the healing arts -- fields most of us try to avoid as much as our health permits. Therefore, I hope you will not find me too pedantic if I offer a few words of definition here to save us some possible misunderstanding. Empathy received may be defined as the capacity sensed in another to be trustworthy in respecting the feelings one needs, wants, or desires to have expressed, perhaps confidentially. Because empathy is an idea akin to the ideas of "sympathy", "compassion", and "concern", perhaps a good way to clarify further what empathy is might be to draw the following distinctions. Empathy is different from both sympathy and compassion in that in empathizing one does not presume a superior status as we implicitly do when expressing sympathy (always!) and compassion (too often!). In empathy one takes care not to presume that one’s understanding of another’s situation or thinking is accurate. Instead we give sensitive attention to the small details of what is happening and of what we are told of another's evolving circumstances. We also engage in considerate curiosity aimed at facilitating expression of a more complete description of the feelings of a team member concerning what is at stake in a corporate productivity matter. Extending empathy is more vitalizing than extending compassion or sympathy because, in empathizing, we do not create dependence or encourage the settling in of either a victim or an entitlement mentality. Rather, in empathizing we encourage the reciprocal flow of goodwill and fellow feeling. This is a critical point to grasp because only in a culture of genuinely reciprocal flows can the curiosity so essential to learning flourish enough for our organizations to learn in good time what they actually need to learn. Empathy is also different from concern in that acts of empathizing may or may not, depending on what we learn from our empathizing, lead to our having concern. The capacity to empathize is essential to productive teamwork because, if a team member does not perceive enough empathy in other team members' behaviours, including especially that of the team leader, s/he will feel inhibited from contributing her or his most authentic contributions to team conversations. High degrees of empathy invite high degrees of authenticity, and low degrees of empathy inhibit the release of what authenticity might otherwise be forthcoming. In other words, the productivity of a team significantly depends upon the qualities of both empathy and authenticity that each member both contributes to, and senses in, his or her fellows. This being so, do people naturally find expressing authenticity and empathy at more or less the same time easy? Unfortunately, not very often! This appears to me to be so in part because we do not easily notice, let alone give recognition to, the particular styles of either authenticity or empathy offered by others from a different culture (or sub-culture such as a profession, tribe, clique, cabal, establishment, ethnicity, dissident group, or family) from our own. I also sense it is partly because few people in organizations have had much education in what constitutes empathy, let alone how to express it, and partly because most of us reserve our most authentic expressions for domestic situations (where we can usually hope that miscues arising from indulgence in the freedom of jocular spontaneity will be either enjoyed or forgiven, or, at the worst, tolerated). How then can a person increase his or her capacity both to express a combination of, and to recognize a combination in, his or her fellows of both authenticity and empathy? The question is not even an easy one to comprehend on first reading, let alone to answer! Nonetheless, by being aware of what empathy and authenticity are and how the informational content of authenticity will not flow without trust that the relational quality of empathy is reliably present in the team cultural climate, a leader can develop more of what he or she already has of the key personal qualities central to the raising of team productivity. A prerequisite of empathic authenticity is, of course, the practice of thorough consultation of both self and affected others more or less coincidentally. In other words, if one wants to be effective in vitalizing leadership of a group for whose productivity as a team one has a formal accountability, one will need to have proficiency in the practice of simultaneous self-and-other consultation. Also, to be a good team member in a new team, one must deliberately practice this faculty in the new milieu even if one has already learned that one was good at it in other teams. One can state this quite clearly in theory. But, after reflecting on many, if not most, of one’s experiences in the work and market places, many of us recognize that experiencing and realizing deeply empathic authenticity in work relationships is quite rare. That seems to me to be both why insights arising from team co-operation do not occur as often as we would like, and also why significant insights occur so rarely outside team co-operation! Does this mean that, if we believe we have mastered the concept of empathic authenticity, we may yet have work to do to appreciate the "other side" of a particular story? Very often that is worth considering, and this may be the reason we so often feel the need to complain of “a silo of group thought” as an irritating obstacle to raising the level of corporate productivity. We all have had, however, memorable moments of relationship with a good friend in which empathic authenticity happened naturally. Indeed that’s how we know that, by being empathic and authentic ourselves, we can hope to learn how to create a state of relationship in which all the parties with whom we may be in communication will feel the well-being of mutual confidence and reciprocated co-operation. “So,” some may now be thinking, “I know more or less what empathic authenticity is, but as for expecting to experience it reciprocally at work, forget it!” Although most people do hold that view, Authentix coaches have found practical ways to increase a person's ability to participate with empathic authenticity in team conversations. But, because such ways are currently very rarely practiced, deliberate efforts to increase their occurrence in one's own organization will often encounter askance, if not alarm, push-back, concealment, or even shameless deceit!, from others to whom our efforts seem disconcerting or upsetting. That is why we often fear revealing ourselves in work settings. Yet it is also why we continue to want, if at all safely possible, to do so even after years of hearing and experiencing that doing so is "impossible" because it would be "inappropriate" or "immature" or "a waste of time". The consequence of this natural obstacle to widespread practice of high levels of empathic authenticity is that one has to be willing, in the conversations of one’s work or marketplace, to risk being occasionally considered, and even severely judged, as strange, awkward, weird, and even insincere or malevolent at times. Virtually all of us feel at least a little uncomfortable when judged in such ways; and some of the more sensitive of us even worry that we might be being considered "out of line" by others too polite or inhibited or insufficiently interested to tell us. In some ways this very common reality is a fortunate one for otherwise life would simply be too upsettingly unpredictable for most of us. When, however, some adjustment to the culture of an organization is needed, someone will have to be willing frequently to set an example of behaviour that many other people will initially find weird and some may judge disdainfully, or even, if they dare, contemptuously (and resentfully if they dare not!). But fortunately, such disdain or contempt will appear increasingly absurd to watchfully impartial others. That, therefore, is the personal investment required of a leader if he or she wants to raise the cultural climate of an organization to where significant levels of empathic authenticity are "normal". First, the values leading to empathic authenticity must be discovered and accepted as a worthwhile aspiration for a growing minority. Then, in small but increasing degrees, these values must become "standard" expectations for everyone's conduct in due career season. Not surprisingly, few people are willing to make such an investment, and those who do have usually felt the need to paint, not always truthfully, as in the Saddam WMD pretension, a picture of what leadership coach and author Daryl Conner calls a "burning platform". Is such a cost worth paying in your particular circumstances? That's not an easy question to answer. Of relevance to a rational answer, however, is the following chart. It compares, in hard numbers, the average performances over a decade of organizations differentiated by arguably the most salient features of organizational culture: |
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| Services to Leaders Coaching Essay: Conscious Leadership |
Consciously Equanimous Leadership: Productive Teamwork through Empathic Authenticity (A Conscious Approach to Finding and Distributing Well-Being) (c) 2008-9, all rights reserved, by Angus Cunningham President, Authentix Coaches angusc@authentixcoaches.com |
| A team develops macro-insight by synthesizing the micro-insights its members each bring to team conversations. The quality of macro-insight produced by a team depends, therefore, on the quality of micro-insight contributed to the team's deliberations by its members. What then determines whether a team member will bring his or her very best quality of micro-insight to the "team table"? Whether or not a team leader has insight into this question will clearly be a major determinant in whether he or she can evoke the best in productivity of which his or her team is capable. In this paper I hope to shed light on the concept of empathic authenticity as an ingredient in productive teamwork of which leaders are wise to become especially conscious. The term "authenticity" is a relatively new one in the lexicon of many leaders. So, to make sure you and I are using this word in the same way, please review "Authenticity: A Learning Approach", a paper in which the concept of authenticity is explored in depth. If, however, you are truly pressed for time, the following is a useful summation: Authenticity may be defined as the degree of expression of what one has experienced and learned that others with whom one is in communication find relevant to the issue then in discussion. |
Source Data - "Corporate Culture & Performance" © 1992 by Kotter & Heskett
Analysis - Authentix Coaches
Analysis - Authentix Coaches
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The chart clearly shows the enormous positive impact a constructive culture has on long-run performance. The figures confirm that attention to constructive values such as those making up a culture of empathic authenticity has real and lasting effect upon the bottom line. The performance of your organization may not be problematic today. If so, this is significantly due to something about its culture and sooner or later the culture will fall out of kilter with its customer and resource markets unless you, as leader, consciously take steps to prevent that. In other words, someone is either making the investment necessary to bring its culture up to the level needed to maintain its independent prosperity or alternative arrangements will have to be made by you or your successor. As always, the choice of the most senior leader is his or hers alone. Yet true as this is, it does not change the reality that attending to the subtle but high-leverage issues of organizational culture is always easier when one is not under pressure from poor performance. Therefore leaders are wise to make the aim of every interaction involving others in their organization a learning one for the values needing to prized by their team members -- even when such issues are regarded as unimportant or unpleasant to discuss. This means that delegation of urgent, but less important, problems by the leader is critical to long-run success. And the good news here is that delegation, with carefully calibrated monitoring of consequences, provides opportunities for growth in leadership by others. OK, so how can we make practical preparation to make investment in culture work pay off? Authentix Coaches has found that leaders who first spend the time to distinguish moments when we know we have genuine equanimity from very similar moments when our equanimity is more an aspiration than a deeply felt knowing, acquire deeper insights -- insights that not only bring us clarity and poise but that also productively vitalize all involved. The process sketched in the diagram below is the one Authentix Coaches use to improve the trade-offs that every decision-maker in an organization is intrinsically making: the one between immediate productivity and longer-run productivity gains through the benefits to be found in a communicatively more vital culture: |
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In the schematic above, the top row describes an evolving and cyclical process by which one extracts data from one's emotional flow as one seeks to maintain equanimity in the face of challenges to one's sense of clarity, poise, and balance. Unlike technical decision-making processes, this process does not ignore data for the purpose of being relieved of one's emotions. In other words, it is not a simple feel-good process! Rather it empowers a leader to sort out the sense from the bias in his/or emotions by avoiding the loss of the useful information concerning legitimate personal needs that is a part, but too often an unconscious part, of them. When the information inside an emotion is not scrupulously discriminated between its components of personal need and automatic evaluative judgment, people affected by that person's decisions are vulnerable to whatever may be sordid in the quality of equanimity then known to the decision-maker, and since few actually know the difference between equanimity and emotional ignorance, society is suffering grievously from heavily biased decisions taken from emotional states far from equanimity. To factor emotional data rationally in to conscious choices, one must first become consciously aware of the emotion one has. One can think of there being a spectrum of states of being in which one will be called to lead. In the diagram the states recognized by a senior project manager are listed to illustrate such an "emo-spectrum". But anyone can categorize his or her emotions as either emotions clearly experienced as positive, or as emotions clearly experienced as negative, or as ones that we cannot easily label as either +ve or -ve. Such ambivalent states of being are usually being experienced when, for example, one says "I'm fine!". Such a statement typically means that the speaker has either the "emotion" of ignorance or the state of being known as equanimity. This ambivalent category, shown in between the distinctly +ve and distinctly -ve categories, of emotions is made up of habits of presumption that a person has either honed by self-discipline or inherited by good fortune. Whichever they may be, such states of being have become habitual and what is necessary to know here is that they "hide" from our conscious attention much data concerning characteristic ignorances of either our own needs or those of others. The schematic outlines how we can consciously shift the focus of our attention in response to whichever of the three categories of feeling and thought of which we become aware during our decision-making deliberations. We can learn to do this by deliberate "self-monitoring". Authentix Coaches have techniques for this purpose in which we help our clients become skillful. These techniques are rooted in the "I have X emotion now" self-monitoring linguistic, to which we have given the acronymic name IHXENs (pronounced "Eye-Zens"). Once we have verbalized an accurate IHXEN, we can advance in our decision-making through the following three steps:
If we are certain our state of being, here and now, is equanimity, will we feel perfectly poised to act wisely on behalf of both self and others? Few of us can distinguish equanimity from its common feel-alikes -- possession by presumptive moods of, for example, stoicism on the one hand, or of brusquely insensitive ignorance on the other. We can recognize the state of insensitive ignorance, for example, when we are vaguely aware of some nagging unanswered questions, to which our consciences will require answers before we can decide on action without fear of later experiencing regret, or even grief. In the state of stoicism, as another example, we are aware of some tendency to believe that one "should" be the hero figure in the drama one is experiencing -- the presumed, but silent and martyr-like, saviour of everybody else. In this state we are aware that we tend, by comparison with the tendencies of others, to neglect our own needs for well-being -- sometimes even when our own needs are quite urgent. We want to be able to distinguish genuine, "honest-to-goodness" equanimity from its feel-alikes, which will always include a segment of emotional ignorance and almost always some "ismic" bias of thought, such as the biases of workaholism or narcissism. We want to make these distinctions because in genuine equanimity we acquire a fund of well-being that is automatically transmitted to the people we lead – whose rate of more or less conscious learning of how to combine the principles of authenticity with empathy will then increase. Unfortunately, and this is crucial to know, we cannot be sure we have done so until we have become very consciously aware of the differences between the genuine feeling of equanimity and its "counterfeits of thunk thought" (for example: brave stoicism on the one side of equanimity and brusquely insensitive ignorance on the other). This we cannot do until we have taken full responsibility for our feelings. Unfortunately, taking full responsibility for our feelings is no easy task. Moreover, many are unaware of this reality. If, however, we introspect enough to discover that the emotions specified in our IHXEN statements (such as "I have frustration now" or "I have doubt now", to give two examples) derive rationally from "because I want Y desires/wants/needs/requirements met", we can take full responsibility for our feelings by expressing them as specific requests in relation to how we conceive "Z" situation. In this way, we both avoid making others responsible for our feelings and uncover our actual needs in the situation we are confronting. Learning to acquire IHXEN proficiency takes time, of course. But we can speed the process by acknowledging to at least one other person – possibly a leadership coach – that we do indeed have needs and shortcomings that we have been reluctant to admit and for which we have therefore been reluctant to request help. Acknowledging our needs and shortcomings as valuable aspirations over time for personal growth, we can engage our energies in growing our skills of empathic authenticity. This is the path along which engagements with Authentix Coaches are designed to support our clients. Along this path, our clients acquire, economically, the personal and organizational insights both to perform prosperously and to distribute well-being. When we acquire proficiency in the path of empathic authenticity, we experience increasing periods of genuine equanimity and find we are then launched along a learning path in which our personal and corporate values align. Our skills -- to express ourselves in relation to the real-life work issue in hand both fully authentically and with appreciated empathy -- then grow rapidly. In summary, when we have distinguished the centered balance of genuine equanimity from its counterfeits, which typically were "fashioned" by emulation of the common idiosyncrasies of our formative cultures, we are ready to move forward both intuitively and rationally. Thus the schematic above presents, in simplified form, a set of rationally related emoto-linguistic techniques (and inner experiential processes guided and sparked by such techniques) by which we learn to deepen the wisdom of our leadership choices and decisions. Applying its principles we find ourselves integrating more and more of our current knowledge and history with the products of the curiosity and narrative of those we lead. These decisions will be ones from which not only we, but others affected also, will enjoy reasonable satisfaction of whatever needs the degree of empathic authenticity of both ourselves and of our leadership team members has allowed to be expressed. In summary, our key existential task as leaders is to be able, surely, to distinguish genuine equanimity from its counterfeits (which, depending on the cultures and sub-cultures from which we have come, is likely to be a philosophy, such as stoicism, or its opposite -- in that case brusquely ideological, and therefore, insensitive ignorance). After fully experiencing both these pseudo-equanimities, we will be able truly to say we know when we have genuine equanimity. From genuine equanimity one can gather the poise to make a decision both equitable for all in the present and vital for the future of the organization one leads. Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 080615-100602, excerpted from "Solving Problems Together", to be published in 2010 |
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