A choice to make whenever you work with others: will you relate to them as supplier or partner?Suppliers are there to give you what you ask for. 'We want 300 widgets by Friday' - there'll be a supplier for that. The supplier does not need to know much about what you care about, or are committed to, beyond the needs of the current supply. Once they have fulfilled your request to the standards you lay out, their job is done. And in relating to them as supplier you become consumer - the one with the right to determine the spec, the one upon whose sole discretion the supply gets accepted or rejected, and the one who expects not to be challenged, or disturbed, or questioned.The consumer-supplier relationship, even if it lasts over a long time period, is essentially a relationship of safety and utility (an I-It relationship). If someone else comes along who can give you what you ask for more quickly, or more cheaply, or with less fuss, have them supply you instead.And while supply gives you what you asked for, it gives you only what you asked for. You may get what you want, but you may well not get what you need.Partners are there to be in your commitments with you. To be a partner is to step in, to care about the same things that another cares about, and to build a relationship which can hold creativity, surprise, trust and difference. To be a partner is to be prepared to question the spec, the strategy and the premise, and be questioned in turn for the sake of the larger commitment you share. It's to enter into something big together, to be influenced by one another, and to be in it for the long term.When you step into a relationship this way, you invite the other party to join with you in your endeavours. As such partnership is an essentially I-You relationship, a shared commitment aimed at a far bigger set of possibilities than a supplier-consumer relationship can ever hope to address.The partner-supplier choice applies to just about any relationship. Colleagues, employees, consultants you bring in, people who make things and services you use - any can be partner or supplier. In each case you choose. Will you invite the other to be supply for your requests or partner in bringing about what matters most?Each kind of relationship has its place, and each has its consequences. But what gets most of us into trouble, sooner or later, is how often we try to make ourselves suppliers when a bolder, riskier and more significant contribution is called for. And how often we look for the safety and reassurance of a supplier, when it's a partner that we really need if we're going to have the impact on the world we're hoping for.
When trust happens
Trust, in the end, is not built by waiting until the conditions are right - "I'll be able to trust them when I feel confident and secure... when they've given me sufficient evidence that they are trustworthy"Instead, trust is always engendered most by our first extending our trust to others - which requires us to be open enough and vulnerable enough to let others in.And trust is deepened by exactly what we do when we experience breakdowns in trust. Closing down or backing off, declaring the relationship over or under threat, does nothing to build our capacity to trust others, nor they us, in the future.No, trust is built precisely by turning towards one another when it breaks down and talking about what is now possible and required. We invite trust precisely by how we respond when our capacity to trust seems most under threat.
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We have to find a way to love our brokenness
We have to find a way to love our brokennessNo, not loving ourselves in spite of our failingsBut loving the brokenness itselfWe have to love all the ways we're lateAnd all the ways we missed the pointWe have to love that we were scaredAnd that we were ashamed to say itWe have to love that we didn't get it all doneAnd love that we imagined it was doable in the first placeWe have to love that we're such a glorious messAnd how we struggle to meet our own standardsWe have to learn to love, in short,all the ways we fall shortBecause our grace, courage and capacity to standOur care of what's broken in the world around usIs strongest when we're carriedby that which we've learned to cherishAnd not when we're miredin that which we've chosen to hate.
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Misunderstanding feedback
'Giving feedback' has become so much a part of what is considered good management that we rarely ask ourselves whether it's effective or question the premise upon which it's based. I think it’s time we did.
The very idea of 'feedback' as a central management practice is drawn from cybernetics. The simplest kind of single-loop cybernetic system is a home thermostat. The thermostat responds to feedback from the room (by measuring the ambient temperature) and turns on heating when required so to warm the air to a comfortable level. When the target is reached, the thermostat turns the heating off. It's a 'single-loop' system because the thermostat can only respond to temperature.
In a double-loop feedback system it's possible to adjust what's measured in order to better address the situation. If you're bringing about the conditions in your room to make it suitable for a dinner party you may need to pay attention to temperature, lighting, the arrangement of furniture, the colour of the table cloth, the number of place settings, the mood and culinary taste of your guests, and the quality of conversation. Single-loop systems such as thermostats can’t do this. But double-loop cybernetic systems allow us in principle to ask 'what is it that's important to measure?'. And, of course, human beings are far more suited to this kind of flexibility than thermostats are.
It’s from this way of looking that we get the contemporary idea that feedback - solicited or not - is what’s most helpful or appropriate for someone to learn to do the right thing. But it is based on something of a questionable premise. Thermostats, even very clever ones, and other cybernetic systems don’t have emotions, or cares, or worries. They do not love, or feel fulfilled or frustrated. They do not have available to them multiple ways to interpret what is said. They do not hurt, and they do not feel shame. They do not misunderstand or see things in a different way. They don’t have an internalised inner critic, nor do they have bodies that are conditioned over years by practice to respond and react in particular ways. They are not in relationship. They do not have to trust in order to be able to do what they do. And they do not have a world of commitments, intentions, relationships, hopes and goals into which the latest temperature data lands.
People have all of these.
When we simply assume that spoken or written feedback, even if carefully given, will correct someone’s actions or help them to learn, we assume they are more like a cybernetic system than they are like a person. Sometimes it can certainly be helpful - when the feedback is in a domain that both giver and receiver care about, given in language that makes sense, and when it meets the hopes and aspirations of the receiver with sensitivity and generosity. But many times we find that the very act of giving feedback wounds or confuses or deflates or misunderstands or treats the other person as if they don’t know what they’re doing. We find that the world of the giver is nothing like the world of the receiver. We find that our best effort to construct feedback according to the ‘rules’ mystifyingly doesn’t bring about what we’re intending. And then we get frustrated or disappointed, and try to give the feedback another way, imagining that if we can come up with a clever technique or way of saying it then our feedback will work.
Perhaps a place to start would be to stop thinking about people as if they were glorified thermostats. In order to do this we'd have to soften our ideas of truth in feedback - specifically the idea that the one who knows the truth gives feedback to the one who must be corrected. Secondly, we could start to think how many ways there are to learn how to do something well than being told how someone else sees it. And third, we could wonder how we can share the riches we do see in a way that gives dignity and maintains connection between both parties - starting by knowing when it’s time to request, demonstrate, reflect, inquire together, make new distinctions in language, show someone how to make good observations for themselves, or simply stay out of the way.
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Scattered
Could it be that we're so harried, so unhappy, so stressed because we've forgotten the simple pleasure and discipline of being up to one thing at a time?When we're committed to being always on, always connected, always responsive - and to reacting to every email, phone call, tweet, facebook posting, news report - how can we expect to lose ourselves, completely, in something that's both fulfilling and of value?Everything is interrupting everything else, all the time. And we keep it this way because we think we like it. It makes us feel important.And perhaps most significantly, it saves us from having to feel, really feel, anything in particular - numbing both our anxiety and our joy.
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Enabling constraints
Often, our attachment to personal freedom becomes its own kind of slavery.
When we demand freedom with no bounds, our endless right to choose, it's incredibly difficult to
enter into a relationshipmake a promise we'll have to keepmake a decision (because any decision closes off options)publish a blog post, letter, report, book
Our demand that we keep everything open closes off the very possibility of taking many kinds of action. In this way freedom becomes its own kind of slavery, a trap disguised as liberation.As a result it's often only through willingly submitting ourselves to particular kinds of limitation that we find any kind of freedom at all. In order to
deeply commit to someonetake a stand on something that's importantfollow a path that takes dedication and focus
we have to discover that the truest freedom sometimes comes in the form of choosing, deliberately, to be bound by enabling constraints.
Undoing the spiral
We discover early in life what the people around us expect from us. And we find ways of doing just that. Even if we’ve completely misunderstood what was being asked.Meeting these expectations becomes, before long, central to our identity. We know ourselves as this or that kind of person, and then actively work to keep the identity we’ve established going. It feels familiar and comfortable to keep having people around us respond to us in the way to which we’ve become accustomed.I learned early on to be the peacekeeper: the pursuer of harmony, making sure I and everyone around me remained undisturbed and untroubled; listening, supporting, staying quiet, defusing conflict, avoiding anger (my own and other people’s).All these ways of being seemed, unquestionably, to be me.And of course they affected and shaped what was possible in any kind of relationship with me. Peacekeeping can be a great gift to the world, but also stifling and frustrating for others when anything genuine and troubling and sharp needs to be said.Other people around me took on other kinds of identity – the helper, making sure everyone is cared for and nobody is left out; the achiever, getting ahead and making things happen, knowing themselves through the outward signs of success; the challenger, being sure to be in control, using assertiveness and power to have things happen.We have powerful inner forces that keep us inside the bounds we’ve established – among them the inner critic, and shame. For years, if I would be ashamed – mortified – if I said anything that I thought might hurt or upset another. And I’d be eaten up by my inner critic if anyone dared express anger towards me.This is such an important topic because most of the time we can’t tell that this is what we’re doing – manipulating the world so it’s just so – not too hot, not too cold, but just as we expect it to be.And this is why we all need people around us who can see through our strategies and habits, who can see who we are beyond the tight spiral these identities produce in us – a spiral which keeps the horizons of the world smaller than we imagine, and smaller than we need.
The life beyond our narrow concerns
We're taught to ask ourselves the question 'What do I want to do with my life?'.But we're much less familiar with asking 'What does my life want to do with me?'.Asking this question requires us to see that there is a something called 'my life' that is beyond the usual narrow, more self-interested concerns that we hold.Beyond ego, beyond all the conditioning that comes from our culture, and beyond our familiar preferences lies something that is always calling to us, if we can quieten ourselves and be still for long enough.Responding to our lives in this way no longer means that things will definitely 'work out' for us in the way we've been taught. But it does offer the possibility of making a bigger contribution to life. One that goes far beyond what's possible when we only look for ways to be liked, to be safe, and to know how things are going to work out.
Photography by Lior Solomons-Wise
The peril of having one story
The problem with being sure of your story - the one you have that explains to you who you are, who other people are, and what's happening - is what is inevitably left out.Your confusion, longing, terrified waking in the quiet hours of the night, your disorientation -
A sign that it's all over, and that you're lost?
An inevitable part of the human condition (experienced by many more of us than will ever let on)?
The birth-pangs of something new? Some new way of living, thinking and relating that is emerging into life?
Each story about what you're experiencing leads to a different place, to different possibilities.Each story calls on a different way of relating to yourself and others.Each story is sustained by different practices (what you're doing repeatedly in your actions, your thinking that keeps it going).And none of them is ever the whole story.Part of the practice of a life fully lived - and leadership well done - is the practice of finding new ways of telling what we're sure we've already understood.
That I would be good
Sometimes we need a simple reminder that behind all our judgements, our self-distrust, our striving to be different from who we are, our perfectionism, our living our lives as a giant and unending self-improvement project, is a basic goodness that we all share. A basic goodness that we quickly forget.This is a topic Alanis Morissette clearly knows about from the inside. Perhaps, today, this song might be just what you were longing to remember.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMZReI2QrlQ[/embed]