A PerformanceChallenge

This one is from my own experience of managing staff. These days, I am ecstatically happy to have three people who work, part time, to support my work in the world. Aside from the great delight of having, for the first time that I can remember, adequate support, I am overjoyed to have my own little "lab" in which I can put to use all of my ideas about collaborative leadership. I have a lot to say about collaborative leadership in the context of my explorations about what power-with does or doesn't mean, and I am planning to come back to this exploration soon. For now, suffice it to say that collaborative leadership is not the same as radical equality. The purpose of our coming together as a team is clearly stated as being in support of my work and my vision - this is what drew these people to want to work with me. In the context of that, we are in full collaboration, and more and more so by the day. I am asking the people on the team, for example, to be the ones to engage with the difficult task of deciding what makes sense for me to take on and what they would recommend I say "no" to. I ask for their input on just about everything significant, and receive wisdom I wish any leader could have access to. In my work with organizations I mourn, in fact, how often I hear this kind of wisdom behind closed doors, wisdom that never makes it to the executive leadership, to everyone's loss.

Within this rosy-looking picture, I was having a growing sense of anxiety about the level of administrative support I was receiving from one of them (this is being written with her consent). I was feeling a lot of stress, because I couldn't ask for a better attitude, and yet some of the work wasn't getting done in a way that supported me.

She is committed to supporting me in ways that move me to tears at times. She is open to receiving feedback without anything I can associate with the word "defensive". She has immense flexibility in terms of what tasks she is willing to do and when, and expresses her joy about doing this work, and her sense of inspiration about what I do and how I do it, consistently. She is also applying herself to learning the content of what I teach, and has wholeheartedly joined my immersion program. At the same time, details were not being tracked, tasks were not completed when I was expecting them, I had to look at what she did before she submitted it and would regularly discover errors, and I felt anxious about not being able to release my own responsibility, the very reason for which I hired her.

Initially, I hadn't crossed the line into the collaborative world. While we talked openly about the issues, I still somehow saw it as my problem to solve. Then, one day, while talking to a friend about my hopelessness about the situation, I suddenly woke up. All I needed to do was to bring this to the team as a whole, and we would hold it together. Almost immediately my stress level declined. At our next staff meeting, I brought the dilemma to the group in exactly the same way I described it above.

It's hard for me to describe the experience of what ensued. The sense of being together, of dissolving the habitual separation, of leaving behind the idea of "boss" and "employee" and embracing the radical image of complete partnership within the team to find ways of supporting her and supporting me - all of this was almost intoxicating. Not easy, because the topics were painful. Still, exciting, meaningful, and hopeful. Within about fifteen minutes we lined up a bunch of strategies - some changes I was going to make in how I explained tasks and asked for them; some changes in how we communicate with each other; some places where fear interfered with communication and where we created structures that would support this person in speaking up when she was beyond capacity, and seek support to fulfill her tasks, or give them back to me; and more availability from the other two people to support her with areas that are harder for her. This happened a few weeks ago, and the results are dramatic. There is joy, there is flow, even more of a sense of collaboration, and, alongside that, more productivity and clarity in the outcome. Work is, after all, not just or even primarily about how we feel... it is, first and foremost, about attending to the responsibilities we have agreed to as part of our job as efficiently as possible and with high integrity. Allofthatishappeningnowmorethanbefore.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 827