PART THREE
THE ART OF WORKING WITH AND TRANSFORMING GROUPS
Setting the Context for Part Three
The very nature of leadership demands the capacity to influence individuals, groups, and organizations to achieve transformational ends. Part Three explores how the thinking described in Part One and ways of being described in Part Two result in transforming how, and how well, we exercise such leadership. Indeed, leadership becomes easier when we change our stance toward those we lead and let go of the idea of the leader as directing the action from above and causing people to act, as if they are without volition.
The transforming vision of the twenty-first century calls us to understand that we are part of the complex adaptive systems that we are trying to transform. Moreover, because we and the world are forever in a state of flux, we can let go of the heroic illusion that we need to exert incredible effort to compel other people and social systems to change. Indeed, the requisite effort may be more like diverting the course of a ball rolling down a hill than struggling to push a huge boulder up it—or even to get the boulder moving at all.
Furthermore, when we have learned to commit fully to our own callings and vocations, as the essays in Part Two encourage, our entire relationship to the outer world shifts, moving us beyond an us-versus-the-world point of view to recognizing a mysterious connection between the state of our consciousness and what happens. Drawing on the work of Jung, Peter Senge (1996) explains, “when we are in a state of commitment and surrender, we begin to experience what is sometimes called ‘synchronicity’” (p. 88). This surrender is to the natural processes of life and to the unfolding of our true nature, vocation, and calling. In Senge’s view, when you stop fighting your genuine relationship to the whole and trust its emergent unfolding, meaningful coincidences (i.e., synchronous events) happen.
I have personally experienced the reality of this notion of synchronicity. One example during the course of my own leadership journey particularly grabbed my attention. Over the winter break two years ago, I was journaling about my values, listening for what inner guidance might arise. I found myself writing about how I wanted to support depth psychological perspectives in the world. But I did not share this new commitment with anyone or make an effort to act on it. Shortly afterward, I received a call from a search firm asking if I was interested in being interviewed for the position of executive vice president and provost at Pacifica—a graduate school whose mission is to support depth psychology and mythology scholarship and education. The recognition of the match between my inner desire and a surprising outer opportunity eventually led to my accepting the job. It also enabled me to avoid what, unbeknownst to me, would turn out to be a less supportive situation at the University of Maryland for others who remained where I had been.
I have found that recognizing and acknowledging synchronous occurrences, rather than dismissing them as just luck, can shift one’s perspective from how difficult it is to live in such a complex world to being aware of some of the mysterious and helpful connections that link us to each other, thus making everything seem easier. And you can be assured that, as Senge points out, the fact that synchronicity seems to work in mysterious ways does not mean it is esoteric or mystical. Scientists do not really know how gravity works, either, but they do not discount its reality.
Reflecting on synchronous occurrences, Joseph Jaworski (1996), a former attorney who worked with Shell Oil, among other clients, and more recently as CEO of the American Leadership Forum, concludes that an interesting tension exists between our sense of personal autonomy and being “caught up in vital forces that are larger than ourselves, so that while we may be protagonists of our own lives, we are important participants in a larger drama” (p. 88).
The conscious mind can help to transform our relationship with others, but it is the unconscious mind that is our greatest ally in living in dynamic interaction between the inner and outer worlds. Too many people view the unconscious negatively rather than as a powerful ally. Sigmund Freud, for example, is known for identifying our pathologies as arising from the unconscious. Yet the unconscious mind tracks much more data than the conscious mind can handle and makes emotionally resonant decisions for us all the time, often with great wisdom. As New York Times columnist David Brooks (2011) observes in The Social Animal,
We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few years, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and others have made great strides in understanding the building blocks of human flourishing. And a core finding of their work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness. (p. 9)
Brooks (2011) goes on to say that the unconscious is not only the largest part of the mind; it is also the “seedbed of accomplishment.” Indeed, he continues, “mental processes that are inaccessible to consciousness organize our thinking, shape our judgments, form our characters, and provide us with the skills we need in order to thrive” (pp. 9–10). Given the unprecedented fast pace of modern life as well as information overload, the ability of the unconscious to take in great amounts of information and process it quickly is a great asset to any leader whose conscious and unconscious minds are in dialogue.
The essays in this section suggest ways of leading for those who not only want to be the change but also are able to trust in a positive relationship with the outer world, including their relationship with the people and systems that they lead. This trust allows them to learn from others as well as promote their own vision and values.
Harvesting the Wisdom of Groups and Promoting Group Effectiveness
Such leaders do not just sell others on their vision; they share their vision as they also harvest the vision of others, within and outside of their group. Anyone who has done work with the Myers-Briggs Type IndicatorTM or other typology systems, or who has seriously studied cultural differences, recognizes that no one of us and no group has all the answers. What we are able to see and understand depends on our type, our socialization (including the imprint of our cultures), and our individual experiences. We inevitably will see only a part of the reality in front of us (as in the famous Sufi parable of the blind men describing an elephant, each one holding a different part of its body). The complexity of modern life requires that we piece together various parts of the puzzle in order to gain an adequate perspective.
However, you can put those pieces together only if people are speaking their authentic truths. Unfortunately, many people match what they say to what they believe their leaders and other group members are open to hearing, saving their true and often more accurate reflections for quiet sharing in hallways and behind closed doors. Others simply posture, saying what they think will get them ahead.
We all pick up verbal and nonverbal cues, consciously and unconsciously, as to what the leader wants to hear or what it takes to fit into a group. This means that if we as leaders want to get the real information, we need to show enthusiasm for hearing divergent voices and surfacing conflict. What is tricky is how sensitive most people are to nonverbal communication. For example, I may say honestly that I want to hear divergent views, but if I look disquieted at hearing something new, or if someone heatedly shares their disagreement with my opinion and my eyes show I’m feeling defensive, they pick it up.
Brooks (2011) explains how it is that we track social cues and accommodate so unconsciously:
If the conscious mind is like a general atop a platform, who sees the world from a distance and analyzes things linearly and linguistically, the unconscious mind is like a million little scouts. The scouts careen across the landscape, sending back a constant flow of signals and generating instant responses. They maintain no distance from the environment around them, but are immersed in it. They scurry about, interpreting other minds, landscapes, and ideas. (p. 11)
This would be complicated enough, but most of the time these “scouts” are not reporting to the general. Indeed, they make decisions on grounds that may be very different from the general’s. Brooks (2011) explains that our unconscious minds are emotionally quite intelligent, and in response to stimuli they shape “our interpretation of the world” and serve as guides for us “as we chart our courses. If the general thinks in data and speaks in prose, the scouts crystallize with emotion, and their work is best expressed in stories, poetry, music, image, prayer, and myth” (p. 12).
In this respect, different parts of us are called forth by different environments. When we go to church, synagogue, or mosque, our more pious (or religiously oppositional) self shows up quite unconsciously. If we go to a party or a bar or the beach, our gregarious, fun-loving part shows up—or if it does not, we may have trouble enjoying our time there. We take a class and our intellectual, studious sides emerge, and so on. Our behavior shifts when our spouse is there, our boss comes into the room, our oldest best friend shows up, or we suddenly feel watched (or private and alone). All this can happen on automatic pilot because those unconscious scouts are doing their job. In The Tipping Point and in Blink, Malcolm Gladwell (2000, 2005) identified the public policy implications of this phenomenon, recounting how not allowing people to jump turnstiles or write on the walls of the trains decreased crime overall in the New York City subways.
In the introduction, I shared insights from my students at the University of Maryland and the Fetzer Institute dialogue participants. The students were in a graduate program in public policy that emphasized critical thinking and pragmatic practice. The classes were held in typical business conference-style rooms on campus and in a downtown Washington, DC office building. Might this have influenced their tendency to argue from reason and demonstrate critical thinking in their remarks, sounding very much like corporate managers, government bureaucrats, or policy wonks, albeit very smart ones?
The Fetzer participants were invited to share their knowledge of transformational leadership by a foundation whose mission is to promote love and forgiveness in the world. They sat in a circle in a beautiful building made of natural materials with large windows connecting us to a lovely natural landscape, every session beginning with poetry and music. Might this have enhanced their readiness to share such deep and soulful insights?
Setting the stage for what we want to unfold is essential to leadership. We do this by creating visual and verbal cues appropriate to the kind of responses we want to draw from group members. However, we need to remember that these cues skew the information we get, so we also must look for divergent thinking in other settings.
Dialogue is an important complement to discussion and debate, committed as it is to extracting the wisdom of the entire group. Our ability to engage in genuine dialogue with one another at an unconscious as well as a conscious level augments our ease in working together to achieve results. During the Fetzer dialogues, Deborah Meehan, the founder and head of the Leadership Learning Community, astounded us by a simple exercise that brought home the power of a deeper level of group cohesion, even in accomplishing a simple task. Twenty of us stood in a circle out in the fresh air at twilight. She gave us the task of counting to twenty, in any order, but with only one person speaking at a time—or we were to start over. We all looked earnestly at one another, trying hard and repeatedly failing. Then she had us do some deep breathing, consciously connect with one another, close our eyes, and try again. Inward panic ensued, at least in me, but, to my amazement, we succeeded easily on the first attempt. And the sense of group communion arising out of this exercise nourished a powerful sharing in the next session, where participants disclosed very revealing (and confidential) stories about their own leadership experience.
Because it is not yet common in the corporate or political worlds to reveal insights from the unconscious, such as dreams or somatic feelings, leaders often operate as if they had one hand tied behind them, functioning explicitly from only one part of the mind. Moreover, when the messages we consciously and unconsciously send out discourage members of the group from communicating anything beyond what their conscious minds know or can rationally defend, we should not be surprised to receive reductive groupthink rather than the collective wisdom of the enterprise.
For these reasons, transformational leaders access their own unconscious knowledge and help others to become aware of what external influences on them are evoking, align energies and connections within the group, and encourage group members to share the wisdom they have, whatever its source: rational analysis, fact finding, intuition, hunches, dreams, and listening to a still small inner voice within them (or the voice of conscience).
The essays in Part Three provide a series of lessons about utilizing the inner work we continue to do in interaction with groups we lead and of which we are a part. By doing this work, we can bring out the transformational capacities not only in ourselves but also in our organizations, communities, and the larger world. The bridging sections highlight capacities that support our overall ability to transform groups.