11
Sacred Heart
Exercising leadership is an expression of your aliveness. But your life juice—your creativity and daring, your curiosity and eagerness to question, your compassion and love for people—can seep away daily as you get beat up, put down, or silenced.
In our work with men and women all over the world, in all walks of life, we have seen good people take on a cloak of self-protection to insulate themselves from the dangers of stepping out. Self-protection makes sense; the dangers are real.
But when you cover yourself up, you risk losing something as well. In the struggle to save yourself, you can give up too many of those qualities that are the essence of being alive, like innocence, curiosity, and compassion. To avoid getting hurt too badly, it is easy to turn innocence into cynicism, curiosity into arrogance, and compassion into callousness. We’ve been there. Maybe you have as well.
No one looks in a mirror and sees a cynical, arrogant, and callous self-image. We dress up these defenses, give them principled and virtuous names. Cynicism is called realism, arrogance masquerades as authoritative knowledge, and callousness becomes the thick skin of wisdom and experience. The following table summarizes the common tendencies that take over when people lose heart.
Cloaking cynicism, arrogance, and callousness in more acceptable language does not hide the consequences of adopting them in the first place. Cynicism, arrogance, and callousness may be the safest ways to live, but they also suffocate the very aliveness we strive to protect.
Indeed, realism must capture both the ugly and the amazing in our lives, unvarnished. To interrogate reality unflinchingly takes courage. The cynical brand of realism, which assumes the worst will happen, is a way of protecting yourself by lowering your aspirations so that you will never be disappointed. It’s like an insurance policy. If things go well, boy, that’s terrific. But if you never expect anything to work out, you’re never surprised, and, more to the point, you never have to experience betrayal.
Furthermore, authoritative knowledge depends upon curiosity to teach you when and where to take corrective action. Maintaining doubt when the people around you yearn for certainty can strain you to the limits of your integrity. But how can you possibly learn if you do not retain a healthy measure of curiosity? And how can you continue to be authoritative unless you continue to learn?
As for the thick skin of wisdom and experience, it is natural to develop some protective cover as you grow in your role and bear the vicissitudes of life. Otherwise the slings and arrows might be intolerable. But it is too easy to buy in to the common myth that you cannot survive a demanding professional role without a tough exterior, as if you have to check your compassion at the office door. Calloused fingertips lose their sensitivity. Your listening becomes less and less acute, until you fail to hear the real messages from people around you, and cannot identify the songs beneath their words. You listen to them only strategically, as resources or obstacles in the pursuit of your objectives. In the effort to protect yourself, you risk numbing yourself to the world in which you are embedded.
Moreover, the deepest wisdom and the most profound expressions of your experience are rooted in compassion. How can you possibly guide and challenge people without the capacity to put yourself in their shoes and imagine what they are going through? How otherwise can you identify the sources of meaning that can sustain them through the losses of change?
The hard truth is that it is not possible to experience the rewards and joy of leadership without experiencing the pain as well. The painful part of that reality is what holds so many people back. As we have described, the dangers of leadership will come from many people and places, and take many forms, not only from known adversaries, but also from the betrayal of close associates and the ambivalence of trusted authorities.
Cynicism, arrogance, and callousness can come in very handy. It may often seem as though, without their protection, there is nothing between you and the experience itself. They get you through the day. In reality, however, they undermine your capacity for exercising leadership tomorrow. Perhaps even more critically, they disable an acute experience of living.
A Reflection on Sacred Heart
The most difficult work of leadership involves learning to experience distress without numbing yourself. The virtue of a sacred heart lies in the courage to maintain your innocence and wonder, your doubt and curiosity, and your compassion and love even through moments of despair. Leading with an open heart means you could be at your lowest point, abandoned by your people and entirely powerless, yet remain receptive to the full range of human emotions without going numb, striking back, or engaging in some other defense. In one moment you may experience a loss of all faith, but in the next, compassion and forgiveness. You may even experience such swings in the same moment and hold those inconsistent feelings in tension with one another. A sacred heart allows you to feel, hear, and diagnose, even in the midst of your daily work, so that you can accurately gauge different situations and respond appropriately. Otherwise, you simply cannot accurately assess the impact of the losses you are asking people to sustain, or comprehend the reasons behind their anger. Without keeping your heart open, it becomes difficult, perhaps impossible, to fashion the right response and to succeed or come out whole.
Several years ago, Ron was invited to give a talk on leadership in Oxford, England, on a weekend that coincided with the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. The morning after the talk, he embarked on a short trip through the English countryside en route to London, where he expected to attend synagogue services. Early on he came upon a very charming village called Castle Combe, where the original movie version of Dr. Doolittle was filmed. A beautiful old manor, hundreds of years old, arose at the edge of the town, with expansive lawns and clusters of old trees. The manor now operated as an inn, so Ron decided to stay there for the night. It was the afternoon before Rosh Hashanah, and as the evening approached, he wondered how he would celebrate the holy day so far from any Jewish community.
Just before sundown, which marked the start of the New Year, he discovered a lovely old Anglican church at the edge of the manor. More than 600 years old, the small, well-built stone building seemed to have no more than twenty rows of pews. He wandered in and sat down in front, a Jew in an Anglican church, facing Jesus on the cross. Only weeks before, Ron had attended a Jewish workshop on deep ecumenism given by Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. (Reb is an endearing form of the word rabbi, which means teacher.) In the workshop, Reb Zalman explained sacred heart as the essence, or heart, of God’s promise, not to keep you out of the fire and the water, but to be with you in the fire and the water.1
Ron looked up at the image of a man being tortured for his beliefs—a frightening sight perhaps for anyone who has not been acclimatized to it, but more so for a Jew, conscious of a history of persecution. After decades of feeling a smoldering outrage with the violent abuses of Christianity, Ron found sitting in that church a challenging leap across a deep divide. As he reflected on his complex feelings, he began to wonder what this holiday might have been like for Jesus in his lifetime. He thought a bit wistfully, “Reb Jesus, you were one of our great teachers. We are the only Jews close by, and nobody else is here to celebrate with us. Why not keep each other company on the New Year?”
Ron looked at Jesus and meditated. “Reb Jesus, will you tell me your experience? What was it like for you on the cross? This is Rosh Hashanah, when we contemplate Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Can you give me a message?” After sitting for a while, Ron got very excited. He went outside into the clear late afternoon day and sat beneath an enormous old pine tree.
As he thought about his experience in the church, he lay down, stretched out his arms wide, and just stayed there for a long time looking up into the branches of the tree. How did he feel? Vulnerable.
And then Ron thought, “That’s the message. That’s what sacred heart is all about—the courage to feel everything, everything, the capacity to hold it all without letting go of your work. To cry out like King David in the wilderness, just when you desperately want to believe that you’re doing the right thing, that your sacrifice means something, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ But in nearly the same instant, to feel compassion, ‘Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.’ Jesus’s heart stayed open. He held it all.”
A sacred heart means you may feel tortured and betrayed, powerless and hopeless, and yet stay open. It’s the capacity to encompass the entire range of your human experience without hardening or closing yourself. It means that even in the midst of disappointment and defeat, you remain connected to people and to the sources of your most profound purposes.
Our underlying assumption in this book is that you can lead and stay alive. Leadership should not mean that you must sacrifice yourself in order to do good in the world. But you will encounter dangers and difficulties, as you may have experienced already, where you are likely to feel as if you are being sacrificed. Can you imagine the sense of abandonment that Maggie Brooke’s Lois must have felt week after week as she faced a circle of empty chairs, surrounded by a community struggling with alcoholism? Or the anguish of Jamil Mahuad, working tirelessly to serve his country, only to end up being forced by a military escort to abandon his office? Or the pain of Yitzhak Rabin, as he lay dying from an assassin’s bullet?
A sacred heart is an antidote to one of the most common and destructive “solutions” to the challenges of modern life: numbing oneself. Leading with an open heart helps you stay alive in your soul. It enables you to feel faithful to whatever is true, including doubt, without fleeing, acting out, or reaching for a quick fix. Moreover, the power of a sacred heart helps you to mobilize others to do the same—to face challenges that demand courage, and to endure the pains of change without deceiving themselves or running away.
Innocence, Curiosity, and Compassion: Virtues of an Open Heart
You choose to exercise leadership with passion because a set of issues moves you, issues that perhaps have influenced you for a long time. These issues might have roots that were planted before you were born, in your family or in your culture; they may reflect questions that live within you and for which you’ve decided to devote a piece of your life, perhaps even the totality of your lifetime. Keeping a sacred heart is about protecting innocence, curiosity, and compassion as you pursue what is meaningful to you.
Innocence
The word innocent comes from a Latin root that means, “not to injure and harm,” as in “not guilty.” We are not using that legal definition. Rather, we use the term in the sense of childlike innocence, naiveté—the capacity to entertain silly ideas, think unusual and perhaps ingenious thoughts, be playful in your life and work, even to be strange to your organization or community.
Adaptive challenges disturb the norms of a culture and therefore require some abnormality. It does not mean that all norms change, but some norms must. For change to take place, some idea has to be imported from a different environment, or exploited internally from a deviant voice from within that environment.2 That deviant voice may have it wrong 80 percent of the time, but that means the other 20 percent of the time, the strange, naive, but ingenious idea might be just what is needed.
When you lead people, you often begin with a desire to contribute to an organization or community, to help people resolve important issues, to improve the quality of their lives. Your heart is not entirely innocent, but you begin with hope and concern for people. Along the way, however, it becomes difficult to sustain those feelings when many people reject your aspirations as too unrealistic, challenging, or disruptive. Results arrive slowly. You become hardened to the discouraging reality. Your heart closes up.
As an organ, a healthy heart opens and closes every second. So how do we keep the spirit in our hearts opening, and not just closing, while in the midst of such difficult work? How do we maintain the innocence along with a realistic appreciation for the dangers involved in exercising leadership? How can you celebrate your desire to love and care effectively, even as you recognize the tough realities you face, which may hurt you?
Maintaining your innocence does not mean taking unnecessary grief. As one former student of ours expresses it, “For twenty-five years, every time I have to terminate somebody’s employment, whether for economic or performance reasons, it is enormously painful to me, and I suffer for it. I don’t think it is supposed to get easier every time, but I also don’t think I have to be stupid and not fire someone who is hurting the organization. So it doesn’t mean that I don’t act. But perhaps I don’t have enough calluses. How do I prevent this pain from becoming destructive, yet still stay smart about it? In a sense, every time I fire someone, I lose a little bit of innocence; I have to have mechanisms within myself and colleagues around me to rebuild that innocence or reconnect with it.”
We all reach our limits. At times, Jesus may have been overwhelmed, too. He got tired. He retreated. He tried occasionally to set limits on the people he chose to heal. In response to reaching your own limits you have a choice. You could say respectfully to yourself, “You know, I can’t take anymore of this today. I can’t witness any more today. Time to turn on an old movie, look back at some family pictures, take time off, and reacquaint myself with the sweetness of life, because that sweetness exists all the time, too.” You can allow your heart to close by developing a thick callus or becoming cynical about people, but you don’t have to.
Curiosity
Nearly all of the rewards of professional life go to the people who know, rather than the people who do not. Every day, even in a great university dedicated to learning, we see many colleagues more eager to show what they know than reveal what they do not. In business, assuredness goes a long way. People overstate their confidence in their products routinely. In politics, candidates express certainties far beyond their predictive powers. In the short run, your people may trust you less when you share your doubts, as they worry about your competence; but in the long run, they may trust you more for telling the truth.
The dynamic starts early. By the time children reach adolescence, they already form deep attachments to having it “right.” They begin to lose that wonderful curiosity that comes from knowing what they do not know, when they assume that people with a different point of view are there to learn from, not just argue with. But the sense of mystery and wonder so precious in the early years fades fast as the routine debates develop the characteristic structure:
“I’m right,”
“No! I’m right!”
“No! I’m right!”
The unlucky ones keep winning and become the “best and the brightest.” They are unlucky because the awakenings, like King Lear’s, often come late, after the mistakes and the waste. Then, the deflating of a grandiose self-assurance becomes particularly painful and laced with regret. A few, like Robert McNamara, who played a key role in the Vietnam War, demonstrate the extraordinary heart to revisit their mistakes and reclaim their doubts. The fact that McNamara would write deeply thoughtful memoirs analyzing his errors of judgment should stand as an inspiration for anyone taking on the risks of leadership.3 How many prominent people can say the same about their own memoir? Instead, layers of self-justification reinforce one another to protect some misguided notions of pride. Lessons for posterity are lost.
If Jesus, at the end of his ministry, could question God, then surely we can question ourselves.
Is it possible to retain that childhood virtue, curiosity, even as we hone our capacity to reality-test assumptions? Are there ways to maintain a sense of the mystery of it all?
To succeed in leading adaptive change, you will need to nurture the capacity to listen with open ears, and to embrace new and disturbing ideas. This will be hard because, the pressures on you will be to know the answers. And in your “inspired moments,” you will persuade yourself that, indeed, you do! And then you may say about your detractors, “How can they possibly doubt the value of what I am offering? Of this new technology? Of this new program?” When Bill George became the CEO of Medtronic in 1989, the company had a tradition of dividing the physicians into two categories: “our customers” and “competitive docs,” those with loyalties to competitor companies and their products. He found that many of the engineers did not like dealing with the “competitive docs” because they were too critical and challenging. “Of course,” reflects George, “they were precisely the doctors from whom we could learn the most.” Against resistance, George quickly moved to ban the term “competitive docs” and to bring them and their ideas into the company.
Most of the time, if you are honest with yourself, you know that your vision of the future is just your best estimate at the moment. As we’ve said, plans are no more than today’s best guess. If you lack the heart to engage with “competitor” ideas, how can your organization possibly do the adaptive work needed to thrive in that competitive environment?
The practice of leadership requires the capacity to keep asking basic questions of yourself and of the people in your organization and community. Our colleague Robert Kegan teaches the difference between assumptions that you hold and assumptions that hold you. The assumptions that hold you constrain you from seeing any other point of view. But we have a special and righteous name for them: We call them truths. Truths are assumptions for which doubt is an unwelcome intruder. And truths are held in place by a lack of heart to refashion loyalties within key relationships.
Compassion
Aristotle described God as the unmoved mover. In contrast, the twentieth-century philosopher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, described God as “the most moved mover.”4 If God is moved, shouldn’t we allow ourselves to be moved, too, by the triumphs, the failings, and the struggle?
At root, compassion means, to be together with someone’s pain. The prefix com- means “together with,” and the word passion has the same root as the word pain, as in the phrase “the passion of Jesus.” We have described throughout this book both practical and transcendent reasons to maintain a reverence for the pains of change. The advice to “keep your opposition close” rests on many strong strategic and tactical arguments, for example, but it also draws upon the insight that the people who fight the hardest also have the most to lose; and therefore, they deserve the most time, attention, care, and skill.
When you lead, you cannot help but carry the aspirations and longings of other people. Obviously, if your heart is closed, you cannot fathom those stakes, or the losses people will have to sustain as they conserve what’s most precious and learn through innovation how to thrive in the new environment.
Like innocence and doubt, compassion is necessary for success and survival, but also for leading a whole life. Compassion enables you to pay attention to other people’s pain and loss even when it seems that you have no resources left.
As he lay in his hospital bed during what he and everyone else knew was his last week of life, Marty’s father made extraordinary use of the time he had left to attend to the impact of his death on his family. He arranged a private conversation with each of his four grandchildren, probing them about their values and delivering the benefits of his nearly eighty years of experience. He gave his granddaughter a rousing pep talk before she retook her driving test. (She passed.) He met alone with his former daughter-in-law, who had always felt distanced from him after she and his son were divorced. He told her that he loved her, and that he thought she had been a great mom. Finally, an hour before he breathed his last, he asked Marty to get him a beer.
“What kind?” Marty asked.
“Bud.”
“Light or regular?”
“Light’s fine.”
Tears streaming down his face, Marty ran down the hospital stairs and across the street to the liquor store. He bought a six-pack and returned to the hospital room so his father could deliver a last gift. The son poured a beer for each of them. Father and son clinked glasses one more time to celebrate his life and his love.
In the formal language of this book we might say Marty’s father led his family, and perhaps himself too, through the adaptive challenge of his death. Probably a better way to say it is that Marty’s father, in spite of his own pain and loss, taught everyone he touched that week something about how to live, how to die, about how to take advantage of any opportunity to love and make a difference to people.
. . .
Opportunities for leadership are available to you, and to us, every day. We believe the work has nobility and the benefits, for you and for those around you, are beyond measure. But putting yourself on the line is difficult work, for the dangers are real. We have written this book out of admiration and respect for you and your passion. We hope that the words on these pages have provided both practical advice and inspiration; and that you have better means now to lead, protect yourself, and keep your spirit alive. May you enjoy with a full heart the fruits of your labor. The world needs you.